Do Expert Witnesses Help Unsophisticated Jurors? Not So Much
Not so much, that is, unless the experts are at risk of being either penalized or outed for saying something scientifically indefensible. Those are some of the findings from "Competition in the Courtroom: When Does Expert Testimony Improve Jurors' Decisions?" just published in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies.
Essentially what the authors did was to pick a decision that could objectively be determined as correct or incorrect; and in this case it was a mathematical problem. Then they used SAT scores on math as a proxy for deciding who was and who wasn't sophisticated. Then they exposed the test subjects to competing experts who opined as to the real answer to the math problem. They even mixed things up by having some subjects pose as the experts; leaving some to their own rhetorical devices while others were threatened either with "verification" or a monetary fine.
Among the conclusions: "... our experimental results demonstrate that competition between experts, by itself, does not help unsophisticated subjects to make decisions that are comparable to those of sophisticated subjects..." "Indeed, we find that unsophisticated subjects who are exposed to competing experts make significantly worse decisions than do sophisticated subjects." However, "once competition between experts is coupled with [penalties or threat of exposure] unsophisticated subjects achieve such large improvements in their decisions that the gap between their decisions and those of sophisticated subjects closes."
My takeaway is: add an impartial consulting expert to the gatekeeper's arsenal of expert control measures and jury decision-making is likely to improve dramatically.
