Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [423]
The next phase was purely psychological. An expert on body language observed prospective jurors during the voir dire, judging their truthfulness and anxiety level from their posture, movements, eye contact, vocal intonation, and hesitancy in speech. (Some jury researchers also take such characteristics to indicate whether a juror makes decisions on an emotional or a rational basis.) The body-language expert passed his evaluations on to the lawyers, who used them, along with the attitude profiles from the community survey, as the basis for selecting or rejecting jurors. Despite the opposing efforts of the prosecution, the jury selected was thoroughly pro-Little and after a five-week trial found her not guilty on all counts.87
Some of the notable cases in which scientific jury selection has been used include the trial of Angela Davis, the Wounded Knee trials, the trials of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Vietnam veterans against the manufacturers of Agent Orange, Mark David Chapman (John Lennon’s assassin), Attorney General John Mitchell, and the criminal trial of O. J. Simpson. Many of these and other front-page trials ended with verdicts favorable to the side employing jury selection experts.88
In many such trials, scientific jury selection has reduced the unknowns by adding to the selection process predictions based on particular jurors’ feelings about giant corporations, leftists, widows, blacks, competitive marketing, the police, homosexuals, paraplegic accident victims, and so on and on.
The basic premise of scientific jury selection is thus in direct conflict with the principle that a defendant is to be judged by a fairly and representatively assembled group. As one jury researcher candidly put it, “Anybody who tells you that jury research is designed to pick a fair jury is out of his bird. Lawyers want to pick a jury that favors their side— they’d be foolish if they didn’t—and jury research gives them a rational way of going about it.”89 In choosing jurors on the basis of their predictable behavior, scientific jury selection undermines the ethical foundation of jury trial.
Beyond the Fringe
As a drowning man will catch at a straw, so people in troubled times will seize on mystical beliefs in the hope of salvation. This may account for the vast popularity in recent decades of New Age (and post–New Age) mystical beliefs, practices, and nostrums said to endow their believers and users with mental health, spiritual power, peace, understanding, and joy. To name but a few: pyramid power, crystal power, aromatherapy, past lives therapy, memory recovery, messages from extraterrestrials, channeling, out-of-body experiences, rebirthing, reparenting, Scientology, thought field therapy, and repressed memory therapy.
We heard of a few such oddities in the chapter on psychotherapies and will pass them by now, noting only that almost all are lacking in any scientific validation; they offer anecdotal and case history evidence but have had no randomized controlled studies and no replication studies by double-blind impartial evaluators. A massive recent review by a team of thirty-seven respected academics considers almost all of them unproven, unevaluated, unscientific, and, in some cases, potentially harmful in a number of ways.90
But enough of that. Our attention now is focused on unorthodox theories and practices that are alleged to enlarge human psychic powers, a potent appeal that has enabled some of these systems, if one can call them that, to far outstrip the popularity of mainstream scientific psychology. The question we ask here is whether these offbeat forms of psychology are “outliers”—instances of real science at its outmost borders—or, like mesmerism