taliv said:
...you know in the absence of data, most people live their lives and make most of their decisions on conjecture and opinions....
Perhaps, and many of them probably wind up making bad decisions based an bad information. The successful people I know investigate, study and research matters, and make important decisions based on good evidence.
taliv said:
...however, as we often state, all opinions are not equal, so someone who is regularly involved in a topic may have a more informed opinion, even in the absence of data....
Nope, an informed opinion is, by definition, not made in the absence of data. Someone with significant education, experience, and expertise might be able to draw reasonable conclusions about certain things with what appears to be minimal data; but that's because his education, experience, and expertise provides certain foundational data. Informed opinions aren't pulled out of the air.
taliv said:
...it's often just as useful and far faster than a formal study....
And that itself is conjecture. Maybe at times someone with enough savvy, when addressing some issues, can come up with a useful "back-of-the-envelop" hypothesis. How useful that will be can be difficult to assess, but it certainly won't be as useful as a properly designed and executed study.
taliv said:
...the old and any new test would only be a guess anyway as applied to any specific jury in any specific location regarding any specific set of facts in a case. so while interesting, it's pretty academic ...
How useful any test is, and what the test can be understood to predict, depends on the design and execution of the test. That's why papers being published in good academic journals are subject to peer review before being publishes in order to validate that, based on methodology and data, the study can reasonably be understood to show what it purports to show.
Ed Ames said:
...As the WEIRD issue has demonstrated, psychology doesn't study timeless absolutes,...
The
WEIRD model relates to this issue:
Broad claims about human psychology and behavior based on narrow samples from Western societies are regularly published. Are such species‐generalizing claims justified? This review suggests not only substantial variability in experimental results across populations in basic domains, but that standard subjects are unusual compared with the rest of the species—outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, spatial reasoning, moral reasoning, thinking‐styles, and self‐concepts. This suggests (1) caution in addressing questions of human nature from this slice of humanity, and (2) that understanding human psychology will require broader subject pools....
It is thus inapposite to the discussion of jury studies.
Those studies are not making broad claims about human psychology, nor are the goals of those studies to draw species-generalized claims, nor do they address broad questions of human nature. They are concerned strictly with the behavior of people in the United States serving on juries in United States Courts.
As Glenn points out in post 97:
GEM said:
...Overall metaanalysis of the methods show that these samples have ecological validity and are not weird samples. There's a reference to this in the papers. The work was done in recent times, mid 2000's for a 2009 paper. ...
And in post 99:
GEM said:
...As I said before, there have been analyses of the using mock jurors from colleges and other populations and results have been similar.
In our study, we got the same results from the liberal arts college (and that does not mean 'liberal' - is it a school classification from older times) and from an older working population (that happened to be going to night school)....