Episode #283 – Comparing the Outdated Food Pyramid to Jury Research

Bill Kanasky, Jr., Ph.D. talks about what attorneys and defendants get wrong about jury research. Defense teams that follow the traditional jury research model and only conduct mock trials ignore the scientific method. If you want results you can have confidence in, you have to follow the proven scientific method. Bill describes the two biggest issues with mock trials:

– conducting a mock trial as the first, and often only, research project invites a significant amount of error into your results, risking false positives and false negatives

– mock trials are built on argument and persuasion and when presentations are not balanced and when the presenters for both sides are not equal in their communication skills, their persuasion skills, and their appeal to jurors, significant bias can skew the results

The solution is to follow the scientific method and conduct focus groups before the mock trial. Focus groups allow the defense team to find hidden vulnerabilities and juror comprehension issues and avoid false positives and false negatives well before conducting the confirmatory research step that is the mock trial. The focus group is the necessary screening tool for litigation.