Notes
Slide Show
Outline
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Advice on Trial Strategy
  • What do we know?
    • Statistical Verdict Studies
    • Surveys
    • Mock Jury Experiments
  • What can we extrapolate from what we know?
    • Related Studies
    • Experience with Similar Cases
  • What do we need to study?
    • Run our own survey, focus group or mock trial
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Information Aggregation
  • Meter Readers (Lopes, 1986, Hogarth and Einhorn, 1992)
    • Algebraic
    • Balancing
    • Anchoring and Adjustment
  • Story Tellers (Pennington and Hastie, 1991)
    • Narrative Construction
    • Seek Coherence
    • More prevalent
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Hindsight Bias
  • Jurors tend to treat low a probability event that actually occurs as much more likely than it is.
    • Jurors will believe it to have been more easily anticipated and will assign greater urgency to guarding against it.
    • Jurors often conclude that parties to a contract should have anticipated every contingency.
    • Jurors tend to blame “the big guy, with all his fancy, high-priced lawyers.”
  • A second order effect is that the more bizarre the circumstances, the more jurors tend to believe that it must have been “somebody’s fault.”
  • One strategy for overcoming hindsight bias is to argue by analogy to something familiar to jurors.
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Issue Salience and Persuasion
(Petty et al., 1981)
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Factors Affecting Jury Performance
  • Give Instructions First.
    • Improves Jury Recollection of Relevant Information (Elwork, Sales, and Alfini, 1977)
  • Defanging
    • Offering bad news yourself allows jurors to provide counter-arguments.
    • Example: The “Hired Gun” effect.
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Damage Calculations
  • A variety of strategies are employed (Goodman, Greene, and Loftus, 1989)
  • “Ad damnum” is often used as anchor for award. (Zuehl, 1982)
  • A “counter-anchor” can affect the jury’s calculations. (Raitz, et al., 1990)
  • Itemized verdict forms can reduce excessive damage awards. (Zuehl, 1982)
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Zuehl’s Ad damnum Study (1982)
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Punitive Damages in Business Cases
  • Punitive Damages are most common in business cases (contract, fraud, employment) according to Eisenberg, et al.
  • The request for punitive damages tends to increase the size of the compensatory award, even if no punitive damages are awarded.
  • When conduct is egregious and punitive damages are capped or unavailable, juries react by increasing compensatory awards
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Do Juries Help Out Local Litigants?
Punitive Awards
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Auditory and Visual Cues of Deception
Zuckerman, DePaulo and Rosenthal 1981
  • Do jurors infer truthfulness of testimony from verbal and visual cues?
  • Subjects saw/heard taped testimony which varied along three dimensions:
    • Audible Speech.
    • Visible Body.
    • Visible Face.
  • Some subjects only read a transcript of testimony.


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Auditory and Visual Cues of Deception: Results
Zuckerman, DePaulo and Rosenthal 1981