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

It’s been all about “fake news” for a while now and here’s a study telling us to just stop talking about it. Well, sort of. What it actually says is even when we have knowledge to the contrary, if we hear something repeated enough—we come to believe it. Hence, our recommendation that we need to all stop repeating fake news—even if our comment is on how ridiculous it may seem. It is as if the false statements morph when repeated enough from outrageous to familiar to having a ring of truth. Merely by repetition. It’s a bit like the dictum

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”

Those of us who’ve been around for a while have heard this repeatedly. But, lest you think times are changing, here’s some sobering data from a March, 2017 report co-edited by a Michigan State University College of Law Professor. From the beginning, this is a disturbing report. Here’s how it starts: African-Americans are only 13% of the American population but a majority of innocent defendants wrongfully convicted of crimes and later exonerated. They constitute 47% of the 1,900 exonerations listed in the National Registry of Exonerations (as of October 2016), and the great majority of more than 1,800 additional innocent

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

It’s been a while since we’ve had a new cognitive bias to share with you. Previously we’ve blogged on many different biases and here are a handful of those posts. Today’s research paper combines three biases—two of which we’ve blogged about before: the better-than-average effect, confirmation bias and also, the endowment effect. The endowment effect is the “(irrational) added value” we place on things just because they belong to us and not to someone else. So, today’s research was described over at BPS Digest (a reliable source for accurate summaries), and it’s a bit odd. For the sake of brevity,

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

After we published that “molecular genetics overlap” post showing curiosity is found in smart people—one of our readers asked exactly how you “see” smart during voir dire. The question was posed on Twitter but the answer is not exactly expressed in 140 characters—so we’re doing it here. Among other things, we made these comments in that post: All we need to do is look to see who is smart and we will then know we can select curious jurors (while considering whether our client’s case benefits from higher levels of intelligence and curiosity). And, as we often say to our

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

When we began this blog in 2009, the reality that facts don’t matter was one of the first posts we wrote. We wrote again about this reality back in 2011. And we’ve written about it several times since then so…here we go again! In this new era of fake news and fake news allegations, we’ve seen a surge in the number of “fact checkers” employed by the media to verify accuracy of statements made by people in this country’s leadership. Some think the publicizing of fact checking can be effective against the spread of misinformation. New research (conducted during the