Jurors Weigh Experience Over Observation
Research published by Dan Ariely, et al. of Predictably Irrational fame, provides another strike to the theory of rational decision making. When making decisions we suffer from two distinct biases. The first is that we give more weight to our own experience than to observation. This suggests a heavy emotional component to decision making.
The second is recency bias. Things we experience and observe in our immediate past have more currency than those that happened in the distant past. This is why we are so bad at understanding risk. When the stock market is going up, we can’t imagine it will go down and when it is going down we can’t imagine it going up.
When your witness is on the stand testifying, jurors will judge their credibility first by looking at their own immediate experiences. This will evoke either a positive or negative emotional reaction that will override the actual words of the testimony or put differently they will judge the witnesses words based on an emotional reaction from their own immediate experience.
That is why it is so critical that your witness connect emotionally with jurors. Even if the jurors has no direct experience that is similar to the witness, they will find a recent experience that in their mind correlates and use the emotional valence from that to make judgments of credibility and likeability.
