Professor Cheryl Boudreau of the University of California, Davis Department of Political Science, and Professor Mathew D. McCubbins of the University of California, San Diego Department of Political Science, have published Competition in the Courtroom: When Does Expert Testimony Improve Jurors’ Decisions?, 6 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 793 (2009). Here is the abstract:
“Many scholars lament the increasing complexity of jury trials and question whether the testimony of competing experts helps unsophisticated jurors to make informed decisions. In this article, we analyze experimentally the effects that the testimony of competing experts has on (1) sophisticated versus unsophisticated subjects’ decisions and (2) subjects’ decisions on difficult versus easy problems. Our results demonstrate that competing expert testimony, by itself, does not help unsophisticated subjects to behave as though they are sophisticated, nor does it help subjects make comparable decisions on difficult and easy problems. When we impose additional institutions (such as penalties for lying or a threat of verification) on the competing experts, we observe such dramatic improvements in unsophisticated subjects’ decisions that the gap between their decisions and those of sophisticated subjects closes. We find similar results when the competing experts exchange reasons for why their statements may be correct. However, additional institutions and the experts’ exchange of reasons are less effective at closing the gap between subjects’ decisions on difficult versus easy problems.”
Tags: Cheryl Boudreau, Competing expert witnesses, Empirical methods in legal communication studies, Expert testimony, Expert witnesses, Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, Jurors' legal decisionmaking, Legal communication, Legal decisionmaking, Legal evidence information systems, Mathew D. McCubbins, Multiple expert witnesses
