Hypothesis testing in attorney-conducted voir dire

Attorneys may hold expectations about jurors based on stereotypes about the relationships between demographic characteristics and attitudes. Attorneys test their hypotheses about prospective jurors during voir dire, but it is unclear whether their questioning strategies are likely to produce accurate information from jurors. In 2 studies, attorneys and law students formulated voir dire questions to test a particular hypothesis about the attitudes held by a prospective juror (venireperson) and provided their subsequent inferences about that individual given certain hypothetical responses to the questions. Bayes's theorem was used to compare attorneys' actual conclusions about the venireperson with the conclusions they would reach if correctly using the available information. Attorneys' conclusions were biased by the questions they asked, and in some cases, by the hypothesis that they were asked to test. Compared with normative models derived using Bayes' theorem, attorneys overrelied on venirepersons' responses when drawing conclusions about their attitudes. These findings suggest that even if traditional attorney-conducted voir dire elicited accurate information about prospective jurors' attitudes, attorneys may not use that information to draw normatively accurate conclusions about the attitudes that they hold.