Joel Cooper, PhD - US grants

ABSTRACT How do teachers, coaches, counselors, and parents reach conclusions about the abilities of those whose skills and performances they are attempting to influence? If a student does well only when assisted or clued by the teacher, will the teacher rate the student's intelligence higher or lower than the intelligence of a student who is relatively unresponsive to help, but does quite well without it? These questions have been addressed in an unsystematic and inconclusive way in previous studies. This research is designed to pose these and similar questions, looking at such factors as (1) the degree of convariation between clues chosen by the teacher, and successes registered by the student and (2) the particular goal or orientation of the teachers. Preliminary studies show that intellectual ability is evaluated very differently when the purpose of instruction is raised. Such appraisals (in the form of teacher expectancies) can be extremely important in guiding teacher behavior and, often, creating self-fulfilling prophecies.

WPC2 2 B V T W #| x 10 pitch z N x x x , x @ ; HP LaserJet Series II (Additional) HLSEIIAD.PRS x @ 0 Z 2 5 V G W Courier 10 pitch z N x x x , x @ ; HP LaserJet Series II (Additional) HLSEIIAD.PRS x @ 0 Z 2 ( J 0 #| x 9317646 COOPER In our society, the legal system is where many decisions that affect the implementation of technology arise. This study a step in determining how such decisions are made and what their impact is on the creation and implementation of technological innovation. Technological and scientific innovations that are supported by good data can withstand legal tests provided that scientific and technological testimony introduced into courts of law or other legal proceedings can be understood by lay jurors and judges. If not, juries and judges are likely to make decisions on scientific and technological matters on grounds that may be at variance with expert testimony. In addition to being potentially unjust, the fear that such an event might occur may cause technologically based companies to refrain from introducing innovations. This is a study of the production, delivery and reception of expert scientific/technological testimony. The research is divided into two phases. The first phase assesses the degree to which industry is concerned about not being able to convince the judicial system of the scientific and technological underpinnings of its innovations and consequently errs on the conservative side in producing such innovations. This will be accomplished using focus groups composed of individuals from relevant professions, patent attorneys, and technical managers. The second phase is an experimental research approach to unders tanding some of the issues involved in presenting complex scientific and technological testimony to lay juries. Using the methods of experimental social psychology, the studies test hypotheses derived from theories of attitude change. It is predicted that jurors or other decision makers may not always be able to comprehend the scientific and technological testimony of experts. Consequently, rather than attempt to process the arguments, the decision makers avail themselves of peripheral or heuristic decision rules. For example, they may base their decisions on the background of the expert rather than the substance of the expert's arguments. In the experiments, juror subjects watch a videotape recreation of a civil trial involving the expert testimony. The first two experiments examine the effects of complexity of the testimony and whether increased complexity does indeed drive jurors to rely on peripheral cues when making decisions. The third experiment tackles the question of the persuasiveness of paid expert witnesses and examines the hypothesis that, regardless of the validity of testimony, experts are discounted relative to an expert selected by the court.

9508727 A conference on "Attribution Processes and Person Perception" will be held at Princeton University on March 23-25, 1995. The purpose of the conference is to bring together experts in the fields of person perception and attribution theory to discuss the emergence of new perspectives on problems that owe their origin or direction to the work of Edward E. Jones who, with his students and colleagues, helped to forge and develop these areas of inquiry, which have been central to the field of Social Psychology for the last thirty years. The conference goals will be achieved through a series of eight paper sessions. Each session will include presentation of a theory and empirical paper by a current, major figure in the field followed by two knowledgable discussants, who will react to the focal paper, as well as interactions with the audience. In addition, invited addresses by senior scientists will discuss the overall themes of social psychology and the influence that Ned Jones had on those themes before his untimely death in August, 1993.

The accurate perception of scientific and technological testimony in courts of law is often crucial to protect the interests of individuals and corporations. In the civil justice system, significant monetary decisions hinge upon jurors or judges accurately perceiving the S/T testimony of scientists and engineers. Technological and scientific innovations that are supported by reliable S/T data may not be fairly adjudicated if those data are not processed accurately by the judge or jurors making the decision. In previous work in our laboratory, some of the difficulties jurors have processing complex S/T testimony in civil liability cases were examined. In this study, we will examine the locus of the investigator role in the adversarial and inquisitorial systems. We hypothesize that participants who adopt the inquisitorial role of investigator for the court will gain a more accurate and complete understanding of the S/T evidence than will participants who are asked to take the adversarial position. Moreover, it is hypothesized that inquisitorial participants will bring a more representative distribution of evidence to the attention of decision makers than will the combination of the defense and plaintiff advocates in the adversarial system. In our society, the legal system is where many decisions that affect the implementation of science and technology arise. The current proposal seeks to provide information on the impact of important elements of the current adversarial system on the accurate perception of S/T evidence in civil proceedings.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In order to minimize people putting themselves at risk for physical and mental disease, it is important to be able to influence their attitudes and behaviors on health related matters. The proposed work suggests a theoretically based way to influence attitudes and behaviors and culminates in a study designed to influence young people to reduce their risk of contracting skin cancer. The research examines the possibility that people's attitudes can change vicariously from the actions of another person. The proposed research specifically addresses vicarious dissonance. The vicarious dissonance hypothesis holds that a person who observes others behaving in a manner inconsistent with their attitudes has the potential to experience cognitive dissonance vicariously, provided that the actor is a member of the observer's social group. The hypothesis combines dissonance with the theoretical construct of social identity. It is suggested that people who share a common group membership, and who feel strongly identified with their group, tend to take on the characteristics, emotions and motivations of the group's prototypical member. Thus, if a group member acts in such a way that produces dissonance in him or herself, it will also produce dissonance in other group members. Even though the other group members did not act in an attitude discrepant fashion, they will nonetheless experience pressure to change their own attitudes. The research in the proposal is divided into four parts. In Part I, experiments are designed to show that people change their attitudes as a function of the counterattitudinal behavior of other members of their own group and that the attitude change is indeed based on the process of cognitive dissonance. In Part II, experiments directly assess the social identity hypothesis and are designed to study the importance of the prototypicality of the participant, the actor and the attitude issue. Part III experimentally manipulates the strength of group identification and also examines the relative contributions of interpersonal and intragroup identification. Part IV seeks to demonstrate the impact of vicarious dissonance on an important health-related attitude and behavior. The work is directed toward convincing people at risk of skin cancer to use sun block more frequently and effectively.

The broader impact/commercial potential of this I-Corps project is the development of an artificial intelligence-driven process for computationally predicting the outcomes of civil legal matters. At present, attorneys estimate the viability and value of a new civil legal matter. The proposed technology leverages artificial intelligence to standardize, systematize, and externalize this time-intensive and suboptimal process. The platform intakes new case information and generate both an assessment of the case and a prediction of its likely settlement value. This represents an advance in managing legal affairs by improved case selection, increased efficiency, and better decision-making.

This I-Corps project is based on the development of an artificial intelligence system that provides civil legal case values and the appropriate action to take in response to the analysis. The proposed technology uses a modeling process where features and associated weights are combined across multiple computational models, including data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) models, rule-based models, and models bounded by meta-analytic research. In addition, the proposed technology will include a centralized database using natural language processing to render the garnered cases into a computationally useful form. One challenge is that the data are often confidential and stored in disparate locations. Federated learning, a technique that trains an algorithm across multiple decentralized databases holding local data samples without exchanging the data samples, will be deployed. The method, which is the first application of federated learning to legal data, enables expansion of the product to numerous users while ensuring privacy and confidentiality.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.