A few weeks back I was in a courtroom helping the trial team select a panel of jurors to hear a three week trial.
We had a weekend to sort through the venire panel's answers to a 65-question supplemental juror questionnaire (SJQ). We made preliminary decisions based on the written responses. We thought we knew something of the members of the venire panel. Armed with their responses we planned our follow up in court.
One woman in particular was intriguing. Her responses read well on the SJQ. She answered appropriately. She appeared favorable to our side. But there was something about her expression that was unsettling.
This woman smiled constantly. She smiled in the jury box. She smiled when she was excused from the courtroom. She smiled when she talked with fellow panelists. She smiled when she responded to the attorneys' questions.
It was too much smiling; it was misleading, disingenuous smiling. And it was a clue.
Despite having previously agreed to let the distraught and grieving parents attend key portions of the trial, this woman later demanded a hearing with the judge to tell him in no uncertain terms that she resented (yes, resented!) having to sit through day after day of an emotionally difficult trial when the same demand was not made on the grieving parents of the dead child.
What does one thing have to do with another?
In a recent study reported in Scientific American, How Emotions Jump From Face to Face, researchers found that:
"Across two studies, lead author Rebecca Neel and her colleagues found that male faces were more likely to grab anger from the face next to them, and female faces were more likely to grab happiness. Interestingly, this was not just a matter of people seeing male faces as more angry and female faces as more happy (an effect shown in several previous studies): the errors were most common when the emotion came from the adjacent face.
While this grabbing seems like an automatic process of visual perception, it can be influenced by biases we hold about the social world. Expectations shape perceptions (and misperceptions). Since we tend to assume men are more aggressive and women are more nurturing, we’re more likely to see men as angry and women as happy. Snap judgments happen easily as we scan our environments looking for social cues. It may seem a serious design flaw in a diverse modern society, but our brains have evolved to make constant and routine approach-avoid assessments called ‘affordance management’ decisions. At the creature level, we’re trying to minimize risk and maximize opportunity. It’s more costly to miss cues of impending danger than it is to mistakenly assume that someone is threatening, so we err on the side of caution. Men have historically posed a greater physical threat than women, so the angry face is suddenly male. Females are seen as posing little threat and ample opportunity for connection, so our brains maximize opportunity by assuming a woman is friendly and eager to interact (or take care of us) even when she isn’t." [Emphasis added.]
This potential juror had it written all over her: I can pose a threat.
TIP:
Do not mistakenly assume that the friendlies are the ones with the smiling faces.
Do not mistakenly assume that the enemies are the ones with the angry faces.
Listen to voir dire with the whole body, and pay attention to what you know about people.
