My favorite psychology research is the stuff that sounds like it might be an April Fool's joke, but it isn't. Studies on the phenomenon called "priming" almost always fit the bill.
Here's a great one, about corporate brand logos. We see them all the time, and companies spend millions trying to get us to associate them with the specific qualities they want to represent in our minds. How successful are they? Very, according to researchers Gavan Fitzsimons and Tanya Chartrand of Duke and Gráinne Fitzsimons of the University of Waterloo. When we're exposed to a famous logo for even a microsecond, they conclude, we act out the qualities we've learned to associate with that picture.
All of a sudden I'm hungry
Remember learning when you were a kid how the movie theater could slip a split-second frame of steaming, buttery popcorn into the movie, and suddenly everybody would line up for popcorn without knowing why? These researchers used the same trick. The subjects watched a screen explaining what they were supposed to do -- but also on the screen, too fast for them to notice, corporate logos flashed momentarily. When subjects turned to the assigned task, which logo they'd seen made a difference:
- Subjects who saw the Apple logo, symbol of creativity, thought of more possible unusual uses for a brick than did subjects who saw the IBM logo, symbol of corporate sameness.
- Subjects who saw the Disney logo, which we associate with earnestly pure things like Mickey Mouse and Snow White, confessed to more bad behavior (like calling in sick) than did subjects who saw the E! network logo, which we associate with celebrity gossip, honest or not.
What it means in real trials
Can lawyers use this? I say yes, but maybe not in the way you think.
There are trial lawyers out there who can use priming to underscore ideas and themes in trial, while still keeping track of where their cross-examination outlines are and whether the client understands what's going on and who's doing the jury instruction argument and whether they brought enough matching socks. I don't think those lawyers read this blog, though. They don't need to.
For the rest, here's a message from priming research we can all use. Jurors make decisions without knowing why. So don't expect so much from your direct questions to them. When you ask in voir dire how they'll approach one issue or another, they'll tell you, so far as they know -- but that's not very far. If you get to interview them after the trial and ask how they reached their verdict, the same is true. Ask the questions anyway, of course. But work to develop an intuition that goes beyond the answers.
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Source notes:
- The paper is "Automatic Effects of Brand Exposure on Motivated Behavior:
How Apple Makes You 'Think Different'". The press release says it's to be in the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, but it's not in the table of contents. Luckily, Duke University generously puts its faculty papers on line at their site, so you can read the whole paper here. - I've written previously about priming here.
(Image by Julian Povey at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpovey/2051196149/; license details there.)
