Your trial advocacy teacher told you to be candid with the jury about the weaknesses in your case. New research suggests she was right.
Stories and gaps
Trial lawyers almost all know they're supposed to tell a story. Many also have worked with variations on that idea: how to help the jurors anticipate where you're going with the story, for example, or let them "solve the mystery" by filling in gaps in the story themselves. This week you can confirm the psychological power of stories, and gaps in stories, if you run a couple of searches on the "Sopranos" season finale, starting perhaps with the 113 (at this writing) comments to this Newark Star-Ledger interview with the show's creator, David Chase. Between those who are complaining that the story didn't close properly and those who are figuring out their own endings, our relationship to narrative and its gaps is a leading news item right now.
We've learned one rule in particular to prevent a dangerous story gap: tell the jury the "bad news" about your case yourself, rather than wait for your opponent to do it. (We have multiple phrases for this, like the Eskimos' supposedly multiple words for snow: draw the sting, bite the bullet. Apparently we get a lot of practice with bad news.)
The science of ambivalence
There's a new study that supports this common wisdom. Researchers Joseph Priester, Richard Petty (not that one), and Kiwan Park have been studying "ambivalence," in the sense that it's important to marketers: what makes consumers ambivalent about the product they're considering?
In prior papers, they found that most ambivalence arises as you'd expect it would: the more conflicting reactions we have to information about a product, the more ambivalent we feel. But a "seeming puzzle" remained in their data. At the bottom of the graph, where people had uniformly positive or negative reactions, their ambivalence should have disappeared, but it didn't. People who had reacted entirely positively or negatively to what they heard were still reporting mixed feelings.
The new paper, "Whence Univalent Ambivalence?", takes on this puzzle. It's in the June issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, and summarized at Science Daily. As the title suggests, the paper is a tough read if you're not a social scientist. In this discipline, a product isn't a product, it's an "attitude object" -- and if you get through the description of the three experiments, you still have to traverse (or, okay, skim) the statistical analysis.
But it's worth it, because the researchers' conclusion gives you one of those "I knew it!" moments. It turns out that when we hear just the good or the bad side of a story (or, in these experiments, a product's qualities), we don't trust it. We assume there must be another side of the story we haven't been told.
A new construct, a familiar idea
This "anticipation of conflicting reactions" is "a new construct" in this field of psychology, the researchers say. Lawyers will be glad to know that it confirms something they were trying to do all along: tell the story, both sides, and draw the sting -- or whatever you call it.
(Photo by iyers at http://www.flickr.com/photos/i_y_e_r_s/532933618/; license details there.)
