The reality is though that psychological and sociological forces seem to impress on us when deciding not only innocence and guilt in our judicial system, but even life or death.
Continue after the break.
Professor of Law at the University of Southern California, Jody Armour joins Radio VR Host, Andrew Hiller to discuss capital punishment and more.  Armour said, "What we found is that juries inculpate black defendants more readily than similarly situated white defendants. We make moral judgments in a racially differentiated way surprisingly, perhaps, to some."

Armour points out that this bias, according to clinical studies, seems to take place both in the courtroom and in the laboratory. To ameliorate the effect, one idea to resolve this potential bias could be to borrow from experimental psychology. That is, too blind jurors so that the effect of visual cues might have less effect. The idea is one that intrigues both Armour and Northeastern University Distinguished Professor of Psychology Lisa Feldman Barrett.

"I think there's about fifty years of research from social psychology indicating that people's appearances very much biases the kinds of judgments that we make about them. Just the mere structure, the physical structure of someone's face can influence the kind of judgments that we make about someone. For example, someone who has a very heavy brow, we might imagine that person to be less intelligent. Someone who has a very dominant looking face, we might imagine that person to be very aggressive. We tend to like people who are more attractive. 

There's no question our judgments, our snap judgments, but also our more considered judgments tend to be influenced by the physical features of someone's appearance."
Beyond physical appearance, scientists and lawyers say that our ability to interpret visual cues, body language, etc. is not as refined as we believe.