We try to keep up with how jurors in various locales vary in attitudes and beliefs. Sometimes that leads us to unlikely places such as a professional publication titled the Annals of the American Association of Geographers. Today’s article is written by a group of geographers and focuses on how hate groups vary geographically with heavier concentrations in some areas of the US than others. The catch is that if you expect most of the heavier concentrations to be in the deep South—the times they are a’changin. While concentrations are much heavier in the eastern half of the US, there

If you are not a judge, this finding may not surprise you. Based on this research, some judges will likely be surprised (or simply think the research is faulty) and others will nod in agreement. The researcher makes this statement:  “Judges tend to believe that their vast amount of legal training and logical thinking skills make them immune to these mistakes. This research is showing that judges are not as immune as maybe they think they are.” For many of us (including many sitting judges), bias is incongruent with how we see ourselves. Yet, we are all socialized and acculturated

We pay close attention to mock juror comments on witness testimony. We typically give mock jurors about 8 minutes of videotaped testimony and then ask for their feedback in rating factors of witness credibility but also with open-ended questions about their memorable impressions of each individual witness. This feedback process has resulted in a number of blog posts over the years as we took in mock juror advice for potential witnesses: Don’t put your fist in your mouth; “I can look in his eyes and tell he is a liar”; Don’t testify with a cold or runny nose because I

I began listening to audiobooks in 1999. I know this because I saw it when I cancelled my membership in a well-known audiobook club a couple of months ago. When you drive, the hours fly by with an audiobook in your ear. I suddenly noticed (after almost 20 years of listening to books) that the public library had caught up with my audiobook club—except books from the library are free. So I went through my book club queue of things I’d like to listen to eventually and asked my public library for all of them. It works just the same—the

Jokes about robots taking over the world aside, here are some (perhaps surprisingly) ambivalent findings about Americans’ comfort with the rise of artificial intelligence and automation. If you have read this blog for long, you know we rely on the Pew Research Center to help us keep up on changing attitudes, beliefs and values of the American public. This time, they are examining the positive benefits Americans see as technology continues to develop. However, there is also a clear discomfort with how far technology will go that leaves survey respondents a bit anxious. (We have blogged about this same ambivalence

We hear so much about “the liberal media” these days that this infographic made us stop and review carefully. It was interesting to see that some of the sites we had casually mentally categorized as either liberal or conservative were truly neither and instead gave a “balanced” view of the news (according to the patent attorney who ranked them).  First, let’s start with that attorney. “Vanessa” is a practicing patent attorney in Denver, Colorado (read about her here). Vanessa writes the blog All Generalizations Are False. Further, she actually published and then modified her Media Bias Chart (see her site

The mental image many of us have of psychopaths is similar to the graphic illustrating this post. They are terrifying. “Terrifying” however is pretty vague and we need a more precise vocabulary to discuss what you see in a psychopath—that is, their core characteristics. Apparently, the more research that has been done on the psychopath, the more disagreement there is about which characteristics are “core to” or “define” the psychopath. Here’s a study that helps to identify what the core characteristics are of the psychopath by comparing similarities and differences between psychopaths in the US and the Netherlands. In an

Seriously. Kellogg Northwestern has just examined a number of research studies showing that seeing or hearing about too many scandals may result in purchase decisions made in seemingly unrelated areas. Here’s how their review starts: You’re at the grocery store, scanning your phone while walking through the aisles. An article pops up about a CEO caught embezzling millions from the employee pension fund. You shake your head in disgust, then turn your attention to which ketchup to buy. And while it seems entirely unrelated, the condiment you choose could be impacted by the news you just read. As you may

The Pew Research Center has just released a new report on the religious lives of African-Americans. Here are five facts Pew highlights in their report (which is released in celebration of Black History Month). We encourage you to read the entire report for more understanding of the differences in religious practice and affiliation between African-Americans and other ethnic groups in the United States. 79% of African-Americans self-identify as Christian. This is in comparison to 70% of Whites and 77% of Latinos in this country (as of 2014). The first predominantly Black denominations in the US were founded in the late

The last time we talked about an emerging demographic group, it was the lumbersexual [usually urban-dwelling bearded men who wear flannel but are unlikely to have ever chopped wood]. And as good social scientists we of course realize that by now you are longing for another social identifier. This time our emerging demographic could be either male or female and they call themselves sapiosexuals. So what is a sapiosexual? According to the Urban Dictionary (knowledge cornerstone for all things hipster) a sapiosexual is: “One who finds the content’s of someone else’s mind to be their most attractive attribute, above and