Jurors of all races show symmetric out-group bias in punishment

Evidence

Out-group bias. Another closely related phenomenon to racial bias is out-group bias, whereby jurors are more lenient toward defendants of their own racial/ethnic in-group, with higher conviction rates, guilt ratings, and harsher punishments for out-group defendants, and more lenient judgments for in-group defendants. For example, when racial issues were not discussed during the trial, out-group bias was evident for both Black jurors and White jurors (Sommers & Ellsworth, 2000). Just as White mock jurors were more likely to convict a Black defendant than a White defendant, Black mock jurors were more likely to convict a White defendant than a Black defendant. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 849

Categorization

• XREF: Symmetric in-group/out-group leniency directly speaks to the reader’s enemy-construction vs primordial-identity question — bias here is structure-driven (in-group/out-group membership), not majority-vs-minority racism.
• DEFINE: Defines out-group bias cleanly with its experimental operationalization.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 849