Dr. Mary Rose, Director of the Human Dimensions of Organizations (HDO) program at The University of Texas at Austin, was recently spotlighted by the Law & Society Association (LSA) for her 32 years of membership, her work on various LSA committees, and her empirical research on legal systems, particularly on juries and their decision making. Her work has been cited in multiple U.S. Supreme Court Opinions. In this conversation, between Dr. Rose and HDO Program Manager, Heather Moreau, Dr. Rose reflects on the LSA recognition, her professional journey from the studying the social sciences to becoming Director of HDO, and how her unique background is used in the HDO master’s program.
Q: Tell our readers a little bit about LSA, your involvement with them, and what this recognition means to you?
For as long as I have been pursuing academic research, I have identified as an interdisciplinary scholar – first, law and psychology and then, when I was hired into UT’s Sociology department, law, sociology, and psychology. This interest in topics that span across disciplinary boundaries is the reason I feel so at home and so grateful to be part of the HDO community, which looks at organizations through so many different lenses. The Law & Society Association is like HDO: It welcomes all perspectives on questions of law and legal practice.
As enriching as this is, it can be hard for people with my multi-disciplinary interests to “fit” well with a single discipline’s association (i.e., the American Psychological Association or the American Sociological Association, both of which I have memberships in). I call the Law & Society Association my primary intellectual home because it is the scholarly association I feel most comfortable in; we are all sort of “misfits” in our home fields. I have been attending their meetings since my first year in graduate school in 1994 (we all watched the OJ Simpson Bronco “chase” because it was happening as the meeting was occurring). It felt special to be spotlighted just because it I love the organization so much, and it always feels good to be noticed by people you love.
Q: Your undergraduate degree is in psychology. You then went on to get your Ph.D. in social psychology at Duke. How did you become interested in studying juries?
As is often the case in graduate school, one is influenced by one’s academic supervisor. For various reasons, I had to transfer out of supervision under one person and into being supervised by one of the greats in the field of Law & Psychology, Neil Vidmar. He was a full professor at Duke Law School, which is a highly unusual position to hold when that person does not have a JD; Neil held a PhD only. He was very welcoming to me as a trainee, and his specialty was juries. He even suggested I consider the topic I eventually chose for my dissertation, which was a study of how people felt about being asked sometimes highly personal questions in so public a forum as jury selection and what factors made jury selection seem more or less fair to citizens. He was a great and supportive mentor, and he directed me toward working as a post-doctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation, the premier law and social science research institute. There I worked with another leading scholar of juries, Shari Diamond. With those amazing mentors, how could I not continue to study juries?
Q: Can you share a little bit about your research?
As a US citizen you have a whole lot of rights; just read the Bill of Rights and all the amendments that come after those first ten. You actually have just three obligations to the government: you have to pay taxes; if you are male, you have to make yourself available for conscription; and you need to serve on a jury if you are called for one. For a lot of us, we pay taxes without thinking about it – the money comes out of our checks (I know that’s not true for many others, but it is pretty typical for most employees). For men, although they registered for selective service, now that we have an all-volunteer army, most will never have to do anything to be part of the armed forces. That leaves jury duty as the one thing that can pull you out of your everyday life and push you to make a commitment to our common life together. I know people groan when they get a summons, but it is a truly remarkable form of direct participation. Juries are a check on the executive branch (because they might not convict someone); a check on the legislative branch (because, through nullification, they may refuse to apply a law they see as unjust); and they are a check on the judicial branch, because they ensure that cases can be decided by more than just the most elite people in society (judges).
I say all of that because every part of the jury interests me: Who serves and who is excluded from service (and why)? How might the experience of serving on a jury affect a person – perhaps even change their views? How do people respond to having a duty imposed on them? When juries deliberate, how do they make decisions? How can trial processes make it easier for juries to do their jobs well? What can we do to prevent the collapse of trial by jury (which is truly a vanishing event). That’s just a partial list of things I love to learn about. I think juries are one of the most important parts of our democratic structure, and I am grateful to have had an opportunity to get great data on who serves and how juries function.
Q: What are some of the most surprising outcomes or interesting findings from your research?
It is not surprising to me, but it is to many: in the main and in most cases, juries do an excellent job with their fact-finding roles. The press often tells you about only the weirdest or most surprising verdicts, so people get the idea that people on juries are (take your pick from) weirdos, not very bright, or bleeding hearts who are gullible toward the slickest side presenting to them. But most juries are made up of dutiful, attentive people who look carefully at the evidence presented to them, in the full knowledge that each side’s job is to spin facts toward their side, and they want to do a good job. I know that juries do, in fact, do a good job in most cases because research finds quite high levels of judge-jury agreement: in about 75% of cases judges report on questionnaires that they would have returned the same verdict as the jury did. When they disagree, it is typically in cases where the evidence is most ambiguous and reasonable people would disagree.
Q: Having the U.S. Supreme Court cite to your work must have been extremely meaningful. Is there one of these court opinions that stands out to you more than the others and if so, tell us which one and why.
So, remember one thing: Justices on the Court cite research to make a point they want to make. Just because the Supreme Court has a reason to cite my work does not mean that I necessarily agreed with the claim they were making. And that’s OK; my work is out there to inform the opinions of people on many sides of a debate.
That said, the most meaningful citation was the most recent one, and I definitely agreed with the argument in that case. For over a century, the State of Louisiana permitted its criminal juries to deliver nonunanimous verdicts of 10-2 in order to secure convictions. This practice emerged in the late 1800s and has some very problematic underpinnings, having to do with Louisiana’s desire to see more people go to prison because there were prison labor programs that benefited some wealthy people. Nonunanimous verdicts also allowed majorities to ignore the views of those in the minority, both racial minorities and people with minority viewpoints. In short: the practice has an ugly history and yields uncomfortable results because someone goes to prison even though one or two people on the jury still had reasonable doubts. Shari Diamond and I wrote a paper on jury unanimity using data from actual (civil) juries who deliberated under rules that allowed them to be to be nonunanimous. (Again, these were civil, not criminal, cases.) We were able to show that jurors themselves feel so much better about results that engendered unanimity, and we could take a look at the positions people in the losing minority held. We were able to show that these positions typical represented reasonable but dissenting voices, and the non-unanimity rule allowed those positions to be ignored. I was delighted to see the Supreme Court found non-unanimity in criminal cases to be unconstitutional (see Ramos v. Louisiana), and I was happy to have our research support the argument for overturning this discredited practice.
Q: The HDO master’s program is interdisciplinary (every faculty member teaches for their home department in addition to teaching in HDO). You are a Professor of Sociology and teach undergraduates here at UT Austin. What undergraduate courses do you teach and how does your research intersect with these classes?
The three courses I teach to undergraduates are: Sociology & Social Psychology, Social Psychology and the Law, and Law & Organizations. The first two are large-sized lecture courses, whereas the third one is designed as an honors-level seminar. I usually have reason to talk about my research in one or two of the classes (particularly Social Psychology and the Law), but I love teaching those courses because I love telling students about all kinds of fascinating research that is out there.
Q: You started teaching HDO graduate students in 2016 and became HDO BA Program Director in 2022 and the MA Program Director in 2023. What originally drew you to HDO and how have our cohorts of working professionals benefited from your unique background?
Fun fact about me: I am married to the person who originally had the idea to pursue an HDO-style MA program, Marc Musick, who was (at that time) Associate Dean in the College of Liberal Arts. He hired (former Program Director) Amy Ware and worked with Dean Randy Diehl to install (founding Director) Art Markman so that Art and Amy could develop and launch the specific HDO Program. Therefore, I have longstanding attachments to the program.
Amy approached me in 2015 about teaching Quantitative Research Methods, beginning the following spring. They had run the course a couple of times and I think they had not found quite the right fit between what students most wanted to know and the list of things that quantitative scholars might want to teach. I had experience teaching a research methods course to law students, which I had done on and off since 2000, even before I came to UT, and I taught it for multiple years to UT Law. I think this gave me a pretty good sense of what students without a methods background might benefit most from knowing, since most law students are not “math types.” I focused on teaching people more about how to assess research conceptually – that is, what makes a study strong or weak – rather than expecting them to be particularly fluent with numbers. I think that has been a good fit with the program (or at least I have not had reason to make it more quantitative than it is!). I was honored to get the HDO Teaching Award in 2022, so I feel like I am able to connect with students and help them to see value in what we teach.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to share?
I love HDO and always will.