SBM Blog

Most of the World's Lawyers are W.E.I.R.D.

That is, "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, And Democratic."  Read Andrew Sullivan's post on the subject to tune in to the WEIRD implications for social research.  For maximum enjoyment, read all the way through to the reaction of a Brazilian to American college students.

Try your hand at seating the Supreme Court

The Washington Post invites you to play a fun (and fast) game of trying to seat the Supreme Court justices based on seniority. Click here to play.

(Don't forget to check the helpful hints boxes below the justices if and when your memory fails you.)

Posted by Samantha Meinke

Every Blogger Needs a Vacation Now and Then...

Happy Labor Day to all.

Just Because: A Crisis of Unimaginable Dimensions

Your Favorite Talk Show Host Says Everything About You

Because it turns out we are our own favorite talk show hosts.  "Everybody has a blowhard inside them," says Jonah Leher, and that blowhard is working pretty much full-time to confirm our pre-existing biases. Lehrer, whose wonderfully written insights into how we think are regularly featured by SBM Blog (and who can now be found at Wired), explains that we are not rational beings so much as we are powerful rationalizers:

Let me tell you a story about strawberry jam. In 1991, the psychologists Timothy Wilson and Jonathan Schooler decided to replicate a Consumer Reports taste test that carefully ranked forty-five different jams. Their scientific question was simple: Would random undergrads have the same preferences as the experts at the magazine? Did everybody agree on which strawberry jams tasted the best?

Wilson and Schooler took the 1^st, 11^th, 24^th, 32^nd, and 44^th best tasting jams (at least according to Consumer Reports) and asked the students for their opinion. In general, the preferences of the college students closely mirrored the preferences of the experts. Both groups thought Knott’s Berry Farm and Alpha Beta were the two best-tasting brands, with Featherweight a close third. They also agreed that the worst strawberry jams were Acme and Sorrel Ridge. When Wilson and Schooler compared the preferences of the students and the Consumer Reports panelists, he found that they had a statistical correlation of .55. When it comes to judging jam, we are all natural experts. We can automatically pick out the products that provide us with the most pleasure.

But that was only the first part of the experiment. The psychologists then repeated the jam taste test with a separate group of college students, only this time they asked them to explain why they preferred one brand over another. As the undergrads tasted the jams, the students filled out written questionnaires, which forced them to analyze their first impressions, to consciously explain their impulsive preferences. All this extra analysis seriously warped their jam judgment. The students now preferred Sorrel-Ridge—the worst tasting jam according to Consumer Reports—to Knott’s Berry farm, which was the experts’ favorite jam. The correlation plummeted to .11, which means that there was virtually no relationship between the rankings of the experts and the opinions of these introspective students.

So, everyone, heads way up during jury selection, eh?

The Forensic Importance of Enunciation in Criminal Law. ("I have a gub.")

Woody Allen in Take the Money and Run was intending to rob the bank, but his bad handwriting was a complication.  In real life, whether the fellow in Dunkin' Donuts actually said, ""Give me the money, I have a gun," as the cashier believed, or, "I want a honey bun," as he is asserting in his defense, makes all the difference.  The Consumerist speculates that the suspect's previous convictions on 23 other charges may also have been attributable to mumbling.

HT: Legal Blog Watch

E-Mailing Link to Blog Can be Publishing for Defamation Claim

In a decision that has sent alarm bells ringing throughout the blogosphere, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas has ruled that sending an e-mail message with a hyperlink to what is determined to be a defamatory blog post can be considered a publication for the purposes of maintaining a libel claim against the sender of the email. 

HT: ABA Journal

Happy 200th Birthday to A Famous Law School Dropout

Robert Schumann's father died during Schumann's law studies at Leipzig University, and he abandoned the law for music, without ambivalence or regret.  He is quoted as saying that the law turns its devotee "into gristle and freezes him into ice, so that no follower of fancy will any longer yearn for the springtime of the world."

Memorial Day Tribute

Dirge for Two Veterans

THE last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finish'd Sabbath,
On the pavement here, and there beyond it is looking,
Down a new-made double grave.

Lo, the moon ascending,
Up from the east the silvery round moon,
Beautiful over the house-tops, ghastly, phantom moon,
Immense and silent moon.

I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-key'd bugles,
All the channels of the city streets they're flooding,
As with voices and with tears.

I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring,
And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
Strikes me through and through.

For the son is brought with the father,
(In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell,
Two veterans son and father dropt together,
And the double grave awaits them.)

Now nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive,
And the daylight o'er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.

In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin'd,
('Tis some mother's large transparent face,
In heaven brighter growing.)

O strong dead-march you please me!
O moon immense with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans passing to burial!
What I have I also give you.

The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music,
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.

Walt Whitman

Pull Up That Anchor!

Jonah Lehrer writes fascinating posts about your brain, and mine, and his.  His latest post is about "anchoring," roughly defined as mental bias toward an arbitrary value. It strikes me that understanding anchoring is especially helpful for lawyers, who need to consciously understand or have a gift for intuiting mental bias -- their own, their clients, and fact-finders' -- in order to maximize success in trials and negotiations. Here's Lehrer's explanation of the phenomenon:

One of my favorite demonstrations of anchoring was done by a group of MIT economists led by Dan Ariely, as they conducted an auction with their business graduate students. (The study was later repeated with executives at the MIT Executive Education Program with similar results.) The items for sale included everything from a fancy bottle of French wine to a cordless keyboard to a box of chocolate truffles. The auction, however, came with a twist: Before the students could bid, they were asked to write down the last two digits of their social security number. Then, they were supposed to say whether or not they would be willing to pay that numerical amount for each of the products. For instance, if the last two digits of their social security number were 55, then they'd have to decide whether or not the bottle of wine or the cordless keyboard were worth $55. Finally, the students were instructed to write down the maximum amount they were willing to pay for the various items.

If people were perfectly rational, then writing down their social security numbers should have no effect on their bids. In other words, a student with a low valued social security number (like 10) should be willing to pay roughly the same price as someone with a high valued number (like 90). But that's not what happened. Look, for instance, at the bidding for the cordless keyboard. Students with the highest social security numbers (80-99) made an average bid of $56. In contrast, the average bid made by students with the lowest numbers (1-20) was a paltry $16. A similar trend held for every single item. On average, students with higher numbers were willing to spend 300 percent more than those with low numbers.

Lehrer's whole post, about how anchoring theory can be applied to belief, e.g.  the reaction to the Gulf oil spill and the Icelandic ash cloud, is a provocative read. Here's the conclusion (but read the whole thing):

The only way to avoid anchoring is to know about it. We need to be more aware that anchoring is a fundamental flaw of human decision making, and that our first reaction to an event will continue to shape our ensuing thoughts, even after that reaction is no longer relevant or valid. Our old beliefs might be wrong, but their influence lingers on, an intellectual anchor holding us back.