Over the 10 years we have been researching, writing, and publishing The Jury Room blog, we have also been traveling coast to coast, applying what we have been writing about on an amazing array of cases. We have come to the realization that we are tired. And this is my last blog post. Rita will bat clean-up with her final reflections after my own. I don’t want to kid anyone— this blog was Rita Handrich’s idea, her vision, her style, and her achievement. Over 98% of the blogs were researched and written by Rita, and I added my 2 cents

That’s a pretty amazing claim, don’t you think? It’s also a very annoying looking font but you can download it free so there is that. We’ve written here about font choices a number of times and it appears that the more you have to focus and concentrate to read a font (that disruption is called “creating a disfluency”), the more you will remember. So. This new font is called Sans Forgetica. No. We didn’t make that up.  The font was designed in Australia at RMIT University. The font creators are graphic design students, psychologists, and researchers and (presumably) they brought

Not long ago we blogged about the false perceptions Americans have of the proportion of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer people in the overall population. What the research on which that blog post was based told us is that there are some people who consistently over-estimate the population proportion of LGBTQ people and that “those who overestimate the proportion of gay/lesbian/bisexual Americans are also more likely to hold false beliefs about homosexuality and less likely to support gay-rights policies like employment protection, child adoption, and same-sex marriage”.  Today, we have a couple more resources to help you understand some

We have blogged a few times here on the ways conservatives and liberals differ — in fact, for a while it seemed there was new research coming out about differences between those two groups routinely. But now we have another one—narcissism apparently shows up in different ways depending on whether you are liberal or conservative.  The researchers were looking at the relationship between social narcissism and political behaviors and values. They surveyed 750 American adults (a nationally representative sample) between October 26 and November 1, 2016. They used the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (a measure commonly used in social sciences research)

A new survey has come out that is the first to show us what cisgender kids think of their transgender peers.  First a reminder of what cisgender is: it is simply the term used to describe someone who identifies with the sex to which they were assigned at birth.  What do cisgender kids think about their transgender peers? The survey was published in the Journal of Cognition and Development and explored “5- to 10-year-old children’s (N=113) preferences for transgender versus gender-“typical” peers who either shared their gender identity or did not”. The authors describe their results this way:  “Children preferred

We’ve all seen this finding before: men who communicate their ideas forcefully are seen as assertive and as having leadership qualities. Women who communicate their ideas forcefully are judged more harshly and negatively. What about hate speech on social media? Are women judged more harshly than men there?  Please. You really have to ask? Of course women are judged more harshly for hate speech on social media!  And it doesn’t matter if you are a woman speaking hate or speaking what is called “counter [hate] speech” You are going to get blasted either way. This new article was published in

We often find things we want to pass along but about which we do not wish to write an entire blog post. Here’s another installment of things you really (maybe, kind of) want to know.  So, who is trusted more? Scientists or the government?  You have probably heard about research on “nudges” (which is the idea that if people are given small informational “nudges” they are likely to modify their behavior). If you read the popular news telling us scientists are in so much credibility trouble—you will be surprised by this one. Scientists are seen as more credible than the

Today we have some recent research examining what happens when prestigious companies are sued for employment discrimination. A good reputation is something most organizations strive for, but in employment litigation, a good reputation can be a double-edged sword.  This research was completed at the Kellogg School of Northwestern University and the researchers found some contradictory findings on the effect of prestige for companies sued for employment discrimination. The researchers generated a list of low and high status companies from Fortune’s Most Admirable Companies list between 1998 and 2008 and gave them a score between 0 and 10. They also examined

We came across this study and thought it was a perfect example of how paying attention to gender balance in management can positively influence your corporate bottom line. And, this infographic summary communicates a LOT in a short period of time. So rather than writing it out for you, take a look at how one company has found out about the positive benefits of gender balance in management.  We’ve written a lot about bias and the importance of maintaining an awareness of bias if you want to manage effectively. If you want to read more about Sodexo’s experience, take a

You may recognize the child illustrating this post from a Cheerios commercial a few years ago that we blogged about several times. Today we are going to focus on what researchers found in attitudes toward categorizing Black-White multiracial people. That is, how are those with Black-White heritage “seen” and then labeled by observers? To assess, researchers gave participants photographs to “sort” into racial piles: Black, White, Multiracial. (They did multiple studies including some studies where Latino/Hispanic faces were added into the sorting task.) You will likely not be surprised to learn that over multiple studies, when various sorting tasks were