Civil plaintiffs and defendants are often thought to be equally capable of valuing and winning cases, and equally capable of making mistakes. Said differently, decision errors in case valuation are thought to be no different for plaintiffs and defendants because it is believed that: (1)plaintiffs and defendants are equally adept in predicting trial outcomes, (2) plaintiffs will win about 50% of the cases that proceed to trial, and (3) plaintiffs and defendants will be equally mistaken in their predictions of a trial's outcome. Researchers have investigated whether mistakes in case valuation, and the cost of those mistakes, are evenly distributed

Kiser and colleagues (2008) studied the role of 998 offers in plaintiff and defendant decisions to settle or go to trial in 847 California cases. These researchers found that when a 998 offer was made, mistaken decisions to go to trial increased, although...

Jurors are instructed in criminal cases to presume a defendant innocent and place a burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt on the prosecution. Even after receiving jury instructions, jurors struggle with these concepts. With the cooperation of the Wyoming courts, Saxton (1998) gave questionnaires to jurors when they were discharged from service on actual trials...

Jurors often perceive circumstantial evidence as weak evidence, rather than an alternative way to prove a fact. Strawn and Buchanan (1976) found that, despite instructions to the contrary,...

The difference between direct and circumstantial evidence is difficult for jurors. Tiersma and Curtis (2008) tested how well California's 2006 jury instruction (CACI No. 202) allowed jurors to identify direct and circumstantial evidence...

Borckardt and colleagues (2003) examined how jurors perceive eyewitnesses to a car accident when trivial details in one of the eyewitnesses' testimony are discredited. Jurors were presented contradictory testimony from two eyewitnesses to a car accident...

Which of the following two statements best reflects your attitudes? (1) People's misfortunes result from the mistakes they make. (2) Many of the unhappy things in people's lives are partly due to bad luck. Jurors who choose #1 are more likely to have an internal locus of control. Jurors with an internal locus of control believe...

Genove and Imwinkelried (1995) report that white-collar workers award lower damages than blue-collar workers for emotional injuries, but this pattern is reversed for physical injuries. Goodman and colleagues (1990) found that...

Social class affects how jurors understand evidence. For example, social class affects whether jurors believe a criminal defendant is carrying a knife as a weapon intended to injure another person, or carrying it out of habit or for general protection. Pennington and Hastie (1990) report how a juror's social class affects which interpretation is accepted for why a defendant...

Sometimes defendants are tried simultaneously for multiple crimes. Tanford (Tanford, 1985; Tanford and Penrod, 1984) studied the effects of trying a defendant on three charges in one trial, or trying the defendant separately on each charge...