Judgement in legal settings: influence of presentation modality and domain specific training

This investigation is designed to determine whether people trained in law, upper-class years’ students, lawyers or judges, and people not trained in law, person from general population and eligible to serve as juror, are persuaded differently when exposed to the same persuasive plaintiff’s message via different presentation modalities. If yes, to what extent the strength of attitudes toward liability, confidence in liability judgments, and recall of relevant case content are influenced by these factors. One-hundred and twenty-one participants, sixty-nine participants trained in law and sixty-two participants not trained in law were presented with evidence of a legal case either as written text, audio or audiovisual format. Recall of relevant case content, Need for Cognition scores, personal relevance content, liability judgment and judgment’s confidence relatively to the decision-making process were explored in an online study. Results revealed no significant interactions for the treatment conditions but found several main effects.