I am grateful to everyone who helped make this project happen, and especially to Sam, whose legacy will continue to ripple through academia and beyond.

This work was the product of a wonderful, interdisciplinary collaboration with @hal-hershfield.bsky.social (social psychologist), Scott Sundby (criminal law scholar), and Aaron Rudkin (political scientist & statistician).

We share more patterns in the data and discuss the legal implications in the full article.

2) Perspective-taking is not applied evenly: Jurors were more likely to take the perspective of White victims than Black victims — evidence of racial disparity in empathy activation.

1) Perspective-taking predicts sentencing: Jurors who took victims’ perspectives were more likely to vote for the death penalty. Evidence that perspective-taking for defendants predicts leniency was less robust.

We analyzed data from 1,198 jurors across 353 capital trials, providing a rare glimpse into how people actually make real life-and-death decisions. Here is what we found:

Our paper explores two simple questions: when we put ourselves in others’ shoes, are we harsher or more forgiving? And do we offer that same empathy to everyone, or only to some?