Jungwon Lee, Ph.D., Hallym University & Margaret C. Stevenson, Ph.D., Kenyon College
Legislative efforts to bolster Batson appear to be driven predominantly by scholarship highlighting evidence of the disproportionate removal of Black jurors. But Asian prospective jurors are also disproportionately removed during voir dire and underrepresented on juries (e.g., Diamond et al., 2009; Gau, 2015). Whereas Asians are disproportionately removed for cause due to hardship and language barriers (Gau, 2015), peremptory strikes claiming a prospective juror “lacks assertiveness” may be used as pretext for race-based eliminations of Asian jurors. As an example, in striking a Filipina juror, the prosecutor referred to her as the type to “walk two steps to the left and one to the rear,” evoking race-based stereotypes of a subservient Asian woman (Morovich, 2007, p. 665).
In fact, when jury trials were being implemented in South Korea in 2008, in Japan in 2009, and China in 2010, socio-legal scholars debated their appropriateness, speculating that East Asians would be uninclined to actively argue and debate with fellow jurors (Han, 2004; Maruta, 2001) due to hierarchical social structures (Kita, 2017) and collectivistic societal values emphasizing group cohesion and harmony, in contrast to western individualistic values that emphasize independence (e.g., Hui & Triandis, 1986). More recent research, however, criticizes the rough dichotomy of West versus East into individualistic versus collectivistic cultures respectively as (a) an oversimplification that requires more subdivisions (Fatehi et al., 2020) and (b) for having overlooked additional dimensions (e.g., Kitayama & Salvador, 2024).
Are jurors of Asian descent disproportionately likely to “conform” during jury deliberation? Attorneys might intuit that they are, in turn influencing their peremptory challenges. Recent research published in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law offers an empirical test of such assumptions. To preview, whereas their analysis highlights cultural differences in deliberation style and processes, it also contradicts the stereotype that Asian jurors are more susceptible to social influence (Lee et al., 2025).
Deliberation Styles of South Korean versus U.S. Mock Juries: What the Science Shows
Claims about Asian jurors’ likely behavior in the jury room often rest on inference rather than observation. Voir dire gives attorneys only a brief glimpse of prospective jurors, yet attorneys must use these brief assessments to predict how those jurors will participate in jury deliberation. Such prediction becomes especially vulnerable to error when attorneys interpret demeanor, speech style, or apparent deference through racialized cultural assumptions.
Until recently, little empirical evidence directly examined whether jurors from East Asian cultural contexts actually deliberate in the ways attorneys might expect. Much of the concern has been extrapolated from broader cultural psychology research on collectivism, harmony, and conformity. But a jury’s deliberation is not an ordinary conversation. It is shaped by legal instructions, evidentiary norms, role obligations, and the pressure to justify one’s position to fellow jurors.
Lee et al. (2025) address this gap by directly comparing mock jury deliberations in South Korea and the United States. Their study is especially useful for jury selection because it moves beyond assumptions about what East Asian jurors “should” be like and examines how Korean mock jurors actually spoke, disagreed, reasoned, and reached sentencing decisions compared with U.S. mock jurors.
Method
Lee and colleagues replicated Stevenson, Bottoms, and Diamond’s (2010) U.S. capital-sentencing jury simulation in South Korea, using the same case materials (a murder/armed-robbery defendant with a documented history of childhood abuse and alcohol abuse), the same death-penalty jury instructions, and the same death-qualification procedure—translated into Korean and lightly adapted for local context (e.g., the firearm was changed to a knife, in line with Korean gun-control law). A total of 143 death-qualified Korean community members and university students were assigned to 14 deliberating mock juries (8-12 jurors each). Those 14 Korean deliberations were then compared with 14 U.S. deliberations randomly drawn from Stevenson et al.’s original 34 juries (402 Illinois community members). All 28 deliberations were coded utterance-by-utterance along multiple dimensions drawn from the cross-cultural psychology literature, including conformity and communication style. To assess conformity, the researchers coded whether jurors explicitly agreed with other jurors or challenged their views. To assess communication style, they examined how jurors participated in discussion, including interruptions, sentencing-related statements, and whether jurors tended to offer one reason at a time or several reasons within a single speaking turn. This last measure reflects Watanabe’s (1993) distinction between single-account and multiple-account strategies. Two pairs of independent coders who were blind to the hypotheses coded the Korean and U.S. transcripts, with high overall reliability.
Results
Contrary to the stereotype that East Asian jurors are especially conforming, the Korean mock juries showed less conformity than the U.S. mock juries. U.S. mock juries expressed agreement more often than Korean mock juries, whereas Korean mock juries expressed refutation more often than U.S. mock juries. In other words, the Korean mock jurors were not passively yielding to one another. They actively challenged one another’s views during deliberation. This finding is especially important because it directly contradicts a common concern about East Asian participation in jury systems.
This result matters because concerns about Asian jurors often center on perceived passivity: Will this juror defer to louder jurors? Will this juror avoid conflict? Will this juror simply go along with the majority? Lee et al.’s findings caution against that inference. The Korean mock jurors were fully capable of disagreement. Indeed, they engaged in more overt disagreement than their U.S. counterparts. The authors interpret this through the well-established in-group/out-group distinction in collectivist cultures (Triandis, 1989): Korean jurors, meeting strangers they would likely never see again, may have perceived fellow jurors as out-group members and felt little obligation to soften disagreement. Korean juries were also openly divided on contested issues such as whether voluntary intoxication should mitigate culpability—a topic of active legal reform in Korea—and debated those points vigorously. In this study, Korean mock jurors were not unusually compliant. If anything, they engaged in more overt disagreement than their U.S. counterparts.
The study also found meaningful cultural differences in communication style. U.S. mock juries had far more speaking turns than Korean mock juries. At first glance, that difference might seem to suggest that Korean jurors participated less. But the transcript analysis showed a more nuanced pattern. Korean mock jurors tended to speak less frequently but at greater length, often presenting several reasons within a single turn. U.S. mock jurors, by contrast, tended to speak more frequently and more briefly, often offering one point at a time. Lee and colleagues described this as a difference between multiple-account and single-account strategies (Watanabe, 1993).
This distinction is especially important in jury selection. Attorneys often equate assertiveness with speed, frequency, and directness. A juror who answers quickly, volunteers comments, and speaks in short declarative statements may appear confident and influential. A juror who speaks less often, pauses, or gives a longer organized answer may appear less engaged. But in Lee et al.’s study, fewer speaking turns did not mean less deliberation. Korean mock jurors often packaged several considerations into one statement, using a more organized and comprehensive speaking style. Their participation was different in form, but not weaker in substance.
The researchers also found that Korean mock juries devoted a higher proportion of their statements to the sentencing decision itself. In terms of Hastie et al.’s (1983) distinction between verdict-driven and evidence-driven deliberation, this suggests a more verdict-driven style of deliberation: jurors moved relatively directly toward the task of deciding the appropriate sentence. U.S. mock juries, by contrast, showed a style closer to evidence-driven deliberation, with more frequent exchanges about pieces of evidence and trial details before or alongside the final sentencing question. Neither style is inherently better. Each can support meaningful deliberation. But the difference matters because attorneys and judges may misinterpret a structured, turn-taking style as less spontaneous or less engaged, even when it reflects careful organization.
Importantly, these process differences did not produce significantly different final sentencing recommendations between the Korean and U.S. mock juries. That finding should be reassuring to attorneys who worry that culturally distinct deliberation styles necessarily threaten fair decision making. The Korean mock jurors disagreed more, spoke in fewer but longer turns, and organized their reasons differently, yet their final sentencing outcomes were not significantly different from those of U.S. mock jurors. The science therefore complicates the common courtroom intuition that quietness, indirectness, or a less rapid speaking style signals inability to deliberate effectively.
Lee et al.’s (2025) study demonstrated that South Korean mock jurors engaged meaningfully in deliberation by considering the evidence, expressing disagreement, and reasoning with fellow jurors. Because East Asian cultures are not interchangeable, however, caution is warranted in extending these findings to other societies, including Japan and China, where cultural and institutional factors may shape deliberation differently. Future research should examine whether similar patterns emerge across East Asian contexts. Although effective deliberation may take different forms across Asian cultures, such differences should never be reduced to presumptions of passivity or incompetence.
Implications for Jury Selection and Courtroom Policy
Lee et al.’s (2025) findings suggest a more careful way to evaluate Asian juror participation during jury selection. Cultural background may shape how jurors communicate, but these differences should not be mistaken for disengagement or lack of independent judgment. This concern points to a broader practical implication: meaningful improvements to the racial representativeness of juries will require holistic interventions addressing disparities exacerbated by (a) the venire, (b) challenges for cause, and (c) peremptory challenges.
First, the majority of the jury whitening actually occurs at the venire phase (Gau, 2015), a phenomenon explained by venire lists that systematically underrepresent people of color due to lower voter registration rates, as well as higher moving rates and socioeconomic hardships that lead people of color to less frequently respond to juror summons (O’Brien & Grosso, 2018).
Second, despite considerable legislative and scholarly concern and attention focused on the potential for peremptory strikes to be harnessed to reduce jury diversity, challenges for cause might play an even greater role (Gau, 2015). In particular, Asians are disproportionately struck for cause for hardship and for language barriers (Diamond, 2009; Gau, 2015). In fact, whereas White people had the lowest probability (5.5%) of being removed for hardship, Asians faced the highest probability of being removed for hardship (22.1%), relative to every other racial category (Gau, 2015). Thus, courts should implement policy changes that increase juror pay, require employers to pay jurors during jury service, as well as facilitate communication for prospective jurors for whom English is a second language.
Whereas such courtroom interventions are likely to go a long way toward increasing jury racial diversity, they do not address the potential for inaccurate attorney-endorsed stereotypes that might motivate them to exercise peremptory challenges for Asian jurors. Moreover, even though peremptory strikes might play a smaller role in the elimination of Asians from a jury, small effects can nevertheless have a meaningful impact for any given jury because the venire is so racially skewed before voir dire even begins (Gau, 2015). Consider a recent case in which, out of 30 prospective White jurors, 4 Black jurors, one Hispanic juror, and one Asian juror, prosecutors used 6 of their 12 peremptory challenges to strike all jurors of color (Smith v. United States, 2023). Whereas the defense raised a Batson claim based solely on the prosecuting striking all 4 of the Black jurors, it is worth noting the circumstances surrounding the struck Asian American juror, a retired housekeeper who was seemingly difficult for the trial judge to hear, and for whom English was her second language. Jurors are not automatically challenged for cause when English is their second language, and in fact this juror was not – rather a peremptory challenge was issued against her. This juror may have been stereotyped as “passive,” but her elimination may also reflect aversive prejudice – a form of prejudice in which people outwardly express egalitarianism but behave in discriminatory ways when the situation is sufficiently ambiguous so as to offer non-discriminatory pretext (Gaertner & Dovidio, 1986). Endorsement of the persistent cultural stereotype of Asians as foreigners (i.e., the “perpetual foreigners” stereotype; Armenta et al., 2013) might also play a role in their systematic exclusion from U.S. jury participation and is not without consequences, as jury participation is associated with increased civic engagement (Gastil et al., 2010). Accordingly, it behooves attorneys and judges to reject inaccurate stereotypes that might otherwise motivate them to disproportionately exercise peremptory challenges for Asian jurors. As Lee et al.’s (2025) research shows, when called upon to follow legal instructions, consider evidence, and to deliberate with fellow jurors, Asian jurors can more than rise to the occasion.
References
Armenta, B. E., Lee, R. M., Pituc, S. T., Jung, K., Park, I. K., Soto, J. A., Kim, S. Y., & Schwartz, S. J. (2013). Where are you from? A validation of the foreigner objectification scale and the psychological correlates of foreigner objectification among Asian Americans and Latinos. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 19, 131–142. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0031547
Diamond, S. S., D. Peery, F. J. Dolan, & Dolan, E. (2009). Achieving diversity on the jury: Jury size and the peremptory challenge. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 6 (3), 425–449.
Fatehi, K., Priestley, J. L., & Taasoobshirazi, G. (2020). The expanded view of individualism and collectivism: One, two, or four dimensions? International Journal of Cross Cultural Management, 20(1), 7–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470595820913077
Gau, J. M. (2018). A jury of whose peers? The impact of selection procedures on racial composition and the prevalence of majority-white juries. In Race and Ethnicity in the Juvenile and Criminal Justice Systems (pp. 75-87). Routledge.
Gaertner, S. L., & Dovidio, J. F. (1986). The aversive form of racism. In J. F. Dovidio & S. L. Gaertner (Eds.), Prejudice, discrimination, and racism (pp. 61–89). Academic Press.
Gastil, J., Deess, E. P., Weiser, P. J., & Simmons, C. (2010). The jury and democracy: How jury deliberation promotes civic engagement and political participation. Oxford University Press.
Hastie, R., Penrod, S. D., & Pennington, N. (1983). Inside the Jury. Harvard University Press.
Han, G. (2004). Public participation in justice: The need for it and the social psychology of Koreans to consider. In The Presidential Committee on the Judicial Reform and Korean Public Law Association. (Eds.), Public hearing on public participation in justice (pp. 235–243). The Presidential Committee on the Judicial Reform; Korean Public Law Association.
Hui, C. H., & Triandis, H. C. (1986). Individualism-Collectivism: A Study of Cross-Cultural Researchers. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 17(2), 225-248. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022002186017002006
Kita, Y. (2017). Lay adjudication system as a democratic institution: an evaluation of the citizen judge system [Saiban-in Seido] in Japan [Doctoral dissertation]. University of Sussex.
Kitayama, S., & Salvador, C. E. (2024). Cultural psychology: Beyond east and west. Annual Review of Psychology, 75(1), 495–526. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-psych-021723-063333
Lee, I., Lee, J., & Han, Y. (2025). Cultural differences in jury deliberations and jury decision making between South Korea and the United States. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 31(2), 181-203. https://doi.org/10.1037/law0000452
Lindsey, A. (2026). Racial Bias in Jury Selection: The Fundamental and Pragmatic Issues with Batson Challenges, 79 Ark. L. Rev. 117. https://doi.org/10.54119/alr.ctda5347 Available at: https://scholarworks.uark.edu/alr/vol79/iss1/6
Maruta, T. (2001). The criminal jury system in imperial Japan and the contemporary argument for its reintroduction. International Review of Penal Law, 72(1), 215–224. https://doi.org/10.3917/ridp.721.0215
Morovich, A. (2007, January). Voir dire: Racial discrimination under a “comparative juror analysis” in Kesser v. Cambra. University of San Francisco Law Review, 41(2), 527–550.
O’Brien, B., & Grosso, C. M. (2018). Jury selection in the post-Batson era. In C. Najdowski & M. C. Stevenson (Eds.) Criminal juries in the 21st century: Psychological science and the law (po.19-40), Oxford University Press.
Smith v. United States, 288 A.3d 766 (D.C. 2023). Retrieved from chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.dccourts.gov/sites/default/files/2026-01/Smith%20v%20US%20%2018-CO-0289%20%28EN%20BANC%29.pdf
Triandis, H. C. (1989). The self and social behavior in differing cultural contexts. Psychological Review, 96(3), 506–520. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.96.3.506
Watanabe, S. (1993). Cultural differences in framing: American and Japanese group discussions. In D. Tannen (Ed.), Framing in discourse (pp. 176–209). Oxford University Press.