Citation

Cooper J, Hall J. Behav. Sci. Law 2000; 18(6): 719-729.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology, Princenton University, NJ 08544, USA. jcoops@princeton.edu

Copyright

(Copyright © 2000, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/bsl.414

PMID

11180418

Abstract

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.

Language: en