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The Effect Of Blinded Experts On Jurors’ Verdicts, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

“Blind expertise” has been proposed as an institutional solution to the problem of bias in expert witness testimony in litigation, as a way to improve litigation outcomes. At the request of a litigant, an intermediary selects a qualified expert and pays the expert to review a case without knowing which side requested the opinion. This paper reports an experiment that tests the hypothesis that, compared to traditional experts, such “blinded experts” will be more persuasive to jurors. A national sample of mock jurors (N = 275) watched an online video of a staged medical malpractice trial, including testimony from two …