Weird Biases, Jury Psychology

I recommend the blog of Keen Trial Consulting for anyone interested in psychology (or interpersonal self-improvement). It might seem weird to recommend a trial consulting web site for psychology info, but it turns out that "jury research" is a big complex field that involves doing a bunch of psychology research to predict things like what kind of biases jurors have and how they can be made more fair.

The blog has a lot of insights learned during through the company's own work, plus a lot links and summaries of other psychology research. It provides citations so you can read about the info in depth, but it tends to summarize info in a way that lets lazy folks like me learn a lot of new stuff.

Some of the info on the kind of biases people tend to have--and the results those biases can have in some unlucky person's life--can be pretty depressing. However, we all have those kinds of biases, and learning about them will help us overcome them, or at least compensate for them. Or to use a quote from the site...

We are all subject to bias– until we pay attention to it. Merely by being conscious of its potential, it can become a much smaller problem.