Just as we see changing demographics in America related to ethnicity (link to post on Asian and Hispanic Americans)—the American landscape with regard to religion and religious affiliation has also changed. But we still tend to think about religion in America as a matter of clumping together Catholics and Protestants and making broad generalizations about those two groups. Here are two recent surveys to remind you we just can’t do that anymore. When it comes to attitudes, values, and beliefs—Protestants are pretty diverse Gallup (another one of our favorites) published a report in September of 2017 saying that Protestants believe

This is the second part of our Top 10 posts of 2017 (see the first here). Today, we present the Top 5 posts you visited most often in 2017. Post No. 5: Do you know what “vocal fry” is? We didn’t either As part of an ongoing effort to keep you informed and “up” on pop culture–we brought you this one. Now that you know what it is, it’s like an ear worm and you simply cannot stop hearing it [and here’s a tip–it’s everywhere]. Post No. 4: What will be most persuasive in your forensic expert’s testimony? Perhaps not

Time for an update on who lies, why they lie, and how you can spot them. We’ve written a lot about deception in the past but there’s always more to say (believe it or not). We’re going to cover several articles in this post and discuss each of them briefly so you can explore the items in greater depth if they strike a chord of interest. 60% of us lie in everyday conversation  When we think of liars, we often think of “them”. But new research out of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst says it is more common than

It is once again time for one of those combination posts that give you scintillating information you know you want to know. Think of these as fun factoids—that you can also use in casual conversation to amaze and educate your friends (or just make them look at you oddly). The new ‘Educated single women over 40 are more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married’ belief  If you are female and were reading Newsweek back in the 1980s, you may remember their early June 1986 cover illustrating this post. And you certainly remember the hubbub raised

The graphic illustrating this post contains false data. It is just one example of the way false information has been used to heighten racial tensions in the past few years. The graphic is shown here with FALSE in big red letters to help you remember the data shown is simply not true (we’ve blogged about the importance of this visual strategy before here. The information contained in this post IS true and comes from a new Marshall Project investigation into 400,000 murders by civilians between 1980 and 2014. They begin the report with these bold statements (which are backed up

The problem with female attorney retention has been discussed at some length in blogs, in reports sponsored by the American Bar Association, in professional association publications, in academic journals, and likely—everywhere female attorneys gather. Female attorneys leave BigLaw for many reasons but here’s a bit of research that may give insight into helping law firms retain female attorneys following childbirth or adoption. It has long been noted that women bear the brunt of the financial/career impact related to childbirth and/or motherhood. And if you are a woman of color, the damage to income is even worse. While the research cited

We have blogged a number of times on the problems with humblebragging. Observers see you as insincere and self-involved. But Forbes recently published an article that just may allow you to promote yourself as well as promoting others. The practice of effective self-promotion for women is strewn with pitfalls. A well-known example is that women will offer ideas that are ignored in group discussion and then when a male colleague says the same thing—the idea is often embraced. Last week we posted on the challenges faced by female and minority managers and this strategy may be a good way around that

This issue has been the banner of a number of well-known male bloggers who encourage their readers to pile on [with their generally anonymous screen names] when commenters do not agree with the blogger. These bloggers make comments like, “it’s my blog and I make the rules” to justify boorish behavior. Granted. We don’t choose to interact with bullies—online or otherwise. We have been the subject of the entire spectrum of comment for our writing over the years of The Jury Room, including bizarre and wildly over-the-top trash-talking from a few other bloggers. We do not like it. We ignore

The U.S. Department of Justice defines hate crime as “the violence of intolerance and bigotry, intended to hurt and intimidate someone because of their race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or disability.” While the documentation and awareness of hate crimes is essential, we also need to understand the differences in the numbers we see reported on hate crimes, increases and decreases for specific types of hate crimes, and what those shifts in numbers actually mean. We often see comments about one kind of hate crime being more “important” than another due to a spike in frequency. Today’s article points

We mentioned this scale last week in a combination post but decided it deserved a post of its own as with other scales we’ve featured here in the past. You are likely aware of the terms “driving while black” or “flying while brown” and this scale means to document that experience of discrimination and accompanying health impact. Despite a plethora of research on general stress and race-related stress—the researchers developing this scale say they “are not aware of any psychometric instruments that specifically focus on assessing Black men’s experiences with law enforcement discrimination”. In order to develop a valid scale,