The Jury Room » Generation or Age of Juror

There are six types of Millennials. That’s right. Six.

Rita Handrich — Fri, 25 May 2012 11:27:25 +0000

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.

While we understand the desire of marketers and others to categorize and thus target various groups in this huge generation, we don’t find this sort of break-down is useful for voir dire and jury selection. We’ve written a lot about generations in The Jury Expert and we think it really makes more sense to look at attitudes, values and life experiences as they relate to your case narrative.

There are some cases for which we’ve seen young Millennial jurors emerge as respected members of a deliberating group and others in which their youth and lack of life experience leave them ill-equipped to process and/or contribute. Figuring out if your potential juror is ‘green’ may be useful and it may not. “Green” (or any other attribute) becomes more or less important based on the personality of the individual, their sense of personal power and authority, and whether there is a cohort on the jury that will allow them to feel safe if they are assertive.

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.

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Generational communication: Will it hurt more than a rook piercing?

Rita Handrich — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:02:39 +0000

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 18^th 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.

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Are we all Millennials at heart? On cynicism when exposed to deception

Rita Handrich — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 11:02:37 +0000

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

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