It's only Tuesday, but the news this week is already unusually rich with research of interest to jury folks. Samples:
--The power of rudeness. Via BPS Research Digest, the blog of the British Psychological Society: "Seeing one person be rude to another can stunt a person's creativity, impair their mental performance and make them less likely to be civil themselves. " The study is Porath and Erez, "Overlooked but not untouched: How rudeness reduces onlookers’ performance on routine and creative tasks," in the May issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Maybe that's why your opponent's style sometimes seems like it's working.
--Alcoholics among us. From Jane Brody in the New York Times, startling numbers on the alcoholics who "are able to maintain respectable, even high-profile lives, usually with a home, family, job and friends." It's millions. And "serve on juries" is something else they can do.
--Holier than thy client. Also from the Times, a collection of the research showing not only that people "tend to be overly optimistic about their own abilities and fortunes" -- we've "long known" that -- but that "this self-inflating bias may be even stronger when it comes to moral judgment." If you've watched mock jurors tell each other what they would have done in the crisis the defendant was faced with, this won't come as a surprise.
--Bad mood, good memory? From the Situationist blog, a study where "subjects were able to remember three times as many items on cold, windy, rainy days when there was sombre classical music playing as they were when conditions were sunny and bright. Rainy-day shoppers were also less likely to have false memories of objects that weren’t there[.]" If your case is complicated, the solemn courtroom atmosphere might be a good thing.
Just some things to think about.
(Image by Jim Sher at http://www.flickr.com/photos/blyzz/407850690; license details there.)
