The witness preparation protocol must incorporate the opportunity for interactions that will allow the witness’s brain to learn how to be an effective witness, how to handle the stress of testifying, and how to tell a story on the witness stand.  Our advantage is the human brain is a remarkable organ that adapts quickly.  We use that remarkable adaptation function by creating a protocol that quickly brings to bear the important interactions needed to create the best, most authentic, witness testimony possible.

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.