Science of Justice

S1E29 - Two Stories That Decide Every Case.

Published: December 2, 2025

Duration: 25:42

Why civil trials are decided by the story jurors reconstruct, not the one we intend to tell. We map the psychology behind narrative drift and share a data-driven framework to make plaintiff narratives resilient in court and in deliberation.

• lawyer’s intended structure versus juror reconstruction
• intuition, stress and simplification under cognitive load
• gap-filling with personal experience and substitute standards
• availability, defensive attribution and system justification
• emotional coherence and moral alignment as decision drivers
• patterned drift points: responsibility, causation, irrelevant salience, invented motives
• deliberation multiplier and dominance effects in group consensus
• case story...

Two Stories That Decide Every Case. - Science of Justice