It's one of the most common questions a jury consultant gets: will the jurors know that? If I make this analogy, this reference, this joke, will they know what I'm talking about?
We're absorbed in our own lives even before we disappear into trial preparation, so it's easy to lose track of what the rest of the world does and does not know. Luckily, the news brings partial answers to this question every day, if we're paying attention. It turns out that most people know more than you thought they would about some things -- and less than you thought they would about others.
They don't know much civics -- or geography, or history, or literature
In an article it titled "Dunce-Cap Nation," Newsweek yesterday released the results of its "first What You Need To Know Poll." The poll results themselves are here. It's not clear how these particular questions were chosen, but only 11% of people came up with John Roberts when asked to name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court; 40% couldn't pick Nancy Pelosi out of a multiple-choice question asking for the name of the Speaker of the House; 20% thought Christianity was older than Judaism; and 35% picked someplace other than South America in a multiple-choice question asking where the Amazon River is.
They know more than you thought about drugs, and sex
"More than one in five adults 20-49 years of age have tried cocaine or other street drugs at some time in their life," says the National Center For Health Statistics in a study of drug use and sexual behaviors released yesterday. (The study itself is here and the press release is here.) "Twenty-nine percent of men reported having 15 or more female sexual partners in a lifetime compared with 9% of women who reported having 15 or more male sexual partners in a lifetime," the release continues.
They don't know what people of other races experience
“White Americans suffer from a glaring ignorance about what it means to live as a black American,” said Mahzarin Banaji, co-author with Philip Mazzocco and others of a paper in the fall 2006 issue of Harvard’s Du Bois Review. (Press releases for the paper, called “The Cost of Being Black: White Americans’ Perceptions and the Question of Reparations,” came out yesterday.)
The authors reached this conclusion after asking white subjects to imagine what they would want to be paid if they had to live as a black person for the rest of their lives. Less than $10,000, typical subjects responded.
Economically, the answer was way off. "White households average about $150,000 more wealth than the typical black family," explains the press release, and "[o]verall, total wealth for white families is about five times greater than that of black families, a gap that has persisted for years." (Key for lawyers: when researchers explained these costs to subjects, the amounts they requested went up.)
The subjects weren't just low graders, economically speaking. They typically imagined they'd need more than $1 million to give up television permanently. And when researchers asked them to imagine they had been disadvantaged in nonracial ways, they asked for much higher figures in compensation.
They know the health care system has gaps
Another study released yesterday at the National Center for Health Statistics details how gaps in the health-care system play out in people's lives. It's called the "National Health Interview Survey" (summary here, study data here and here), and it reveals among many other things that almost 20% of Americans 18-64 did not have health insurance in 2006. That means someone on your jury likely has an uninsured friend or loved one, even if they're all insured themselves.
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Source notes:
- Thanks to both Eric Turkewitz of New York Personal Injury Law Blog and the Blog of Legal Times for picking up the Newsweek poll.
- Before you let that poll make you too hard on your fellow people, you might want to take it yourself. I missed a couple of questions. Even Newsweek spelled Jane Austen's name wrong in the poll questions -- and, as Eric and BLT point out, spelled "charitable" wrong in the article.
(Photo by at http://www.flickr.com/photos/dcjohn/74907741/; license details there.)
