The emotion and controversy over the July 5 not guilty verdict of Casey Anthony regarding the murder of her young daughter, Caylee, three years ago, can be much more clearly understood through the psychology of the negotiation process that occurred among attorneys, jurors, the public, the media and other interested parties.
First, the facts meant much less in this case than most people realize. The perception of the facts by the various parties was much more important. For the prosecutor and its followers, Casey's nights on the town meant guilty pleasure. For the defense, it meant escape from sorrow. Which side one believed depended on people's individual personalities and histories, and the influences around them. In negotiation, if you don't understand each party's perceptions, you can't hope to be persuasive or even to understand the situation very well.
The media and the prosecution did poorly in not differentiating facts from perceptions of facts, and how much influence this would have on the verdict. The process of persuasion must begin with valuing the perceptions of others, even if different. An acknowledgement of some uncertainties goes a long way toward building credibility. This wasn't done effectively by the prosecutors.
Second, the public was whipped up into a presumption of guilt by prominent media commentators with their own agendas. There was a compelling story of Caylee as a victim. And there was the partying mother as an object of blame, for instance not reporting the daughter missing for a month: another compelling story. Whether it was actually provable in court was rarely cited as a caveat. Many major media treated the mother as guilty before the trial. The public was apparently convinced, too, based on what they saw and heard in the media.
Imagine the emotional shock when a contrary verdict was announced. A big cause of emotion is dashed expectations. As such, a not guilty verdict would dash expectations and thus cause a lot of emotion. People who are emotional are often uninterested in listening to any other viewpoints. After the verdict, many TV commentators could not bring themselves to admit that a real killer might not be found. They wanted closure, and they wanted it to be with the mother as culprit. Proof to a duly constituted jury was less important. They could only see their side of the story.
Third, the sequestered jurors, exposed less to the media, were influenced by different sets of information - evidence and transcripts from the trial. They had fewer expectations of guilt or innocence and did not have shrill voices blasting in their ears during their deliberations.
The jurors had specific instructions. They were supposed to decide guilt or innocence not based on the loudness or phrasing of the accusations or how they felt. They were supposed to decide by how well the evidence by prosecutors removed doubt about guilt. One way to remove doubt is to provide detail. But the prosecutors were unable to do that concerning important events, such as method of death.
Lack of sufficient detail causes a drop in credibility, whether it's a tale told at a party or evidence in a murder trial. Pure and simple, the prosecutors did not meet the standard of detail - and as such the standard of credibility - necessary for effective persuasion concerning doubt, in the perception of the jury.
Fourth, all of this raises the issue about the extent to which the public was manipulated - that is, influenced for someone else's benefit or led to a wrong conclusion by others who gave them selected and biased information. Indeed, the public was clearly manipulated, as most of the loudest media messages actively advocated for guilt, and selected the information necessary to bolster that sentiment over a multiyear period.
Fifth, there has been a lot of criticism by media pundits of the jury's judgment in the case. In analyzing human interactions, it is important to analyze whether someone has a private agenda in pushing one conclusion over another. Clearly, the pundits who confidently predicted guilt for many months had egg all over their faces.
So, in order to take the focus off their own credibility problems, it would be logical for pundits to blame the jury and further incite their viewers to emotion. When people are emotional, their information processing ability goes down. So viewers would be less able to see that the jury had different standards and that the U.S. judicial system, and everyone's rights, depends on fair process in which juries examine the evidence at trial, not the blaring of the media.
Finally, what is the alternative? To pick and choose what verdicts we want based on public opinion polls? This is what happened in Germany during World War II. There, a skilled public relations staff used the media to influence public opinion about races, religions and all sorts of minority groups. The resulting strong public opinion was then used to justify judicial decisions against the targets. This is not untypical of undemocratic countries.
The appropriate media and public reaction to the Caylee verdict would have been to praise the jury for making a difficult decision, and be thankful for a process that keeps us all free. For that to happen, the media needs to be less manipulative and the public needs to better understand the psychological processes that underlie judgments.
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Stuart Diamond, a contributing writer for Psychology Today, is a professor of negotiation at Wharton Business School and Penn Law School, and a Harvard-trained attorney with an MBA from Wharton. He won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for The New York Times. His latest book, Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World (Random House/Crown Business, 2010), is a bestseller in the U.S. and abroad, and focuses on the importance of people and perceptions in human interactions.
