Here’s another combination post to make sure you stay informed about the many things we come across as we seek out interesting blog posts. And we will get to it, but no. Gelotophobia is not a fear of gelatin. Aha! Sudden insights or “epiphany learning” You’ve probably had those rare moments of insight when you are suddenly able to see a solution to a vexing problem. Scientists call them moments of epiphany and they only recently discovered a way to study them. As it happens, the way to study this sort of learning requires eye tracking and pupil dilation software.

We’ve written about eyewitnesses and problems with accuracy here often. Today we have an article that tells us 242 people were wrongly identified by eyewitness testimony and served years in prison prior to being exonerated by DNA testing. Researchers at Florida Atlantic University wondered how memory in people might be altered by police use of “individual mugshots, an array of mugshots, composite sketches, and lineups” as well as subtle innuendos. Specifically, they wanted to answer this question: Does presenting a picture along with a question like ‘is this the person who did it?’ create an association between those two things

Recently we saw the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia (1967) which ruled marriage across racial lines was legal throughout the US. In honor of this milestone, Pew Research Center has released a series of articles examining intermarriage in the US. We think it a good use of blog space to update you on the frequency of intermarriage in this country (which is rising—just like the US population is becoming increasingly racially diverse). Less than a year ago (September 2016) , we posted on those who find interracial marriage “icky” so here are some prevalence numbers

Recently, several articles have come out on Millennials and women but neither were enough to fill an entire post—so we’re combining them into a single post so that we do not miss passing on the information. “Psychologically scarred” Millennials are “killing industries” This article is almost funny but they are blaming Boomers (the parents of the Millennials) for the “industry-killing” habits of the Millennials. They quote Millennials who say this is “just some more millennial-blaming BS” and apparently, headlines saying Millennials have “killed off” another corporation or even industries are very common. The buying habits of Millennials are very different

Seven years ago, we blogged about a disruptive persuasion strategy meant to catch the listener off guard and thus, elicit cooperation. Four years ago, we blogged about a negotiation strategy to help you more successfully negotiate prices (from salaries to farmer’s market produce). Now, in a new meta-analysis, the strategy is called the pique technique (which is very catchy). The pique technique is a persuasion strategy believed to work by raising the listener’s curiosity and thus disrupting the automatic “No” and encouraging you to engage with the asker. Most people ask, “What is it for?” to an unusual request like

This is a combination post of some of the ways race is coming up in 2017 (so far). It is easy to become numbed to how many shocking things are said on a regular basis now, but we agree with John Oliver in this NSFW video—this is not normal and we need to remember that! So today, here’s just a sampling of things that we need to pay attention to and not just accept as “normal”. These are not normal things. What is even more disturbing is these are stories all published within the past week. A lawyer who stood up

You have likely heard many stories repeated about increased racial prejudice since the 2016 national elections in the US, but is there any evidence-based proof that alleged increase is real? According to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, yes—at  least when it comes to a willingness to say things aloud that have not been “okay” for a very long time. Vox has written a plain language explanation of this paper that you may want to look at to get a quick (and clear) synopsis. Essentially, the message is that when you see leaders behaving badly,

We’ve written a number of times about dangerous women here and our readers (as well as random internet visitors) seem to be fascinated by them. But there is disagreement among those that believe their personal experiences/exposure define reality and the actual facts. For example, we published a post on a prospective research study. The study questioned whether women were sentenced to more time in prison than men who were convicted of the same crimes. A legal blogger known for his moral outrage wrote about the post and asked why in the world we would use our blog to perpetuate a

Time for another one of those posts that combine the things we’ve been reading into a ‘this and that’ sort of post that gives you information on issues you may want to know more about and that certainly make you a more interesting conversationalist. Or perhaps a more memorable conversationalist. Employers are less likely to hire women wearing headscarves It seems like it has been forever since anyone suggested we were living in a post-racial society but it probably has been more than 150 days. (Sigh.) We’ve written before about women who wear head scarves but in the context of

Last year, we posted several times on CRISPR (the revolutionary gene-editing tool) as an example of how to explain something very complex to the novice juror. We’ve also talked a lot about how expert witnesses are not present in the courtroom to show jurors and parties how smart they are—but rather, to educate the jurors. When we say we want expert witnesses to teach at the high school level—we often get confusion from experts as to  how this can possibly be done. Typically, the expertise of an expert technical witness is in a specific area and it is hard to