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There are six types of Millennials. That’s right. Six.
Marketers are always trying to figure out how to distinctly describe various groups of us. This time it’s the often-studied Millennial Generation. Apparently there are six discrete types of Millennials (those aged 16 to 34) and they are not all what marketers seem to think.
Boston Consulting Group identifies the various groups of Millennials. And because they are marketing consultants, they have to give each market segment a goofy name that would embarrass any member of that segment: Hip-ennials (29%); Millennial Moms (22%); Anti-Millennials (16%); Gadget Gurus (13%); Clean and Green Millennials (10%); and the Old School Millennials (10%).
Their graphic succinctly describes these young people as separate and distinct segments within the Millennial generation.
So while marketers continue to parse and define subgroups of the Millennials, they are looking at different reasons for describing this group than makes sense for trial lawyers. We recommend you stay focused more on the values, beliefs and attitudes that resonate with your case and identify the jurors that won’t be good fits when it comes to hearing your story.
We’re all for debunking stereotypes (as the title of this report trumpets) but this approach simply looks like another way of sticking people in categories that aren’t useful in the courtroom.
Barton, C. Fromm, J. Egan, C. 2012 The Millennial Consumer: Debunking stereotypes. Boston Consulting Group.
Generational communication: Will it hurt more than a rook piercing?
My daughter was 11 when I agreed to take her to get her ears pierced. She desperately wanted to have it done but was afraid of the pain. So I had my ears pierced with second holes to show her it was survivable. As time has gone on, she’s added to her collection–always in my company. Second ear piercings. A cartilage piercing. And now, in the wake of her 18th birthday, she asked for my company to a tattoo parlor so she could have her rook and tragus pierced. Showing my age, I asked what part of the body these unfamiliar words were located upon and was relieved (and appalled) to discover they were also on the ear.
So off we went. The “piercer” came out to meet us. He was a huge man (think sumo wrestler) with huge hands, and gauges in both nostrils and the biggest gauges I’ve ever seen in each ear. I felt faint. My daughter looked anxious. He turned out to be the nicest guy. And when he picked up the huge needle to pierce her ear, I could have passed out. She turned very pale as the needle went through not once, but twice to pierce the rook. After he got the earring in (with his huge hands and fingers), he asked if she was ready for the tragus piercing. She asked in a small voice, “Will it hurt more than the rook piercing?” He assured her it would not.
I was reminded of a blog post from Dave Munger back in the glory days of Cognitive Daily blog. In this post, Dave’s spouse Greta (co-author of the blog) discovered that the fable of the Fox and the Grapes was unfamiliar to many of her students. Cognitive Daily then did a survey of their readers to see how many were familiar with the origin and meaning of the phrase “sour grapes”. As it turned out, not that many.
It’s a good lesson in generational communication for the courtroom. While we (hopefully) will not hear plaintiffs describe their pain in terms of body piercing, it’s important to consider the examples we use to communicate. As they saw in the Cognitive Daily survey, those survey respondents who were avid readers were more familiar with the meaning and origin of the term “sour grapes”. We need to remember the phase of life of our jurors, as well as how actual ‘reading’ has decreased for many. Movie references, TV show references, book references, even pop culture references become quickly dated and meaningless to your audience.
Pay attention to what you say. Don’t use verbal shortcuts and assume everyone knows what they mean. Your snappy analogy may just fall short.
We saw this recently in a mock trial where the defense attorney was attempting to demonstrate the difference between the disputed technologies as the difference between a record album (which he held up for the mock jurors) and a CD. Same music. Much different technology. Jurors liked the comparison and it made sense for them. But an unanticipated message came through. The attorney displayed a record album by Barry Manilow. Younger jurors saw that choice as reflecting both the attorney’s age and a questionable taste in music. They were unafraid to verbalize this perception directly.
So. Be careful what you unintentionally communicate! You likely won’t have the benefit of direct juror feedback on mistakes you make.
Are we all Millennials at heart? On cynicism when exposed to deception
When my now 20 year old son was an adolescent he would often talk back to the TV during advertisements with “Yeah, right!” and I worried (like a good psychologist-parent) that I was raising a “too cynical” child. He grew out of the vocalization but not out of the tendency toward cynicism which I know now is a generational trait. Or not.
New research says we all (unless brain injured or quite advanced in age) note deception in advertising and our brains warn us about the deception.
Researchers hooked participants up to fMRI machines while they watched a series of print advertisements. They were not asked to assess the merits (i.e., evaluate) the ads, just to passively observe. The researchers exposed the participants to three (pre-tested) advertisements deemed “highly believable”, “moderately deceptive” or “highly deceptive”. What they found is intriguing in terms of how our brains deal with threats (even well beyond adolescence).
When the print ads were either “moderately deceptive” or “highly deceptive”, the fMRI results showed increased attention was paid to the ad. Specifically, the precuneous area of the brain (associated with focusing conscious attention) was activated. The more deceptive the ad, the more the precuneous was activated. In short, the more deceptive the ad, the greater the threat and the more the participant focused their attention on the ad itself.
Intriguingly, ads that were “moderately deceptive” caused more overall brain activity than the “highly deceptive” ads. The researchers suspect it is because participants had to work harder with the “moderately deceptive” ads to ascertain the truth while they were able to quickly evaluate and toss away the “highly deceptive” ads.
So how is this connected to litigation advocacy? In several ways.
Most deception in cases that make it to trial is going to be of the “moderately deceptive” type. The good news is that jurors will automatically focus more on those issues to attempt to intuit the truth behind the evidence presented to them.
What we see (over and over again) is that jurors do not want to be told what to think. They want to figure it out for themselves. Most effective is a tight case narrative that answers the questions that naturally emerge in the minds of jurors as they hear your story–and you want to let them draw their own conclusions.
Second, it isn’t just our youngest jurors (the Millennials) who are suspicious and look for deception everywhere. They may simply be more consciously aware of that process. For the rest of us though, our brains are lighting up. Make us consciously aware of our suspicions by questioning witnesses, subtly displaying doubt on your own face, and giving jurors alternatives to opposing counsel’s explanations.
Craig, A., Loureiro, Y., Wood, S., & Vendemia, J. (2011). Suspicious Minds: Exploring Neural Processes During Exposure to Deceptive Advertising. Journal of Marketing Research, 1-12 DOI: 10.1509/jmr.09.0007
Generation X: Active, balanced and happy. Seriously?
Remember them? Cynical, jaded, depressive punks? Unwashed slackers? Well, it’s time for a mental reset. They grew up. In the most recent issue of The Jury Expert, we have an article updating all of us on Generation X today.
This is an update of an article we first wrote back in 2000 attempting to describe Generation X in more balanced terms that reflected the actual research literature rather than solely individual opinions and the largely opinion-based popular media. It’s fascinating to return to your past writing and update it for current sensibilities while still retaining the integrity of the original work. Not an easy task.
Nor has it been easy for Generation X. A smaller generation sandwiched between two large (and often over-shadowing) generations (the Boomers and the Millennials/Gen Y)–Generation X morphed and matured while we weren’t looking.
We focus, in this new article, on updating the variables we identified as important for jury selection, voir dire and the hearing of your case back in 2000. And, naturally, we added in a few new ones as well since things change over the course of a decade.
Gen Xers are now 30-45 years old and have mortgages, families and careers. And guess what they’ve done?! They are the most educated generation ever. They are employed at a higher proportion than any other generation. They are married with children and are credited with reducing the divorce rate to the lowest we’ve seen in decades. They have retained and concretely defined their youthful values of family, work/life balance and acting locally not globally so that their lives actually reflect their values. And they are happy.
Who would have thought it? Take a look at our article on Generation X to see the summary of the research and to identify strategies for jury selection and voir dire. If we’re lucky, it will also update your thinking on these formerly inscrutable members of the venire.
Keene, DL Handrich, RR. Generation X: Active, balanced and happy. Seriously? The Jury Expert, November, 2011.
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Mock Jury Research: How do we make it more useful?
The literature on mock juries has been criticized for years for use of convenience samples (i.e., college students). An upcoming issue of the journal Behavioral Sciences and the Law is devoted to examining mock jury research and assessing where we have been and where we need to go.
The authors argue that since we are trying to find out how people make decisions within the confines of the courtroom, with elements of law, burdens of proof and standards of evidence—we need to use real adult jury eligible volunteers. We are not that interested in how college students in Psychology 101 courses think about fact patterns and determine responsibility. And that is the mainstay of the psycho-legal literature on jury decision-making.
The authors refer to Bornstein’s (1999) conclusion that there are simply not enough comparisons between samples of convenience (i.e., college students) and actual community populations of jurors to test the generalizability of college student ‘jurors’. The entire issue contains multiple examinations of mock jury research—done with both college students and community members. Ultimately, they recommend beginning research with convenience samples and then doing comparisons with actual jurors. If you are interested in mock jury research, the entire issue is an interesting read.
It’s an interesting issue for us. If you are a regular reader of this blog then you know we make hypotheses based on social sciences research. And it’s interesting when we try those ideas out in our mock trial research. Sometimes they work out and sometimes they don’t. And when they do work out, we think of them as a sort of secret weapon.
There is though, a difference between our college student mock jurors and our employed jurors. Here’s some of what we’ve seen:
Cases that require life experiences to assess damages can leave college-student mock jurors pretty silent. They don’t ‘get’ the rationale for damages and depending on personality style—will either follow older jurors or stubbornly insist on low or no damages.
High-tech cases with high-tech college-student jurors often result in young jurors speaking up actively and being listened to and questioned for additional information by less technologically proficient jurors.
Wrongful death cases (or other cases where a damages component is ‘mental anguish’) typically result in lower awards from these younger jurors who do not yet have the life experience to empathize with the pain of the loss of a partner or child.
Patent cases or intellectual property cases are often less concerning to our younger college-student jurors. They often do not see intellectual property theft as “that big a deal” and often have a higher standard of proof for awarding damages.
There are other ways we see younger, college-student mock jurors as different than our older mock jurors. But much of it comes down to individual differences between those college-students. If they are technologically proficient, they are often useful in those cases. If they are verbally persuasive, they can be seen as a valuable group members. We don’t know the magic answers to make academic mock jury research more useful and generalizable—but we like the idea of running basic research that compares convenient college samples with actual jurors.
The issue of how much faith you can place in the outcome of mock jury research is extremely important and complex. We have discussed it before in various ways, and we will revisit in again in the future. But for now, let’s be realistic. Even college students know that they are different than their parents. And their parents know how much they’ve changed since their 20’s.
Wiener RL, Krauss DA, & Lieberman JD (2011). Mock Jury Research: Where Do We Go from Here? Behavioral sciences & the law PMID: 21706517
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