Reaction of mock jurors to testimony of a court appointed expert

Abstract

A study was conducted to assess the impact of court appointed experts on the judgments of mock jurors. A civil proceeding was adopted for the experiment. Mock jurors heard testimony about a plaintiff's injury in an automobile accident. In some conditions, medical testimony for the plaintiff and defendant was provided by experts hired by each side. In other conditions, a medical expert appointed by the court testified in addition to the two adversarial experts. In one of these conditions, the court expert sided with the plaintiff; in another, the expert sided with the defendant. The plaintiff in the case was always an individual. The defendant was sometimes a corporation and sometimes an individual. The results showed that mock jurors sided with the court appointed expert in every condition except when the expert favored a corporate defendant. The results were discussed in terms of heuristic processing of persuasive information.

The Impact of Clinical Diagnosis and Plaintiff's Award Request on Mock Juror Damage Awards and Injury Perceptions

“…The current study is one of the first to directly compare these effect sizes. Of course, the literature suggests that there are a number of variables that could either bolster or diminish the impact of both the expert testimony (e.g., Cooper & Hall, 2000;Kovera et al, 1997) and the requested award amount (e.g., Diamond et al, 2011). For example, in the current study, the defendant's attorney did not counter with an alternative (lower) award amount, nor was a cap on the settlement proposed, with either of these factors likely impacting the effect for award request (see especially the Saks et al, 1997, findings regarding pain and suffering awards for low to moderate severity injuries).…”

“…Indeed, in a review of the literature, the effect of expert testimony on juror decisions was found to be modest, but consistent (see Kwartner, 2007, as cited in Willis-Esqueda & Bornstein, 2016, especially when opposing council does not counter with an expert who offers an alternative opinion (see Levett & Kovera, 2008. Although the bulk of the literature examining the impact of expert testimony focuses on criminal cases, it appears that juror decisions in civil cases are even more strongly influenced by expert opinions (e.g., Cooper & Hall, 2000;Raitz, Greene, Goodman, & Loftus, 1990).…”

Evidentiary instructions improve mock juror assessment of feature-comparison evidence

“…Research has demonstrated that, when confronted with complex scientific testimony, jurors considered scientists with a PhD from a prestigious university more persuasive (Cooper and Hall, 2000). Jurors may, moreover, believe that expertise is linked to excellent performance or skill in a particular task rather than to a broad range of professional competencies (Martire and Edmond, 2017).…”

Can experts help jurors to evaluate eyewitness evidence? A review of eyewitness expert effects

“…Thus, the role of the expert is conceptualized by these groups as a means of assisting jurors to reach just decisions by correctly differentiating between accurate and inaccurate eyewitness identifications; that is, to ‘improve[s] the match between verdicts rendered and the actual guilt or innocence of the defendant’ (Wells, 1986, p. 90). McCloskey and Egeth (1983) termed this the ‘discrimination rationale’ for the inclusion of eyewitness expert evidence, and it is a position adopted widely in the psychological literature (Ainsworth, 1998; Cooper & Hall, 2000; Cutler, Penrod, & Dexter, 1990; Devenport, Stinson, Cutler, & Kravitz, 2002; Doyle, 1998; Konecni & Ebbesen, 1986; Lempert, 1986; Pezdek, 2007; Yarmey, 2001):…”