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Archive for the ‘Bias’ Category
We have nothing to fear (unless we are conservative)
A number of recent research projects have focused on attitudinal differences corresponding to political orientation. Many of them have looked at whether our political leanings are based in our genes. That is, we’re born this way. We have another one and this one is on how fear motivates conservatives (more than it motivates liberals).
First, research participants were assessed to see if they were liberal or conservative (based on self-reports and a series of questionnaires to ensure consistency). Those with the strongest political positions (strong liberal and strong conservative) were selected to continue with the study. Then, researchers tested skin conductance changes [as subjects looked at either positive or aversive images] and gaze attraction [what did you look at first and what did you look at longest].
Because we know you are wondering, the aversive images were a spider on a man’s face; an open wound with maggots in it; and a crowd fighting with a man. The positive images were a happy child; a bowl of fruit; and a cute rabbit. You can see a more detailed description of the study online at Miller-McCune.
What they found is interesting:
Conservatives spent a longer time paying attention to the aversive images and their reactivity to those images was higher. It was as if they could not look away. Were they afraid? They were drawn to the aversive images twice as fast as the liberal participants and spent a much longer time staring at them. But the researchers did not think they were afraid. Instead, the researchers thought “individuals on the political right are not so much ‘fearful’ and ‘vulnerable’ as attuned and attentive to the aversive in life”.
It wasn’t that liberals didn’t look (or as the researchers say, “they did their share of gawking”) they simply didn’t look as long and were more drawn to the positive images.
From a litigation advocacy perspective, this study would indicate that if you are plaintiff and there are gruesome images, conservative jurors are likely going to be more impressed with the potential threat to their safety. Some would say, they might be more influenced by the “reptile approach”. Know that conservative jurors are going to spend more time dwelling on them than liberal jurors. The open question for you is: “how are these images going to move decision-making, and how can I optimize their impact on my case?” Do the liberal jurors turn away more quickly because they are upset? Are they prone to deny the impact of the image? Do conservative jurors gaze longer because they are immune to the emotional impact, or because they are internalizing a sense of threat and will react more harshly to its cause? A simple pre-trial focus group can give you insight into what jurors think about the images, as well as insight into the potential value of knowing their conservative or liberal leanings.
It is important to bear in mind that participants in this study were those who were very conservative and very liberal. When we see mock jurors that identify themselves that way–they are often unpredictable and emotionally reactive for idiosyncratic reasons. They are simply not good bets as either pro-defense or pro-plaintiff, as they are prone to seizing on what they see as a key subtlety of the case and making more of it than anyone else thinks makes sense.
Although there is a growing literature similar to this research, and certainly a growing political polarization in the country–don’t rely on this criteria (liberal or conservative) in selecting jurors for your case without knowing where the jurors’ judgements go as they look at the images. As one of a number of criteria, it is likely fine. Alone? It’s dangerous.
Dodd MD, Balzer A, Jacobs CM, Gruszczynski MW, Smith KB, & Hibbing JR (2012). The political left rolls with the good and the political right confronts the bad: connecting physiology and cognition to preferences. Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 367 (1589), 640-9 PMID: 22271780
Does a ‘bad heart’ lead to a bad heart?
John Edwards apparently has a bad heart and this will delay his criminal trial. Cynical commenters snipe “oh, he has a heart?” and there is little sympathy for a man people see as narcissistic. And now we see this research showing that narcissistic men have chronically high cortisol levels which leads to (you know this) heart problems. The ultimate irony. A bad heart leads to a bad heart.
Some wonder about the timing of this medical record disclosure–saying only a narcissist would leak his medical records at a time like this–shouldn’t we have heard about this when he was running for President? Our friend Charli Morris (a self-described “loyal Democrat”) tells us that the up-close view of this trial from her North Carolina home is not a pretty picture.
John Edwards took a short cut on the long slide from from “golden boy” to “most contemptible”. Not unlike Newt Gingrich, he had an affair with a woman during his wife’s convalescence from cancer, and is now suffering the complications of having to deal with the stunningly insensitive abandonment. It’s the ultimate challenge to pretrial publicity. While recent research would say that older jurors might be better for John Edwards, it’s hard to believe that jury selection will be that simple in his case. There are too many wrinkles and caveats and too many negative opinions.
While Gingrich prevailed among the Christian evangelical voters in the South Carolina Republican primary with claims that it was an error of the past brought on by excessive devotion to work(!), Edwards has much bigger problems. Edwards’ betrayal was relatively recent, with a wife who has consistently been more popular than he is, who died after having been in recovery at the time that the scandal was made public. While potential jurors may say they are able to be fair, it’s hard to see how most people can put the media information aside completely and offer a verdict based on facts alone.
It’s part of what makes voir dire such a constantly changing puzzle. Everyone tries to find an edge. Whether that edge is assessing social anxiety from Facebook profiles or some other strategy–we all look for clues in the arena of the not easily observed that will lead to a better jury selection. It’s our guess that the Edwards’ defense team is doing extensive pretrial research to identify trial themes, case narratives, and juror experiences that work for them and not against them.
Fernandez, K., Levinson, C., & Rodebaugh, T. (2012). Profiling: Predicting Social Anxiety From Facebook Profiles Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611434967
Pretrial publicity & bias: Take a look at the age of your jurors!
Despite the Supreme Court ruling [Skilling v US] that pretrial publicity [PTP] does not bias the public perception and limit the right to a fair trial, most of us who have experienced the impact of pretrial publicity disagree.
It is an accepted truism that older people are more conservative than younger people. So it’s interesting to see some research on how pretrial publicity affects older jurors [range = 60-80 years old, average age = 69.5] and younger jurors [range = 18-21 years old, average age = 19]. In this instance, researchers looked at the impact of both positive and negative publicity on mock juror decision-making related to a specific set of case facts.
Mock jurors read either positive or negative pretrial publicity accounts of the case (via mock news articles) and then, one week later, they watched an edited 30 minute video of the trial. (This video was used in previous research and found to be realistic, believable and ambiguous as to guilt. Pretrial publicity is believed to be most important when guilt is ambiguous.) Following viewing of the trial video, they were told to disregard any relevant information from their readings the week before and then they wrote down their individual verdicts.
Older jurors were only affected by positive pretrial publicity.
Younger jurors were only moved by negative pretrial publicity.
In other words, even though the mock jurors were given identical information “pretrial” and then viewed the same video summarizing the trial, they came to very different conclusions. Older jurors were only biased by the positive PTP while younger jurors were more conviction prone than the older jurors only when exposed to negative PTP.
The researchers summarize by saying:
“the same PTP can have a large biasing effect on the decisions made by one age group while having no significant effect on decisions made by the other. [snip]
…these attentional biases [in older adults] may lead to more biased decisions, when the biasing information is positive and less biased decisions when the biasing information is negative”.
They also suggest that this age-related attentional focus may be more important in terms of decision-making than overall liberal or conservative orientation.
What this research would suggest is that when you have negative pretrial publicity, older adults (early Boomers and Silents) are going to make less biased decisions than when they have been exposed to positive pretrial publicity.
If you have a well-known and positively regarded client, older adults are going to be more affected by the ‘halo’ surrounding your client than will younger adults.
If you have a high level of negative publicity and your client is a relative unknown, younger jurors are going to be more swayed (negatively) while older jurors are largely unmoved.
It’s an intriguing finding for us for two different reasons: one is that this is a demographic finding–attitudes and values are almost always more powerful in affecting decision making. The second point is the question of why the older jurors were only moved by the positive PTP. They are, for the most part, more conservative. If they were looking for reasons to be punitive, the negative PTP would be powerful. Instead, another finding in our analysis of generational research seems to fit: older jurors are happier. They prefer to pay attention to news and information that says ‘the world isn’t so bad after all’. Setting aside our crazy aunt Freda who is fixated on conspiracy theories and Glenn Beck, you can expect older jurors to prefer positive stories, good character, and good manners.
This is an important new study (heading into press now) that we hope will see follow-on research to add nuances to our understanding. We’ll be watching, and will keep you posted.
Ruva, C., & Hudak, E. (2011). Pretrial publicity and juror age affect mock-juror decision making Psychology, Crime & Law, 1-24 DOI: 10.1080/1068316X.2011.616509
fMRIs and Persuasion: Did anyone tell the jurors?
We all know that neuro-imaging is not ready for courtroom persuasion yet, but did someone remember to tell the jurors? Apparently not–but maybe they already knew.
Are “pictures” of the brain so persuasive that they can sway juror decision making? Even though the credibility of the medical experts has to be factored in, many people believe that when you include brain scan photos (as opposed to bar charts or topographical maps for example) the viewer is more persuaded. Even though there isn’t a chance in the world that an average juror can make sense of the image.
So, the current researchers decided to look at the effect, if any, of neuroimages using a fact pattern of a capital murder case. They were trying to sort out whether it is useful to focus mitigation arguments on neuroimaging evidence, since it could “create the impression the defendant is ‘damaged goods’ and beyond repair.”
The researchers presented the facts of a murder along with evidence (included in nearly all capital trials) of the likelihood of future dangerousness and evidence about the psychiatric condition of the defendant. They divided participants into 3 conditions:
The first group was told the defendant was psychotic.
The second group was told the defendant was psychotic and was given the results of neuropsychological testing discussing damage to the defendant’s brain (specifically, the frontal lobe).
The third group was given the diagnostic information and the test results but also shown color photos of “structural and functional scans of the defendant’s brain” and given descriptions of likely consequences with this sort of damage to the brain.
The researchers expected that the more information participants were given, the less they would choose the death penalty IF the defendant was adjudged to be at low risk for future violence. And they were wrong.
When mock jurors were provided only a diagnosis, and were told the defendant had a high risk of future violence, they were overwhelmingly more likely to give a death sentence (65% voted for death penalty) than other mock jurors. When they were given additional information (either a psychological testing summary or the testing summary with neuroimaging evidence), their imposition of the death sentence dropped dramatically (down to 12% voting for death penalty). If jurors assessing these ‘dangerous’ defendants were given all three forms of information, the death penalty was selected only 8% of the time.
Oddly, low risk of dangerousness only affected those jurors who were only given the diagnosis (but no supportive test data or images). ‘Diagnosis only’ mock jurors assigned the death penalty about 17% of the time (down from 65%), while diagnosis plus testing mock jurors chose the death penalty about 21% of the time and mock jurors receiving all three types of evidence chose the death penalty about 14% of the time (essentially the same as the ‘high risk of violence’ condition).
The researchers concluded that with high risk for future violence defendants, both neuropsychological testing and neuroimaging evidence reduced the likelihood jurors would choose the death penalty. Rather than being ‘aggravating’, this additional evidence was truly mitigating in the case of the high-risk-to-violently-reoffend defendant.
Our view is that this is consistent with what is frequently seen in juror decision-making: Jurors are much more comfortable accepting a high-risk proposition if they are comforted that they have a valid reason for doing it. This is most clearly seen in the high risk group, where they needed to be assured there is ‘scientific evidence’ that the defendant was impaired, not merely that the defense found an expert willing to make that claim. It also suggests that in the population used in the study, there were about 15-20% who were in favor of the death penalty regardless of mitigating scientific evidence.
It’s important to note that the neuropsychological testing results mitigated almost as much as the testing results plus the brain pictures. The verbal description alone (or verbal picture if you will) persuaded jurors. The researchers say it is possible that any additional information pertinent to the defendant’s condition ‘personalizes’ the defendant for jurors and thus may prove mitigating. We go with the former idea, as it seems unlikely that a psychological test profile or a description of neuroimaging studies causes anyone to become more ‘personal’. The jurors simply want reassurance that they are working off more than one person’s opinion.
For the practitioner, this says you don’t need bells and whistles [like brain scans] to successfully mitigate. But you do need solid and scientific information, well-presented using language and examples jurors can understand. That testimony can save a life.
Greene, E., & Cahill, B. (2011). Effects of Neuroimaging Evidence on Mock Juror Decision Making Behavioral Sciences & the Law DOI: 10.1002/bsl.1993
Republicans prefer ‘Republican-looking’ political candidates
As I consider the Republican Presidential candidate lineup, I can’t figure out just how a ‘Republican-looking’ candidate might look. Is it the patrician and reserved Mitt Romney? The disgruntled Newt Gingrich? The intense and dry humored conservative Ron Paul? The GQ-ready Rick Perry? Or someone else? I’m not sure what a Republican looks like. Or whether there is a ‘Republican look’. It turns out these researchers (and their participants) cannot answer that question either but it is clear there is ‘something’ communicated to the observer in photographs of Republican and Democratic candidates.
Researchers obtained photos of Republican and Democrat political candidates and removed any highly recognizable candidates from the array. The photos were simple head shots. They replaced the backgrounds with a plain gray background so that contextual cues were not available. They displayed only Republican or Democrat candidates in 256 elections and asked half the participants to identify (in a computer presented format) which candidate they thought was Democrat (thus, by default, identifying the other as Republican). They asked the other half of the participants to identify which candidate they thought was Republican (thus, by default, identifying the other as Democrat).
When they discovered participants tended to identify female or non-Caucasian candidates as Democrat, they performed an analysis of the entire sample as well as one in which they only included candidates who were both white males.
The results were disturbingly accurate. Republican or Republican-leaning participants were more accurate in identifying the candidates’ political affiliation. There was no particular bias for or against facial appearance among the Democrat or Democrat-leaning participants. The researchers concluded that conservative voters are more influenced by political facial stereotypes than are liberal voters.
To be certain, they also checked facial competence [whether participants thought the person appeared competent], attractiveness, and the sense of the candidates‘ honesty and dependability. All of these were based on their attributions to a photograph. None of these perceived traits or qualities correlated with the participants identification of the photo to a political party. When they compared “permanent facial characteristics” (like bone structure) with “transitory features” (such as facial expression, eye gaze direction or head tilt)–again, the effect seemed to be related to something permanent in facial features.
So no one can tell us just “what a Republican looks like” but Republican voters can “see it”. Seriously? We know this happens with religious affiliation where others can identify whether you are or are not a Mormon. But political affiliation? Our take is that they are responding to a sense of familiarity with leaders they prefer. The one with whom they most closely connect. The one that is most like them. It is a human inclination that we have written about before, and it appears to resonate with voters as well as jurors.
Olivola, C., Sussman, A., Tsetsos, K., Kang, O., & Todorov, A. (2012). Republicans Prefer Republican-Looking Leaders: Political Facial Stereotypes Predict Candidate Electoral Success Among Right-Leaning Voters Social Psychological and Personality Science DOI: 10.1177/1948550611432770
Image is one of the stimuli used in the actual study. Who’s the Republican?
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