Why civil trials are decided by the story jurors reconstruct, not the one we intend to tell. We map the psychology behind narrative drift and share a data-driven framework to make plaintiff narratives resilient in court and in deliberation.
• lawyer’s intended structure versus juror reconstruction
• intuition, stress and simplification under cognitive load
• gap-filling with personal experience and substitute standards
• availability, defensive attribution and system justification
• emotional coherence and moral alignment as decision drivers
• patterned drift points: responsibility, causation, irrelevant salience, invented motives
• deliberation multiplier and dominance effects in group consensus
• case story alignment audit and emotional topography mapping
• structural fixes: causation sequencing, explicit motive, vivid anchors
• designing simplification tools and framing system rule-breaking
• strategic voir dire to surface values, credibility lenses and damages caps
https://scienceofjustice.com/
