While you may think most of the things we write about here are on litigation advocacy (and you would be correct) we also care about you, dear reader. We have written often about smartphones and their ubiquitous presence in our lives. This is a post to update you on the increasingly cruel reality of the role smartphones play in our emotional experiences, how they accentuate our personality traits, and the ways they affect our work lives. Excessive smart phone use leads to emotional problems This finding stems from research at SUNY Binghamton where they found smartphone use could result in

If you are young(er) you likely know precisely what vocal fry means and if you are old(er)—probably not so much. It is a cultural phenomenon seen primarily (but not only) in young(er) women as described at the Mental Floss website: “Vocal fry describes a specific sound quality caused by the movement of the vocal folds. In regular speaking mode, the vocal folds rapidly vibrate between a more open and more closed position as the air passes through. In vocal fry, the vocal folds are shortened and slack so they close together completely and pop back open, with a little jitter,

This is the sort of article that can either amuse or terrify you. It will amuse you if you are charmed by all the ways in which we see ourselves as superior to others. And it will terrify you if you do not want to know that you are always being observed closely by everyone around you. The article even starts off creepily: “People-watching is an age-old pastime. People notice and observe the people around them all the time—on trains, at cafés, waiting in line, at cocktail parties and office meetings, and beyond. Pretty much anywhere there are other people,

One of the most common internet searches that brings people to our blog is “women who stalk” and we intermittently receive emails from men who say they have been belittled by the police for reporting a female stalker. They wonder if we can somehow help them. (No. We cannot. We typically refer them back to law enforcement in their area.) Dangerous women are apparently intensely interesting and intensely frightening, as we’ve seen by the number of visits to our posts on women who murder or commit other violent crimes. Female cannibals “frighten and fascinate” We will start with the most

‘Resting Bitch Face’ is, in case you missed it, the condition of having a neutral facial expression that people perceive as sour, unpleasant, and generally bitchy. Long before was RBF was a thing, a woman in my graduate school class told me that professors often thought she was angry because her face carried a flat expression when she was thinking. “It’s just how my face is!” she protested. Years later, allegedly not until 2013 (although it hit the Urban Dictionary in 2011), the phrase went viral. It is a “real thing” say scientists, is seen in the famous and the not-famous,

Back in 2010, we posted on an article called Artful Dodging that talked about how politicians in particular, answer the question they prefer to answer rather than the question you asked. We talked about responding to that strategy in voir dire. Now, we have another article from the same group of researchers and this one is on lying by using the truth. Here’s how a press release describes paltering: The ability to deceive someone by telling the truth is not only possible, it has a name — paltering — it’s common in negotiations and those who palter can do serious

When litigation cases rely on science or highly technical information, it is critical to help jurors understand the information underlying the case at a level that makes sense to them. If they do not understand your “science”, they will simply guess which party to vote for or “follow the crowd”. Here’s an example of what happened when scientists “followed the crowd” to see what fields of science were seen as most precise (and therefore reliable). You can see from the graphic illustrating this post that too many people are watching CSI shows on TV. When forensic science is more “certain”

When my kids were younger, I used to talk to them about the difference between intent and impact as they struggled to understand the varying reactions of people to their behavior. Back in 2009, we posted on some new research showing that we reacted more indignantly when bad deeds were done “on purpose”. Here is some of what we wrote then and you may want to visit that post in full as well: This is an intriguing study because it speaks to the heart of telling the emotional story at trial.  You want jurors to have an emotional response—a connection

Here’s another this-and-that post documenting things you need to know but that we don’t want to do a whole post about–so you get a plethora of factoids that will entertain your family and entrance your co-workers. Or at least be sort of fun to read and (probably) as awe-inspiring as the stack of vegetables and fruit illustrating the post. Just don’t do it: How bringing up politics ruins your workplace You probably know this already since many people say their Facebook feeds are a toxic combination of politics and rage these days. So. Bringing up politics up at work is

In 2014, we wrote about research investigating how people felt when a witness wore a veil such as some forms of a hijab or a niqab. Here were some of the findings we described in that research. We’ve written a number of times about bias against Muslims. But here’s a nice article with an easy to incorporate finding on how to reduce bias against your female client who wears a Muslim head-covering. (In case you have forgotten, we’ve already written about head-coverings for the Muslim man.) The graphic illustrating this post shows the variety of head-coverings Muslim women might wear