By Dr. Ken Broda-Bahm:
It is said that you know someone when you know what they hope for and what they fear. Since we're just past Halloween, let's go with the latter. A new survey coming out of Chapman University focuses on the greatest fears held by Americans. Based on a random sample of 1,573 adults, the short list of the top five are as follows: 1) Walking alone at night; 2) Becoming the victim of identity theft; 3) Safety on the internet; 4) Being the victim of a mass or random shooting; and 5) Public speaking. These are the kinds of social science results that are interesting in their own right. But in keeping with the spirit of the Persuasive Litigator blog, I can't help but wonder about the litigation relevance of these results.
Motivation is, after all, key to persuasion, and fear is a powerful motivator. Litigators in a variety of contexts should be attuned to the fear that a given trial story can evoke when jurors inevitably map the narrative back upon their own experience. They'll ask whether the case touches, even tangentially, on an issue that affects them. Could something like this happen to me? What can I do about it? Understanding fears is important to understanding audiences. The broadly influential Reptile perspective on legal persuasion goes so far as to say that reacting to fear and seeking personal safety and security, are the most important motivators for jurors. In that context, it is interesting that only two of the top five fears have to do with physical security in the sense of the risk of injury or death. That suggests that there are other powerful sources of fear that range beyond the physical threat. That would mean that fears don't just come into play in wrongful death or personal injury cases, but extend to other more abstractly threatening situations as well. In this post, I'll take a look at the top five scares according to the Chapman survey, and share some thoughts on why they might matter in a legal persuasion context.