The Stickiness in Solidarity

We’ve all been there when deciding to go to a group dinner: one person wants burgers, one person wants tacos and someone else is on a diet.  Choosing a restaurant that all 10 friends can agree on seems like an impossible task. 

Yet, juries made up of strangers from different backgrounds are asked every day to come to a consensus when reaching a verdict.  Getting 12 people to agree on anything seems like a daunting task, let alone a complicated legal case with thousands of pages of documents.  

Although it’s not necessary in many civil trials to reach a unanimous verdict, examining how groups of people form a consensus gives us an insight to how jury deliberations work and how we should frame our cases.  So how exactly does a diverse group of people come to a unanimous decision?

California Institute of Technology research recently combined neurology and social science to examine the biology behind forming a consensus.  They hooked up one individual to an fMRI machine to examine his brain while he worked remotely with five other people (who were off site in a separate room) to make a group decision during various trials.  Researchers found participants’ choices were determined by their own preferences, the group members’ previous choices and the “stickiness” of group members’ choices.  “Stickiness” refers to the willingness of a group member to “stick” to his or her decision.  These aspects of the decision-making process were each highlighted in a different part of the brain and combined in another part of the brain, illustrating it is a combination of all three that leads to consensus decision-making.

This Caltech study shows there is a biological basis in forming a consensus.  Although jurors’ personal choice comes into play, a large portion of their decision is driven by the group’s mentality and the ability of others in the group to conform to the majority.  Therefore, if you have a juror who is dead set on a particular verdict, that juror can actually sway others to change their minds. 

That’s why understanding what jurors think of your case before it goes to trial matters so much.  It’s important to examine not only how jurors react to particular arguments, but also what kinds of jurors to look out for during voir dire. 

To assess potential jurors' “stickiness,” we suggest asking questions during voir dire that elicit a scaled response to gauge the strength of a person’s opinion.  For instance, on our questionnaires we ask participants, “Generally speaking, corporations deserve to be punished more harshly than individuals” with “completely agree,” “somewhat agree,” “I don’t know,” “somewhat disagree” and “completely disagree” as their responses.  Jurors who answer using “completely” are more adamant in their beliefs and are less likely to be swayed.  Those who answer in the middle of the scales are more open to changing their opinion.

If you want to discuss how our focus groups can identify the issues that will build consensus in your trial jury, please contact Senior Vice President Claire Luna at 714.754.1010 or cluna@juryimpact.net