Reaction of mock jurors to testimony of a court appointed expert.
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.
Cooper
J
J
Department of Psychology, Princenton University, NJ 08544, USA. jcoops@princeton.edu
Hall
J
J
D003416:Criminal Law; D003657:Decision Making; D005104:Expert Testimony; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D010565:Persuasive Communication; D011897:Random Allocation; D000078329:Workforce