Avoiding Expert Testimony About Family Therapy

Although the family therapist may prefer to not be involved in legal proceedings, it is common for attorneys and judges to use the legal process (e.g., a subpoena or court order) to obtain testimony. This article considers how the family therapist should respond to a legal process that seeks to expand testimony from facts about the treatment to expert opinions. Ethics and legal considerations are discussed, and recommendations are offered.     

Expert Testimony on Child Sexual Abuse:a Qualitative Study of the Swedish Approach toStatement Analysis

Statement analysis is an evaluation method occasionally used forassessing children's testimony in cases of alleged sexual abuse. InSweden, statement analytical evaluations can be presented as expertevidence in legal proceedings. The purpose of the present study was toexplore the Swedish application of statement analysis, developed by Dr.Arne Trankell. Ten written expert witness reports were subjected to acombination of qualitative and quantitative content analysis. Inaddition to exploring what information was considered in theevaluations, the study focused on the way experts integrated data, andhow they interpreted the results of their evaluations. Statementanalysis in Sweden is characterised by a case-related approach, ascompared to the way of using pre-defined criteria within the frameworkof Statement Validity Analysis. Experts used statement characteristicsin different ways and emphasised different aspects of cases in order toreach their conclusions. Most experts used alternative hypotheses inorder to evaluate their data. Although the use of hypothesis-testing hasstrong support in the literature, there appeared to be risks for logicalmistakes connected to the conveyance of tentative hypotheses intoconclusions. The results are discussed in relation to other applicationsof statement analysis.     

The Impact of Expert Testimony on Jurors’ Decisions: Gender of the Expert and Testimony Complexity1

The present study investigated whether people used the gender of an expert witness as a heuristic cue to evaluate the evidence presented by the expert. Specifically, the gender of the expert and the complexity of the expert's testimony (low, high) were varied systematically within a simulated civil trial involving an antitrust price‐fixing agreement. It was expected that the male expert would be more persuasive than the female expert, but only when the testimony presented was complex. As predicted, this interaction was revealed across a range of dependent measures. Somewhat unexpected was the finding of a female expert advantage in the low‐complexity condition. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Expert Trespassing Testimony and the Ethics of Science Communication

Scientific expert testimony is crucial to public deliberation, but it is associated with many pitfalls. This article identifies one—namely, expert trespassing testimony—which may be characterized, crudely, as the phenomenon of experts testifying outside their domain of expertise. My agenda is to provide a more precise characterization of this phenomenon and consider its ramifications for the role of science in society. I argue that expert trespassing testimony is both epistemically problematic and morally problematic. Specifically, I will argue that scientific experts are subject to a particular obligation. Roughly, this is the obligation to qualify their assertions when speaking outside their domain of scientific expertise in certain contexts. Thus, I argue that scientists who possess expert knowledge are confronted with hard questions about when and how to testify and, therefore, that being a scientific expert comes with great responsibility. Consequently, I provide a concrete “expert guideline” according to which scientific experts, in certain contexts, face an obligation to qualify their assertions when speaking outside their domain of expertise. Furthermore, I consider a number of the conditions in which the guideline is waived or overridden. On this basis, I consider the broader aspects of the roles of scientific experts in a society with a high division of cognitive labor that calls for trust in scientific expert testimony.     

Institutional Constraints on the Ethics of Expert Testimony

We examined the dilemmas posed by the involvement of expert witnesses in court cases and the institutional constraints on the ethics of expert testimony. The causes for the incorporation of bad science into legal decisions, potential solutions to this dilemma, and the limitations of these solutions are considered. We concluded that law, science, and experts must respond to the problems posed by expert witnessing.     

Juror Responses to Direct and Mediated Presentations of Expert Testimony1

One hundred twenty-one King County (Washington) jurors viewed one of four videotaped versions of medical testimony relevant to the determination of a claim for damages against an employer in an industrial accident case. Two versions presented the claimant's physician (direct testimony), and two presented an attorney reading the physician's testimony verbatim (mediated testimony). Two professional actors (one female, one male) portrayed the physician in one version and the attorney in the other. Videotape presentations were introduced by written material and followed by a questionnaire in which Ss answered a number of legal, attitudinal, and factual questions. Responses to direct testimony differed from those to mediated testimony on several dimensions: number of items listed as significant to the determination of a cash award, estimates of sufficiency of material presented to determine an award, estimates of physician's competence, estimates of confidence in ratings of physician's competence, and number of correct items in a factual retention test. Significant correlations were found between scores on some of these dimensions and number of dollars awarded as compensation. Differences between the actors produced no significant effects, nor were there any significant interactions. It is concluded that, ceteris paribus, direct testimony is to be preferred to mediated testimony.     

Undermining Reasonableness: Expert Testimony in a Case Involving a Battered Woman Who Kills

Student participants  ( N = 316)  viewed a videotaped simulated case involving a woman who had entered a self-defense plea in the shooting death of her abusive husband. As successful claims of self-defense rest on the portrayal of a defendant who has responded reasonably to his/her situation, the implications of various forms of expert testimony in constructing this narrative were examined. Jurors were presented with either expert testimony regarding the battered woman syndrome (BWS), the BWS framed within post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) nomenclature, or a no-expert control condition. As the BWS classification may support a stereotypical victim, the degree to which the defendant fit the stereotype in terms of her access to a social support network (family, friends, employment outside of the home) was varied within the expert testimony conditions to reflect either a high or low degree of stereotype fit. Although jury verdicts failed to differ across expert testimony and stereotype fit conditions, perceptions of her credibility and mental stability did. Although affording jurors a framework from which the defendant's experiences as a battered woman may be acknowledged, this portrayal, as advanced within PTSD nomenclature, endorsed a pathological characterization of the defendant. Implications of this discourse for battered women within the context of self-defense are discussed.     

Testimony and Assertion

Two models of assertion are described and their epistemological implications considered. The assurance model draws a parallel between the ethical norms surrounding promising and the epistemic norms which facilitate the transmission of testimonial knowledge. This model is rejected in favour of the view that assertion transmits knowledge by expressing belief. I go on to compare the epistemology of testimony with the epistemology of memory.     

Jurors' Decisions in Trials of Battered Women Who Kill: The Role of Prior Beliefs and Expert Testimony1

The present research explored the influence of four factors on mock jurors' decisions in a homicide trial involving a battered woman who killed her abusive husband: (a) jurors' preexisting beliefs about wife abuse, (b) the presence of expert testimony on the battered woman syndrome, (c) jurors' beliefs in a just world, and (d) gender. Mock jurors listened to a trial involving a woman who had killed her abuser, which either contained expert testimony or did not, and then rendered various judgments about the case. Results indicated that those individuals who were more informed about the dynamics of abuse and those exposed to the expert testimony, compared to their respective counterparts, were more believing of the battered woman's account of what occurred. In general, weak believers in a just world were more lenient in their judgments, with verdicts of not guilty being associated with weaker beliefs in a just world than guilty verdicts. Weak believers in a just world also felt that the expert testimony applied more to the defendant than did strong believers. Finally, women who were weak believers in a just world were less likely to hold the defendant responsible for the events and to be more informed about the dynamics of abuse following the experiment.     

Relativism,Disagreement and Testimony

This article brings together two sets of data that are rarely discussed in concert; namely, disagreement and testimony data. I will argue that relativism yields a much more elegant account of these data than its major rival, contextualism. The basic idea will be that contextualists can account for disagreement data only by adopting principles that preclude a simple account of testimony data. I will conclude that, other things being equal, we should prefer relativism to contextualism. In making this comparative point, I will also defend self‐standing relativist accounts of disagreement and testimony data.     

Change Blindness and Eyewitness Testimony

The authors explored the relevance of research on change blindness to eyewitness identification and testimony under intentional and incidental memory conditions. Participants (N = 80, 40 men and 40 women) viewed a video enactment of a burglary in which the identity of the burglar changed at the halfway point of the film. Half of participants were briefed to remember the content, and the other half were not. All were tested for the recall of the content, awareness of the change, and ability to identify either or both of the burglars. Some 61% of participants did not notice the identity change. Rates of detection were significantly higher in participants in the intentional condition, who also recalled significantly more detail from the film. Awareness of change was also significantly related to content recall scores and accuracy of identification of both burglars. The results illustrate the interrelation between the eyewitness and change blindness literatures.     

Moral Testimony and its Authority

A person sometimes forms moral beliefs by relying on another person's moral testimony. In this paper I advance a cognitivist normative account of this phenomenon. I argue that for a person's actions to be morally good, they must be based on a recognition of the moral reasons bearing on action. Morality requires people to act from an understanding of moral claims, and consequently to have an understanding of moral claims relevant to action. A person sometimes fails to meet this requirement when she relies on another person's moral testimony, and so there are moral limits on such reliance.     

计算机、证明和证据(英文)

有论者认为以电脑辅助进行之数学证明其实包含了经验性之前提,因此要接受此类证明,就得修改传统的"数学证明"的概念。本文审视此说法;以讨论Thomas Tymoczko的一篇关于四色定理得哲学意义的论文为发端,进而论及Tyler Burge等人的相关观点,并由此对上述说法提出质疑。