Originally published by Douglas Keene.
A nation-wide (Taiwanese since the researcher is located in Taiwan) telephone survey was conducted to check the accuracy of the hypotheses that if reports of new research findings leave you uncertain and confused, you will discount the credibility of the source and have a more negative attitude toward research. Participants in the national telephone survey were only told the headlines of the report and not the contents of the actual stories themselves.
What they found was that the more novel or unfamiliar the research report, the less credible it was seen as being and the less likely participants were to say they would comply with the findings.
When contradictory headlines were presented [think of these as akin to dueling expert witnesses disagreeing with each other], they were rated as less credible and participants were less likely to say they would comply with the research findings.
Then the researcher wanted to see what would happen if participants actually read the entire story rather than headlines alone. They conducted two separate experiments using university students as participants—one experiment exposed the participants to novel versus familiar findings and the other exposed them to contradictory [e.g., dueling experts who disagree with each other] versus one-sided stories [e.g., only one expert testifies so participants do not know the other side of the story].
The researcher found that when participants were exposed to novel/unfamiliar research stories, they saw the information as less credible and were less likely to report plans to adopt the recommendations from the study.
When they were exposed to contradictory news, participants were less likely to have a favorable attitude toward health research than when they were exposed to one-sided news. Additionally, contradictory news was seen as less credible than the one-sided news.
The more unfamiliar and contradictory science presentations left participants defensive and uncertain and their attitudes toward health research became more negative than the attitudes of those who only saw familiar or one-sided research findings.
The researcher recommends that press releases describing research findings that are novel present their findings in context with the cumulative body of prior research and offer possible explanations for discrepancies with previous findings.
From a litigation advocacy perspective, this reminds us an awful lot of what we do when we expect dueling expert witnesses on the stand. Jurors don’t like experts that contradict each other and they tend to toss both experts testimony out and rely on their intuition or idiosyncratic reactions to the experts (e.g., “He looked sort of like Newt Gingrich. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing” or “His mustache reminds me of my favorite high school teacher”). We often work with our expert witnesses to not only present information in a way jurors can understand, but to also explain the contradictions in the research and why our experts’ perspective is more accurate. If the research is unfamiliar or is likely to run counter to their previously held positions, it often works best to embrace the novelty—call it ‘groundbreaking’ or ‘a major step forward in scientific understanding’, etc.—rather than minimizing the difference. Jurors appreciate an expert who is credible, personable, and who wants to help them in the difficult task of understanding complex new information.
This research would say that experts who contradict each other leave jurors feeling uncertain and confused—which is what we see over and over again in our pretrial research. Rather than taking the chance they will simply base their decisions on idiosyncratic associations to the expert’s appearance or demeanor, work with the expert to place the research in context, explain contradictions or inconsistencies in the research literature, and teach the jurors what they need to know to make the best decisions possible. They’ll appreciate you for it.
Chang, C. (2015). Motivated Processing: How People Perceive News Covering Novel or Contradictory Health Research Findings Science Communication, 37 (5), 602-634 DOI: 10.1177/1075547015597914
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