By Dr. Ava Zwolinski and Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm:
Americans have long viewed large organizations, both governmental and corporate, with considerable skepticism. In civil litigation, jurors will often perceive corporate defendants through an interpretive lens colored by preconceived biases against corporations (e.g., they’re guided solely by profit, and they harm individuals for their own gain) as well as by conspiratorial beliefs about the leaders within these corporations. We live in a unique informational landscape in which society is more connected than ever, and disparaging narratives are quickly, easily, and durably disseminated through social media and alternative news sources. Society’s growing institutional distrust also includes a shift toward a “safetyist” perspective, in which individuals adopt exaggerated sensitivity toward threats to their safety and essential needs. This perspective has become increasingly prominent in the wake of large-scale, catastrophic events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, and financial insecurity. Cognitive dispositions, such as conspiratorial thinking and anti-corporate bias, broadly amplify sentiments against corporations in civil litigation.
Taken together, these converging attitudinal trends pose a unique and current challenge to the civil corporate defendant. Jurors filing into courthouses to evaluate the behavior of large companies in environmental, employment, personal injury, products, intellectual property and many other types of cases will inevitably bring their own beliefs, experiences, and attitudes relating to a corporation’s honesty and safety, as well as their own views on whether that corporation might be part of a larger conspiracy. In this article, we will explore the risks to the corporate defendant coming from the conspiracist mindset, the anti-corporate mindset, and most importantly, the intersection of the two. We also share some recommendations on what defense litigators can do in response.
Conspiratorial Thinking in the Jury Box
In the United States, growing economic concerns underscore the perceived distance between Americans and large corporations, including the mega-wealthy individuals in those corporations’ C-suite offices. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that 72% of Americans rated the country’s economic conditions as fair to poor (2026). Social scientific research indicates that in times of such “existential threat,” where individuals may fear that the resources they rely on to survive are scarce or uncertain, conspiratorial thinking tends to increase (van Prooijen, 2020). Given these dynamics, jurors selected for commercial or corporate trials may enter the courtroom with a conspiratorial mindset and a baseline skepticism of corporate actors.
Conspiratorial thinking is the tendency to believe that many events in the world are caused by conspiracies, and conspiracy theories are beliefs that multiple bad actors are secretly working toward ulterior goals that threaten society. Individuals who subscribe to such mindsets tend to exhibit heightened threat sensitivity toward powerful entities, including large corporations. Rather than identifying error as a causal explanation for legal disputes, these individuals prefer intentional explanations that cast the parties involved as diametrically opposed: good versus evil. This matters in civil cases, where corporate litigation often involves complex decision-making, internal communication, and institutions with multiple layers of insurers, in-house legal teams, and PR experts working to maintain the corporation’s public reputation. These features naturally lend themselves to conspiratorial interpretations, especially among individuals prone to interpret the world in conspiratorial ways.
In a 2009 paper, Harvard law professors Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule described how “informational cascades” can fuel conspiratorial thinking. They illustrate a scenario in which a group of individuals is attempting to determine responsibility for the tragic loss of life. If the first speaker asserts that a coordinated conspiracy caused the event, and the next speaker, either uncertain or indifferent, adopts that view, a dynamic begins to emerge. As more individuals observe apparent agreement among the speakers, they may then abandon their own independent assessments and align with the emerging consensus, assuming that earlier speakers must have had evidentiary support for their conclusions.
This simplified example captures what Sunstein and Vermeule described as a “conspiracy cascade,” a process that can be amplified when the underlying issue carries strong emotional weight. The same dynamic can unfold in jury deliberations. Imagine a personal injury case pitting an individual plaintiff against a large corporation: a juror who interprets the evidence as demonstrating the corporation’s intentional disregard for safety, or a coordinated effort to conceal wrongdoing through lawyers or corporate witnesses, may voice that interpretation early in deliberations. If others are uncertain or already predisposed to distrust corporate actors, they are likely to adopt that framing as well. As agreement builds, the perception of intentional misconduct will harden, making alternative explanations less likely to gain traction and increasing the risk of a verdict that reflects moral condemnation more than factual analysis.
Anti-Corporate Bias
While conspiratorial thinking shapes how jurors interpret evidence, anti-corporate bias shapes how jurors feel about the corporate defendant before any evidence is presented. Anti-corporate bias is a predisposition to view corporations as profit-driven at the expense of individuals, to reflexively attribute harm or moral indifference – rather than error – to issues in litigation involving corporate defendants, and to believe that large companies receive little government oversight, prioritizing financial gain over safety or fairness. Cutting across ideology alone, anti-corporate bias reflects sentiments that can arise from a complex interplay of socioeconomic status, socio-partisan views, educational background, location, and other factors.
Since 2008, our firm has administered a standardized anti-corporate bias measure to jury-eligible adults nationwide. On a 4-point scale, we ask jurors to report their perspectives on seven key issues related to nuanced aspects of corporate behavior, such as government oversight, prioritizing profit over people, and environmental harm caused by corporations. Over the last 18 years, cumulative scores on this 7-item scale have remained remarkably consistent, averaging from 2.9 to 3.1 points in every annual measure. This pattern suggests that anti-corporate sentiment does not fluctuate dramatically across administrations or economic cycles, but instead reflects a stable feature of the modern juror pool. The scores observed over the years indicate moderate baseline anti-corporate bias, which can be particularly salient in litigation contexts. When these perspectives intersect with conspiratorial thinking, a corporate defendant’s risk in litigation can intensify.
Convergence of Conspiratorial Thinking and Anti-Corporate Bias as a Risk Multiplier
Alone, conspiratorial thinking can induce heightened skepticism when interpreting evidence or evaluating witnesses. Anti-corporate bias, by contrast, creates a baseline predisposition to distrust corporate litigants in civil cases. Together, these two mindsets create an environment in which perceived errors are more likely to be interpreted as intentional misconduct, routine institutional processes are reframed as concealment, and skepticism becomes the default interpretive stance. These implications are broad and wide-reaching and can be an especially dangerous combination in the jury deliberation room.
In liability cases, the anti-corporate conspiracist would tend to characterize a corporate defendant as acting with conscious disregard for the safety or welfare of others. Similarly, they would easily perceive any contract disputes as bad faith or dishonesty. In determining appropriate damages, jurors with the conspiratorial and anti-corporate combination will apply the mental shortcut of seeing large corporations as being able to afford very high damages, and are more likely to act with a motivation to morally punish (with or without the existence of a punitive damages claim), and to not just make the plaintiff whole. During deliberations, informational cascades amplify preexisting biases, particularly when jurors who hold such mindsets are passionate or confident in their views. In cases involving a high degree of emotional salience, this cascading consensus is only accelerated.
The Defense Response: Discover and Adopt
In the space of a single jury selection or trial, you are unlikely to be able to “cure” or to “rehabilitate” jurors away from a strong bias. The solution is to target the worst for cause or peremptory challenges, and to find ways of developing a common-ground persuasive strategy with the rest.
Voir Dire on Anti-Corporate and Conspiracy Mindsets
Anti-corporate bias often is seen as common and socially acceptable, and jurors likely won’t shy away from voicing such opinions in voir dire. Conspiratorial thinking and anti-corporate bias are often not politically predictable, and for that reason it is better to ask than to make assumptions based on a potential juror being either liberal or conservative. Because predictors of cognitive biases can be nuanced, it matters how you ask. To the extent that voir dire conditions allow, it helps to ask using questioning styles that have been tested with large populations, such as the Anti-Corporate Bias Scale (see Hunter, 2018) or the Conspiracy Mentality Questionnaire (Bruder et al., 2013).
Address Residual Anti-Corporate and Conspiracist Attitudes
As common as anti-corporate and conspiracist views have become, it is likely that, even with the most robust voir dire, litigators will still find themselves addressing at least some adherents to these mindsets in the jury box. For that reason, some parts of the corporate defense message needs to speak to these ways of viewing the world. While the specific themes will naturally depend on the case and the venue, one way to address the anti-corporate and conspiracist biases that remain on your jury even after effective voir dire is to leverage profit motive in the right direction. Jurors won’t believe that the corporation and its leaders simply and altruistically want what is best for society. So, it may help to acknowledge that, while they’re doing it for the money, that motive tends to lead them toward better practices (safer products, better employment practices, more transparent contracts, etc.). The message, in effect, is that if there’s a plot, it is a plot to do the right thing because that is what helps the bottom line.
Anti-corporate bias is a stable, measurable, and persistent phenomenon. Conspiratorial thinking, particularly in emotionally charged cases, can transform baseline skepticism into moral condemnation through deliberative dynamics such as informational cascades. For litigators, recognizing and adapting to these patterns is essential to managing risk in commercial trials.
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Other Posts on Anti-Corporate Biases:
- Expect More Extreme Anti-Corporate Attitudes
- Treat Anti-Corporatism as a Bipartisan Bias
- Bank on Bias Against Financial Institutions
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Bruder, M., Haffke, P., Neave, N., Nouripanah, N. & Imhoff, R. (2013). Measuring individual differences in generic beliefs in conspiracy theories across cultures: conspiracy mentality questionnaire. Frontiers in Psychology, 4. 225.
Van Prooijen, J.-W. (2020). An existential threat model of conspiracy theories. European Psychologist, 25, 16-25. https://doi.org/10.1027/1016-9040/a000381
Pew Research Center (2026). A year into Trump’s second term, Americans’ view of the economy remains negative. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/02/04/a-year-into-trumps-second-term-americans-views-of-the-economy-remain-negative/
Sunstein, C. R. & Vermeule, A. (2009). Symposium on conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories: Causes and cures. The Journal of Political Philosophy, 17(2), 202-227. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9760.2008.00325.x