Interesting study was just released in the International Journal of Obesity entitled The Influence of a Defendant’s Body Weight on Perceptions of Guilt. OBJECTIVE: To investigate the influence of a defendant’s weight on simulated jurors’ perceptions of guilt. DESIGN AND METHODS: Participants were 471 lean and overweight adults (mean body mass index: 25.34±5.91) who read a vignette describing a [...]
I recently got around to reading a whopper of an old law review article that I had been wanting to read for awhile entitled, “Inside the Judicial Mind.” From the introduction: …we conducted an empirical study to determine whether five common cognitive illusions would influence decision making of a sample of 167 federal magistrate [...]
All the lights were out. I was laying in bed, next to the rhythmic breathing of my wife’s sleep. The only thing illuminating the dark room was the faint glow of the iPad’s screen. I turned pages through the book I was reading; skimming my finger briefly across the screen. Mid-turn I stopped, examining [...]
Remember that party from college? That crazy time where we went and picked up the security guard from our apartment complex on the Strip at 2 am? And instead of picking him up, we ended up going out with him and walking down the Strip barefoot. Then the sorority! And what about when the [...]
Earlier this year, the Web Ecology Project (WEP, an interdisciplinary research group focusing on using large scale data mining to analyze the system-wide flows of culture and community online) ran an interesting experiment on Twitter. The picked a specific networked group of 500 people who all had similar interests in a topic. Here is a [...]
I previously wrote about the gamification of social media services in a piece entitled: You’re Being Played By Twitter. The article touched on the use of engagement statistics and feedback loops in order to draw users deeper into the services provided. Essentially, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc all manipulate the egos of users in order to [...]
When approaching a complex situation that requires a creative solution, some leading research points to a novel approach to problem solving. Don’t solve the problem based on how you would solve it, but instead pretend to be someone else and solve it from their perspective. Via BPS Digest: According to Evan Polman and Kyle Emich, we’re more [...]
How many advertising messages are you exposed to a day? Take a moment to think about. Billboards, TV ads, radio ads, web ads, branding on any packaged goods, clothing, objects all over your home (that iPhone sitting next to you), iconography, texts ads…it goes on and on. The estimates vary from 247 commercial messages a [...]
As I noted on Monday’s post on Judge Posner’s research, judges believe that juries favor the more confident lawyer. Here is some more research backing that up, from The Jury Room: Researchers (at Harvard Business School, no less) find that if you “act more like a peacock” you will not only look more powerful, you [...]
As seen by Judge Rosenthal’s comments in the previous post below, effective communication is incredibly important for a lawyer. One aspect of effective communication is the rather ethereal ability to “connect” with a listener or reader. Often times when listening to an effective speak it can seem as though a listener is “in sync” with the speaker [...]
Keith writes and speaks on Professional Development, Law, Technology, and Net Culture. Alabama lawyer. Interests: running, food, martial arts, Classics.
