Understanding the Role of Linguistic Complexity in Famous Trial Outcomes

Abstract

Famous trials not only generate immense popularity and intrigue, they also have the power to change history. Surprisingly, little research examines the use of complex language during these culturally-significant trial outcomes. In the present study, we helped fill in this gap by evaluating the relationship between attorneys’ use of integratively complex language and trial outcomes. Using the well-validated Automated Integrative Complexity scoring system, we analyzed the complexity of language in the opening and closing statements of famous trials. We found that higher levels of integrative complexity led to a significant increase in winning outcomes, but only for the prosecution. Further, this effect was driven by elaborative forms of complexity and not dialectical forms of complexity. Taken together, these results fill a large gap in our understanding of how language might influence the outcomes of culturally-significant legal proceedings.

The curious case of left‐wing authoritarianism: When authoritarian persons meet anti‐authoritarian norms

“…Stated differently, we would expect LWA persons to exhibit less of a defensive-oriented complexity pattern. This is exactly what our preliminary data suggest: Using the ratio of elaborative-to-dialectical complexity as a marker of a defensive cognitive posture (see Conway et al, 2011a;Houck et al, 2017;Zubrod et al, 2020), RWA was positively associated with defensive thinking (r = .13, p < .001), whereas LWA was negatively associated with defensive thinking (although the effect size was very close to zero, r = -.04, p = .038).…”

“…Consistent with this possibility, LWA in one study was significantly, but only moderately (r = .31), correlated with attitude extremity/strength on an environment-based item (Conway et al, 2018a). Conway, 2011;Conway et al, 2011) using the standardized and validated Automated Integrative Complexity system (for validation and evidence pertinent to the system, see Conway, Conway, & Houck, 2020;Houck et al, 2017;Houck et al, 2018;McCullough & Conway, 2018a, 2018bZubrod et al, 2020).…”

“…We used available data to provide a more direct test of Hypothesis 3. In the context of the larger study discussed for Hypothesis 2, participants were asked to write their open‐ended opinion on the following group cooperation‐based topic: “It is a good thing for Democrats and Republicans to work together to solve our nation's problems.” These open‐ended responses ( n = 4,767) were scored for integrative complexity (Suedfeld, 2000; Suedfeld et al., 1994; Suedfeld & Wallbaum, 1992) and its two subcomponents (dialectical and elaborative complexity, Conway & Conway, 2011; Conway et al., 2008, 2011) using the standardized and validated Automated Integrative Complexity system (for validation and evidence pertinent to the system, see Conway, Conway, et al., 2014; Conway, Conway, et al., 2020; Houck et al., 2014, 2017, 2018; McCullough & Conway, 2018a; 2018b; Zubrod et al., 2021).…”

Are American Presidents Becoming Less Rhetorically Complex? Evaluating the Integrative Complexity of Joe Biden and Donald Trump in Historical Context

“…Designed in its current instantiation by Peter Suedfeld's lab (e.g., Suedfeld et al, 1977), integrative complexity is the measurement of the degree that spoken or written materials have differentiation (the recognition of different distinct dimensions) and integration (the subsequent recognition of interrelations among differentiated dimensions). In addition to helping researchers understand issues such as terrorism Houck et al, 2017), strategic communication (Conway et al, 2008;Repke et al, 2018;Zubrod et al, 2021), and popular culture (e.g., McCullough, 2019), integrative complexity has proven vitally important in understanding political leadership. For example, political leaders' integrative complexity is tied to success in gaining and keeping power (Conway et al, 2012;Suedfeld & Rank, 1976;Tetlock, 1981), subsequent declarations of war (Suedfeld, Tetlock, & Ramirez, 1977;Suedfeld & Jhangiani, 2009;Tetlock, 1985; see Conway et al, 2001;Conway et al, 2018, for reviews), charisma (Wasike, 2017), and political ideology Houck & Conway, 2019;Suedfeld, 2010;Tetlock, 1983).…”

“…Additional studies have compared expert human scorers to AutoIC and shown continued positive results -indeed, in each case, the human-AutoIC correlation was greater than in the original Conway et al (2014) paper (Conway et al, 2020;Houck et al, 2018;McCullough & Conway, 2018a;Prinsloo, 2016). Further, AutoIC has been used in multiple studies across a wide variety of domains to produce theoretically-interpretable findings, including in the domains of organizational science (Mell et al, 2021), forecasting (Karvetskia et al, in press), terrorism (Houck et al, 2017;Putra et al, 2018), fictional versus real dialogue (McCullough & Conway, 2018a), decision-making (Prinsloo, 2016), the film industry (McCullough & Conway, 2018b), video game dialogue (McCullough, 2019), fan fiction (McCullough, 2019), religion (Houck et al, 2018), social media (McCullough & Conway, 2019), and trial outcomes (Zubrod et al, 2021). Also, a recent set of studies revealed that AutoIC showed similar across-domain and across-time correlations as human-scored IC (Conway & Woodard, 2019).…”