How quickly do we decide on who to vote for?
Some interesting research has begun to give us some very troubling answers on how we make decisions between competing parties. It seems that people, as young as 5 years old, can pick the winners in political contests simply by comparing pictures of their faces. These pictures are creating competency profiles and warmth versus cold profiles in our brain that allow us to choose who we want to govern us within a few seconds of looking at the pictures. Our brains have demonstrated that it uses heuristics (shortcuts) for a variety of decision making operations, but the emerging research points out that not only is the decision making structure largely emotion based, but it is also visually based. Note, that the actual rational policy differences of the politicians are no where to be found in this decision making model!
This is troubling because actual competency or even honesty have little correlation to these visual clues. So in a lot of ways we remain mired in high school decision making mode, voting for the “good looking” people for homecoming queen and king!
What this means to your case is that no matter how the fact pattern is laid out to your advantage, if your chief witness comes up short in comparison with the opposition witness, then you are likely to have a poorer result. And it is possible that your witness will come up short for no other reason than what they look like!
