Back in October of 2016, we wrote about a paper by the Cultural Cognition Project on assessing “scientific curiosity”. Here is some of what we said then about what Kahan and his colleagues found by measuring scientific curiosity: “What they found was that participants who scored higher on the curiosity scale were more likely to choose the story that would disconfirm their preexisting beliefs (that is, it would surprise them) and the participants enjoyed that process of surprise.” We concluded that 2016 post this way: From a litigation advocacy perspective, the challenge is to identify  jurors who are curious and

When facing a panel of prospective jurors for voir dire and jury selection it is important that you update your perceptions of who these people are in 2017. It is hard to keep up with change and to replace our outdated ideas of “how North America is” but here is some data to help you do just that. These facts are wonderful perspective changers and we hope some of them will surprise you (since that will help you remember and update your perceptions of those potential jurors). “Normal America is not a small town of white people” The people over

Time for another combination post of various things you will want to know that will improve your conversation skills and general life knowledge. We are not saying that it will make your hair shiny or inspire your kids to do their homework. Kernels of wisdom, that’s what they are, in truth. Talking to your kids about stereotypes The Conversation website has a brief and very good article on how to talk to your children in order to combat stereotypes. They address the best ways to speak to kids at different ages, how to combat generalizations kids might make about whole

Or at least, maybe there is no “ugliness penalty” if you are not beautiful. We’ve written a number of times here about the many benefits given to those who are seen as beautiful or attractive. This paper debunks the stereotype and says that salary goes beyond appearance and individual differences matter too. The researchers used a nationally representative US data set (from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health aka “Add Health”) with “precise and repeated measures of physical attractiveness”. In this data set, are researcher-ratings of physical attractiveness of all participants (on a five-point scale) at four different points

Here’s another combination post offering multiple tidbits for you to stay up-to-date on new research and publications that have emerged on things you need to know. We tend to publish these when we’ve read a whole lot more than we can blog about and want to make sure you don’t miss the information. Juror questions during trial and the prevalence of electronic and social media research The National Center on State Courts just published a study authored by a judge in the Pennsylvania Lawyer on whether allowing jurors to ask questions during trial will help resolve issues of electronic and

We’ve written before about American attitudes toward China and Asians in general and are used to seeing knee-jerk negative reactions toward Asian companies or parties across the country as we complete pretrial research. But, like other biases and attitudes all over the media these days, American attitudes toward China have been getting worse in the past decade. You likely know we hold Pew Research in high regard for measuring shifting attitudes in this country. We often look to their work to take a “national temperature” on various issues so we can then see if those attitudes are stronger or weaker

Lately we’ve heard a lot more anti-immigrant bias expressed in public and it turns out, hate speech breeds hatred of its own. This research has pretty frightening findings and you may find it hard to believe there is such misinformed hatred in 2017. Or, perhaps you won’t find it hard to believe at all. We will just share a few of the disturbing findings here: The researchers (from Northwestern University) showed American participants (recruited via the internet through online subject pools and via email through university channels) the ‘Ascent of Man’ diagram (which is apparently popular in research circles and

It’s time again for another combination post featuring fascinating tidbits you may have missed were it not for our eagle eyes and constant efforts to keep you informed. And yes, we’ll start at the end since we know you are wondering if smart-phone blindness is really a thing. Would we steer you wrong? Smart-phone blindness (Yes. It’s really a thing) You can think of this as a public service announcement meant to protect you from lying in bed and reading your phone when you should be sleeping. Or at least making sure you are looking at your phone with both

Anyone who has been in court more than a few times, has likely heard a judge “rehabilitate” a potential juror who has expressed bias by asking the juror if they will, in judging “this case”, be “fair, impartial and unbiased”. Why yes, your Honor (say almost all of them). Mykol Hamilton and Kate Zephyrhawke, researchers, call this “prehabilitation” and have written several articles over in The Jury Expert speaking to this issue. But, today, we have a simple and straightforward blog post so you can tell it to the judge: it simply does not work! You may be familiar with

It is hard to believe that more than two decades have passed since the controversial Time magazine cover featuring OJ Simpson with his skin intentionally darkened was distributed. It was published in 1994 and people were so upset that the magazine’s managing editor issued a public apology for publishing the cover photo. Today, we are covering very recent research that tells us the exact same thing is still going on in a wide variety of publications. The researchers looked at stories on both celebrities and politicians and found that when the story content was positive, the skin tone on the