By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: File this in the category of, “I didn’t realize just how uninformed some people are,” a new survey makes the claim that seven percent of American adults believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. The data comes courtesy of the Innovation Center for U.S. Dairy drawn from an online survey conducted in April […]
Brown Cows and Chocolate Milk: Account for Rational Ignorance Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: We live in an age of wonders, and those wonders are making it into the courtroom. Attorneys can now display, slice, and dice their documents on the fly using sophisticated presentation software, or even their own iPad. They can show demonstrative exhibits created with the kind of cutting edge design
Go Ahead and Use a Flip Chart Read More »
By Dr. Broda Bahm: When I give the orientation at the beginning of a mock trial, I’ll typically say something like, “Because this is a shortened version of a trial, you aren’t going to be able to hear everything. We will boil it down, summarize, and avoid some of the details, and we do that
Excluded Evidence: If Jurors Can’t Know “What,” Help Them Understand “Why Not” Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Have you heard of a company called Cambridge Analytica? Well, chances are, they’ve not only heard about you, they know quite a bit about you. Until recent months, the company had been a little-known data analysis outfit based in London. But based on a number of reports, including a very informative recent
Understand How the Presidential Campaign Rewrote the Book on Persuasion Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: Damned if it isn’t true: People who swear are more honest, and perceived as more persuasive. According to a recent Psyblog post, that is indeed what the research shows. The most recent study on the subject (Feldman et al., 2017) looked at both self-reports as well as an analysis of Facebook communications
Drop Your Filters…in a Few Safe Ways Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: As the juror sits in the jury box hearing the case, she is not just rationally deciding who has the better position. She is also applying and maintaining her own self-concept. The implicit question she is asking herself is, “Am I the kind of person who would approve or condemn this?”
Expect Jurors to See Themselves as More Moral than Average Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: An attorney at our firm, tapped to give a CLE talk, asked me recently if I had anything on the “science of persuasion.” Pretty broad. I wondered where to begin, but it did get me thinking. At the most general, 30,000-foot level, what is the science of persuasion? Does the
See Persuasion as a Process (Toward a Unified Theory of Legal Persuasion) Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: The issue of “fake news” has been in the news — the actual news — a lot lately. The ease and speed of sharing via social networks has made it common for fake stories to be accepted, trusted, and passed around. One story, for example, tells of Trump protestors being
Link the New to the Known Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: It is a situation where the common sense advice is in conflict and the platitudes can go both ways: Don’t keep your light under a bushel, but pride goeth before the fall. Practically speaking, do you boast about your abilities, or to you keep it humble? For a witness in court,
Brag Your Competence, But Not Your Character Read More »
By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm: You may have seen the video called “Order in the Classroom.” The piece, the work of the National Jury Trial Innovations Project, offers a quick and humorous take on what a college course would look like if it were run with all of the constraints of a trial. In the video, the
Let the Jurors Take and Review Notes Read More »