In modern times at least, corporations have not been terribly popular. However, since the murder of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO about a half a year ago in New York City, observers and the corporations themselves have been paying more attention to the extreme edges of these attitudes. For nearly two decades, Persuasion Strategies has tracked anti-corporate bias in the forms that matter most in U.S. courtrooms. While we have consistently noted that the attitudes are broadly shared, with seven to eight out of ten typically siding with the anti-corporate side of an attitudinal scale, more recently we have seen the bias become significantly more bipartisan, with the emergence of a new anti-corporate rightwing alongside the more expected anti-corporate leftwing — each side, naturally, bringing their own reasons.
The anti-corporate profile can be a factor in a wide variety of cases. Certainly, when a case pits an individual plaintiff against a corporate defendant, the level of distrust in the larger entity plays a role. Even in more common commercial cases, with corporations fighting among themselves, the default attitudes and stereotypes jurors apply can determine the ways credibility and blame are distributed. While the bias has been strong across the years, just within the last year, our tracking of the anti-corporate attitudinal profile has shown significant movement toward the extreme edge of anti-corporate bias. In this post, I will take a look at that trend and discuss some implications for jury selection.
Our Research: More Extreme Anti-corporate Views
The voir dire process sometimes assumes that attitudes are binary — a potential juror either has the bias or doesn’t. Social scientists, however, know that it is always a matter of degree. For that reason, we have consistently applied simple scale measurements to the attitudes, asking, for example, whether a view is held “strongly” or only “somewhat.” Even as the proportion of individuals on the negative side of the scale has changed relatively little, the proportion of the public selecting the more extreme negative option has increased.
Within the last year, we have seen this trend in eight of the nine anti-corporate categories we measure.
- Asking “to what extent do business executives share your values?” we found within the last year that the most extreme “very little” category increased by nine percent.
- Asking whether the “government should police corporations” more or less, we saw “much more” increase by five percent.
- Asking about the amount of responsibility corporations should be held to when compared to individuals, we saw “much more” increase by six percent.
- Asking about the extent to which the government favors large corporations over ordinary Americans, we observed a ten percent increase in those responding “very much.”
- Asking how often lawsuits against corporations have merit, the extreme response of “almost always” increased by two percent.
- Asking “how often do you believe a corporation would lie if it could benefit financially from doing so,” those on the negative side increased four percent, but the “almost always” option increased by a full twelve percent.
- Asking about the amount of environmental harm corporations cause, the option “a lot” increased by seven percent.
- Asking how often large corporations face appropriate consequences when they harm individuals, the “almost never” option increased by eight percent.
Even with a somewhat modest proportion moving to the extreme, it is important to remember that on all of these questions, a substantial majority ends up on the anti-corporate side of the question. For example:
Implications: Focus on Extremes in Jury Selection
When asked, most potential jurors will report at least a somewhat anti-corporate view. That influences the strategy in asking the question. For example, if your party is more likely to be the target for anti-corporate bias, then you shouldn’t necessarily ask the broad general questions of who has negative views of corporations. Asking that might just serve to highlight the minority who has a favorable view, which could help the other side in deciding who to strike. The solution is to focus more strategically not just on those with soft or generalized anti-corporate views, but on those whose views are specific and extreme.
Measure by Degrees
Don’t think of attitudes as something a potential juror “has” or “doesn’t have.” Instead, think of it as points along a spectrum. The best way to focus on the most harmful edge of the spectrum is with a questionnaire that allows you to assess strength of opinion using a scale. Even in oral voir dire, if you have a group raising their hands in agreement with something, you can add a follow-up to focus on areas of greatest concern:
For those who raised your hands that you agree, please leave your hand up if you would say you strongly agree.
For all who agreed, how many are basing that agreement on a specific experience?
Normalize the Majority to Focus on the Extremes
A second option is to bypass what you know or suspect to be the majority view and directly move to asking about the extremes. When you have reason to suspect that an opinion that’s bad for you may find agreement with most in your panel, you don’t necessarily want to call it out, to keep your more favorable minority out of the spotlight. So instead, you can lead into the question by framing that view as the norm, and asking just about those who would take a more extreme view on the point. For example,
These days, I suspect most of you have at least a little distrust for a big corporation. But how many of you would say that you are so distrustful of a big company that you would try to avoid doing business with one?
If you read the news, you have probably seen examples of companies who have been caught doing something dishonest. We know that may describe some big companies. Maybe even more than a few big companies. But who here thinks that this would describe almost all big companies?
When you’re the party conducting the selection, of course, you would prefer to have the juror with no negative views at all. As that juror becomes increasingly scarce, however, it becomes necessary to focus on the more extreme edges.
Image credit: Shutterstock, used under license. Thanks to Josh Haby for the research to support this post, and best wishes to him as he moves on to a new opportunity.
