It’s a truism of pretrial research. Well no, actually… it’s a truism of life. We don’t want to have our ideas challenged—we want to be told things that confirm our pre-existing beliefs. It’s why we perform rigorous pretrial research and give our clients feedback on what case themes and narratives arise—both those that work well and those that just don’t work well at all. There are always mock jurors who simply do not listen to the story but, instead, come up with explanations of their own for what happened based on their pre-existing assumptions.

We’ve written about this before but we have never seen research that so eloquently illustrates the reality of believing what we already believe as the new piece out from the great minds at the Cultural Cognition Project (Yale). We think this piece offers valuable information to trial lawyers and appreciate our client Chris R. passing it our direction. Orin Kerr, at the Volokh Conspiracy, offers a succinct summary of the research process.

“The paper reports the results of an interesting study on how a person’s political and ideological worldview impacts how they see facts that have a significant political and ideological valence.

In the study, individuals are shown a video of a protest at a building. Individuals are then asked to say, based on the video, whether the protesters violated a law that that prohibits intentionally interfering with, obstructing, intimidating, or threatening a person seeking to enter, exit, or remain lawfully on the premises.

Now here’s the catch: There were actually two videos, not one. The two videos are identical except that the designers of the study altered the videos to change what was being protested. One video is edited so that the protest is against military recruiters; the second video is edited so that the protest is against an abortion clinic.

The results of the study found that people tended to find or not find liability based on large part on their views of abortion and military recruiting. As the authors of the paper explain:
Our subjects all viewed the same video. But what they saw—earnest voicing of dissent intended only to persuade, or physical intimidation calculated to interfere with the freedom of others—depended on the congruence of the protestors’ positions with the subjects’ own cultural values.” [Volokh Conspiracy blog]

In other words, viewers of the two videos had differing reactions based on whether they were more sympathetic to military recruitment or abortion rights. We often say that demographics don’t tell us a whole lot about potential jurors but their attitudes and values truly inform us about their likely reaction to a specific case. This research, conducted in a fashion that reflects how the context of a story (and the values it encounters)—contains a key lesson for trial lawyers everywhere.

Make sure what you communicate about your case is what the jurors really hear.

‘They Saw a Protest’: Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction. Dan M. Kahan, David A. Hoffman, Donald Braman, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski . February 5, 2011, Cultural Cognition Project Working Paper No. 63.

Related posts:

1. When identifying punishment—will jurors focus on intent or outcome?
2. It isn’t just about your case…
3. Detecting Deception Using the Law of Sufficient Motivation
4. Outsmarting liars (five decades of research)
5. Does familiarity improve our skill at identifying liars?