IDAHO VS. KOHBERGER HEARING-RAW COURT AUDIO PART 2

this is a special report from True Crime today and the hidden Killers podcast from the hidden Killers podcast I'm Stacy Cole Brian Colberg was back in court for a hearing on a potential change of venue for his capital murder trial let's go now to the courtroom CR 2922 285 sorry for the delay I think we had to adjust some uh mics uh make sure everybody can hear and uh Council and Mr coburger are here in courtroom so we're ready to go forward uh next next uh witness thank you Ron we will call Dr anani L Aly all right thank you thank you man please raise your right hand do you Solly swear or affirm that the testimony you give in this case shall be the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth under penalty of purgery all right thank you please have a seat and then please state your name name the Manny ly last name is e l tyon a l a y l i thank you Miss Taylor thank you good morning I can see you brought some papers to the witness stand with you today you identify what those are yeah it's just copies of the slides I could see okay and it the slides does that refer to the PowerPoint presentation that you for us to share today it okay at this time you place that document in front of you face down and if you have difficulty seeing the slides let me know and we'll have you turn it over so you can track and help us understand what you're going to teach us today okay sure yeah I want to make sure then state has has stipulated to admit that that's correct okay thank you so all the slides that we might be considering today you agree to that's correct okay thank you go ahead thank you judge will you tell us what you do for work I'm a professor at Eastern Washington University what do you teach I teach social psychology which is the study of how people interact with each other and influence each other how we're all affected by social situations I'm going to ask you some questions so that I can understand your background that led to your to teach but I want to know if you're here today in Your Capacity as a professor or in your separate role as an expert consultant and here's my separate role as a consultant so what I'll be talking about today is based on my expert opinion uh B on the research I've conducted and what I've learned about in the field and it's not affiliated with the University thank you for that now let's go to your education what what degrees do you hold so I have a bachelor's in psychology and I have a masters and PHD in social and personality psychology uh with a focus on social psychology what does that mean a focus on social psychology so our area uh like I mentioned it studies how we interact with and influence each other uh the power of the situation and how it affects us like how we're all behaving differently here than in our living rooms it includes things like how uh people influence us to purchase things like I teach a class on social influence uh or influence us to donate money uh and then my specific area of focus is on social cognition which is how we select remember and interpret social information how long have you been teaching I have been teaching uh since before I graduated my PhD so since the late 90s uh but I started my positions as a professor in 2002 2002 2002 at University of Florida 2003 at Easter University EAS Washington University in your role as a professor and a professional have you written articles and been published I have how many roughly roughly 15 give think do any of those relate to human bias yes uh most of them uh so a lot of them are focused centrally on bias and then uh many of the others are tangentially related to bias so it could be biased perceptions of ourselves how we tend to overestimate ourselves in a lot of ways uh it includes biased impressions of individuals like you might take one thing about a person and make a whole bunch of conclusions about them when you don't know them and that could influence how you perceive their behavior later on uh it includes bias perceptions of groups so stereotyping and Prejudice um and I've also studied biased impressions of businesses have you consulted as an expert in other cases besides Mr cober's Case yes uh I consulted in a case around 2016 or so and then I was involved in the non-dissemination hearing here as well for Mr C case so you're telling us that you've testified before Mr cober's Case is that correct correct and have you testified as an expert in any other hearings besides that one for Mr cerer for Mr Co bur no just that one how about other people yes one for uh and Cas I didn't PE it out I a full-time job plenty to do uh but I've been asked to do expert testimony and I feel like it's the right thing to do to share what I know about bias thank you for that what is your role today what did we hire you to do and ask you to do so my role was to evaluate how publicity about a case could shape potential jurors when they come in and and sit on the panel and U to see if maybe uh people who were living in Lea County or have some connection to Lea County might potentially have more problems being objective because of immediate saturation and other issues did you prepare a PowerPoint to help walk through what you have to share today yes I did I'm going to do my best to open that up um I am trying to find the right you just go to slideshow um right to the on the top maybe six down to the right one more right and then on the left towards this front beginning okay I think we're there thank you for helping me through that do this regularly teaching all right um I want to know if this is the the background of the research on potential juror bias what do you know about that yeah so um there's been a lot of research on how publicity affects potential jurors it really it says roughly 40 years really it's been longer because in the 1960s there were some high-profile cases and so social SCI scientists wondered does it matter if there's a lot of publicity about a case could that potentially make jurors is less objective could that influence actual outcomes in a case and so the research started then kind of trickled in and then became more and more popular and then uh in 1999 there were enough studies that somebody conducted what's called a metaanalysis and another one was conducted in 2022 so it's nice to have a recent one a metaanalysis is when you take a bunch of studies on the same topic and you statistically combine them into one giant study so they do this in field they do this in medicine every discipline where you really want to know an overall effect of something because I might run a study on the effects of pre-trial publicity and find maybe a small effect and somebody else might find a big effect and somebody else might find no effect and uh it's hard to trust any one study with you know a few dozen participants or even if it's hundreds I would want to see lots of studies you know just like if I were trying to decide if I want to take a medication I don't want just one study that tells me it works or doesn't work if I have a serious illness or the medication has serious risk but I would be much more confident if there were a whole bunch of stud dozens of studies combined and thousands of participants data and so a meta analysis basically does that it Narrows down a specific Topic in this case the effects of pre-trial publicity on judgments and it examines overall combined is there an effect and so there were um like I said one is is quite recent from 2022 so it's the simplest way way to describe this research it's the easiest way for somebody to to know where it stands even if they don't read all the Articles and what this work has found is that if somebody's exposed to publicity about a case something about the defendant you know something about the case fact fiction uh that the tendency is if you look at everything as a whole for it to affect judgment and specifically how much you like the defendant uh your inclination to think that they're guilty your judgments of their criminality Etc uh and this has been shown with individual judgments of guilt but in even more so with group judgments with uh juries and it looks at participants uh who are randomly assigned to get pre-trial publicity information or not so that you can really determine cause effect so this would be a formal experiment we do lots of studies and experiments are the ones that I like to look at because what you do is you hold everything constant except for one thing that you change you know you get one people one experience another group of people another experience and then expose them to all the same things so all the same trial stimulus materials and you see okay the people who got some information ahead of time that they weren't supposed to pay attention to uh did they evaluate the evidence differently uh did they come up with different judgments and so uh The Meta analysis in 2022 is based on over 11,000 total participants and it it summed up the studies on that specific topic and the sum up um what was the sum up yeah essentially what's on the slide there are the main findings the the fact that if you get exposed to publicity you're more likely to render a judgment of guilt and less likely to or have lower liking uh for the defendant and have higher ratings of their criminality based on your years of teaching and work and understanding human bias do you do you know why this happens yes if you don't mind advancing to the next slide I have a couple sections here one is on why we sort of soak up this pre-trial publicity in the first place and then the next section is on why that stays with us through a trial if we are to serve as jurors even when we don't want it to stay with us and so if I just start with uh the first topic you know why is it that we soak this up in the first place one reason is because of how we process information you know since the 80s social psychologists have studied this model that suggests that it's pretty straightforward you know sometimes we think deeply about things and we scrutinize arguments and find flaws in them and then sometimes we make quick decisions we like decision shortcuts and we only have so much cognitive capacity that the vast majority of our decisions and thought processes are more automatic and we call this peral root processing when it involves an influence situation you know so if you're making some kind of deter determination about something whether you should purchase a certain car or vote for a certain political candidate or something like that you can go through and you can analyze every single thing and try to be as objective as possible or you can make a decision in two seconds oh my neighbor has that car and they like it you know and so the problem with peripheral processing is sometimes you're going to come to a conclusion that you wouldn't have come to before if you had thought about things more meth uh methodically you know more systematically and so the reason this applies here is because people when they're consuming media are often processing peripherally why because they might not be um completely able to focus on a story or they're scrolling quickly through a Newsfeed you know so if you're scrolling through a news feed or a social media feed uh or if you're watching the news while you're cooking dinner or something like that you're taking in information but you're not able to really devote the resources cognitively to to nitpick and so you'll see something like um frying cobber arrested for the murder of four students or you'll see something like this among items taken from suspect knives guns and automatically when we're processing at this superficial level which again most of the time we're doing we'll say oh okay so they they found the person who committed the crime and they have evidence and we don't take it a step further but if you actually stop and think uh then you realize oh wait a minute you know people get arrested all the time and it turns out they didn't commit a crime or wait a minute we all have knives in our homes but we haven't all killed somebody you a lot of knives in my kitchen a lot of households have guns and so we don't take that extra step to really think deeply about things a lot of the time when we're consuming media it sounds like you're telling me that we're just absorbing information and in Mr cober's case from the media people may take bits and pieces and that starts to create a level of knowledge or human bias we might feel like we know about something more than we do yeah are there other ways that that bias gets created yes and it looks like you ADV to the next slide so one thing that's relevant here too is uh listening to authority figures so uh I mentioned that um we're processing superficially a lot of the time peripherally and one readily available peripheral cue a lot of the time when it comes to this type of situation is hearing information from authority figures people who have status or expertise any kind of power and we tend to listen more to people in those positions and uh yes you know a lot of the time they have more knowledge but there are big problems with this uh one is that we assume that they're accurate we forget that they're humans too um that they make mistakes too that they have buses too uh you know like if I'm in charge of trying to um make a community feel safe by you know arresting the right person for a crime like I have a motivation I I want to I want to make sure you know I want to I convinced myself maybe that you know I've caught the right person and you know if I'm in that position doesn't make me less biased right we all have biases all humans have biases and so and they also could be wrong you know like I said people can get arrested for a crime when they didn't commit it uh and what we found in research over many many years decades is that if somebody has any kind of indicator of authority even if it's something as minor as height but certainly you know an occupational status title uh that people will take their words so far that they'll do things to contradict their own morals you know and they'll they'll be influenced in areas beyond the person's expertise like a doctor influencing you in your relationships or something that's totally irrelevant and so we take it a little bit too far um and in the case of Moscow and Lea County it's really small community right and so the authority figures are often going to be people who are known and well trusted and you know so that makes this effect even potentially more problematic and um you know as you know Chief fry the chief of of the police at the time had said that he was certain that he arrested the right suspect and he didn't have any doubts and so the community would say okay well the chief of police is sure so then I can be sure too uh but like I said you know we can't assume and there's no trial that had taken place yet and and so we can't assume that that's accurate information but we tend to take that a little bit uh too much at fa value the example that you gave of the police chief speaking out and offering what he thinks about a case does that is that something that creates more bias in the minds of the L Tod County residents that heard that yeah I mean they're familiar with him they know him to be an author figure uh you know they may know him personally or trust him personally and so yeah somebody outside of L County they'll still be affected by his authority status but maybe not as much right and and then he also has power over people in that community and that seems to carry some weight when it comes to this type of influence and then also you know the the President of University of Idaho saying you know we can feel safe now you know they they found the person it sounds very conclusive when there hadn't been a trial yet and so another authority figure who's pretty major in an area like Lea because so much is centered around the university are there other ways that you found that create bias yes if you don't mind advancing to the next slide uh this is the phenomenon that goes back maybe maybe a century we've been studying this in so many different contexts tons and tons of research on this phenomenon called classical conditioning and it's basically when we make associations between things and it causes us to have reactions that we didn't have before like for example uh if your alarm clock we don't really have alarm clocks that much anymore if your if your alarm sound on your phone if that's what you use H wakes you up this morning and you have kind of a negative response to it it might be because you Associated it with waking up before you wanted to before uh I know I always choose try to choose a sound that I don't have an aversion to but then it doesn't take long before know I have a negative reaction so you make this connection right but if that same tone was used every time uh somebody a loved one texted me then I wouldn't develop an aversion I might develop a favorable reaction so classical conditioning is when we develop a response to a stimulus could be a sound it could be any stimulus at all including a person because we've connected them with something that it has been paired with especially repeated pairings so in this particular case uh if the defendant's name is seen throughout media and social media a lot or his image is shown alongside things that are aversive negative words things like Terror murder evil uh or alongside known Killers um you know alongside details of the murder alongside uh information about you know tragic consequences things that make us feel bad what happens is it doesn't take that many pairings and then his name alone which was once neutral because most people wouldn't have known him uh becomes conditioned and it evokes those same kinds of feelings and they've done studies like this where they can make this happen within minutes if I could take a picture of any of you or multiple pictures of any of you show those interspersed with pictures of other people and at the same time present words consciously or not consciously that say things like Terror and evil and at the end of the study I can ask people what do you think of this person and the rating will be lower and so if you get that exposure a lot like in L where people are are getting a lot of media exposure and also social media exposure and having a lot of discussions and attending you know vigils and and they're really being exposed to kind of all these emotional reactions if they're thinking about him at the same time they they can't help make that connection even if they don't think he's guilty let me make sure I understand um how how big this is how far reaching this is we've been with this case pending for a year and a half and there's been to say a lot of media coverage there's a lot of pictures of Mr coburger in in the media do you mean that when we walk into trial in the rooms full of potential jurors there's going to be a great majority of them that before we sit down are going to have a feeling a bias against Mr cober yeah I do and you've seen the pictures these ominous headlines that connection can't help but be made do solve the way that bias gets created or do you have another one for I have one more um as far as things that happen largely while the publicity is coming in and you're getting exposed to it and and it's sort of a category of a lot of different influences that are emotional and motivational and this one I think is especially relevant to you know sourcing people out of lah County to featurers so uh the media played a role in inducing some emotions like it it does it likes to attract attention things like fear and anger and and sympathy and empathy but in that Community people are going to have those emotions anyway from everything that's going on but if the media uses phrases like killer on the loose everybody stay vigilant make sure you report all suspicious activity then they're arousing that even more uh and so what happens is when we have emotions like that they filter in how we process information just like when you're angry you're more likely to remember things that have made you angry in the past than things that have made you happy and when you're angry you're also more likely to have kind of an agenda with new information coming in and so for example and this is something that could stay with somebody this distorted information processing could stay with somebody and could get you know there could be a Resurgence during a trial where it keeps affecting somebody as they are reminded of their emotions because um you know they've Associated moods uh with different judgments of guilt like for example uh if you're angry you tend to be more punitive and you want retribution and in fact in one study they Associated anger of mock jurors during a trial with support for imposing a death sentence for somebody uh you know and they uh when they were angry they were less likely to pay attention to defense arguments so people aren't trying to be biased you know it's just that when we're in moods those moods filter how we process information how we take it in and you know I I think I may have mentioned this already uh but there's also kind of an emotional motivational component to feel like the person who committed the crime is under arrest it is the right person I think I mentioned it as you know being a Motivation by the police but the community has this motivation too in L to because they were living in fear during all these weeks where they were trying to find somebody to arrest and somebody was arrested and people said take a side of relief but that s of relief assumes that he's guilty and so we have this um coping mechanism basically uh where we want to get rid of these negative emotions and one way to do that is to feel like oh well if he committed a crime and he's under arrest then I can feel safe now and so that's something that could come into play too if you live within the region where the event occurred and that's because of the fear that was associated with any of the emotions really could potentially distort information processing that last Point relevant to fear but a lot of research on how anger influences judgments and how uh sympathy for victims empathy for victims influences judgments and certainly if you are in late time of attended vigils and or offered social support that you're really getting a lot of that empathy and sympathy as well or if you're exposed to the personal media stories about what happened so I think I understand the ways that a human bias just gets bigger and more solid in a person what happens if we seat a lah County jury and those biases are there what happens as we put on the trial and evidence is presented yeah well you know I mentioned this one can get carried through the trial this idea of motivational and motiv and emotional sources but there are other things that can happen during trial too that kind of exacerbate the problem and one of these is confirmation bias so this has to do with us wanting to confirm our expectations of things and one of the most fundamental human needs we have is a need for predictability you know you don't want to walk into this courtroom and feel like you have no idea what's going to happen that's uncomfortable we want to feel like uh we know what's going to happen uh and we know how people are going to behave and so part of this need for predictability is that it causes us to distort reality a little bit and so and one way that this does this is through the confirmation bias which is once we develop an expectation of something you know once we decide that this is true this is the case or uh you know the defendant is guilty or not guilty or the defendant lives a certain lifestyle or behaves a certain way or has uh you know then once we decide something everything goes through that filter I talked about an emotional filter this is a cognitive filter uh that we actually process information differently based on what we expect to see and hear it's just like if you know you're going to meet up with a friend and you think somebody called your name you know you expected it and so it made you hear it even when it didn't happen and if somebody does call your name you hear it more readily so we're kind of tuned in and so the processes I mentioned here this filtering uh can happen via three different processes one is selective attention so if I'm a juror and I have expectations about Mr cobber it doesn't have to be just that he's guilty but it could be expectations about him as a person uh if I have expectations coming in and I'm getting all this new evidence during trial going through that filter and paying attention to information that backs up my idea well I had this idea that he's a bad guy and this information backs that up so I pay I pay extra attention to that and then they talked about something where you know where he was kind of someone I really have to pay much attention to so you know we have this filter and then uh we process information too in a distorted manner we actually will change the information to fit in with what we think uh it's just a way of our mind simplifying our worlds and while these processes all help us not be overloaded cognitively they distort what we take in so we have to be aware of them and recall is distorted as well so you know trial takes place over a long period of time potentially and somebody has to remember a lot of information and if they have distorted recall that's consistent with their expectations before coming in that's obviously problematic is that the only thing that happens when we have new information at trial no I have a couple other things that I'd like to talk about and the first one is belief person verance which is really a direct consequence of the confirmation bias so it's just like it sounds as is the tendency for our beliefs to persevere even in the face of contradictory evidence you know confirmation bias supplies us with this filter because we have this filter if somebody gives us all these facts that go against what we think logically we just change our minds a lot of the time we don't in fact there's some evidence to suggest that sometimes we even cling more closely to our beliefs and anyone who's looked at anything on social media has probably seen evidence of this you know where somebody has a strong belief about something and then somebody provides actual facts that contradict it and then uh instead of saying oh you're right you know I I see your point of course that can happen sometimes the general tendency is for people to still stick with their beliefs anyway because they formed them when you're in the process of forming your beliefs that's different but once you form something it it's it tends to stick it's the same thing with stereotypes you know somebody has an assumption that elderly people are bad drivers and they see a whole bunch of evidence suggesting otherwise and even research studies I think like that then they no I still think I still think elderly people are bad drivers uh so that's police perseverance and in some cases people will even double down again social media they might even get more aggressively in line with their initial opinion after seeing evidence to the contrary so this is one reason that's directly aligned with the confirmation bias it sounds like they can work together when somebody already has a bias they've already made decisions about yeah really any expectation or decision or judgment uh even if you don't know that you have it uh you know I heard the phrase of growing legs well there there's a a famous social influence Searcher who used that same phrase with decision making like once you've decided something your decision grows legs of its own and so now it's not just the normal information uh necessary that for any irrational person because we all kind of have this tendency to be irrational in situations like this uh but it ends up uh causing us to distort reality a little bit and need a lot more evidence now than we should to change our minds what else impacts getting new information BR CL advance to the next slide I I want to mention a little bit about cognitive dissonance and cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling we have when we have like an inner Clash like an inner hypocrisy you know like if I'm religious but I don't uh adhere to one thing about my religion and there's this inter clash and we don't like that feeling and we like to reduce it minimize it prevent it so why is that relevant here um well if somebody is lives in Lea County uh they might have a dissonance experience because if they start during trial to believe that oh maybe the defendant is innocent you know maybe he shouldn't be convicted that belief might be battling another belief about loyalty to their Community because they know the community wants closure you know they know uh that the community wants him to be guilty they know the community wants to feel safe and so they have this inner clash and what happens we have this inter Clash lots of things can happen uh but one thing that could happen is we could distort reality that's another reason for kind of being a little bit less accurate when taking in information so if I'm a defend I'm sorry if I'm a juror from Lop County and I'm starting to kind of think oh maybe maybe he didn't do it uh there might be part of my brain convincing me that no no no he's he's guilty because of this inner Clash I want to get rid of the Clash is that because of of the Loyalty a person would F to the to Le County to their Community I think that's a a a big part of it and there could be other reasons with regard to community connections that could create that collash too like a concern that they might be known yeah who they are as a juror a concern that they might be known um you know they're they're you know just kind of picturing yourself sort of coming back to your community with the news that you were involved in a process that actually uh you know acquitted somebody for example you know and having to face people in your community which is something I touch on later a little bit too all right should we move forward yeah all right um I I know the Court's going to want to know can we fix this sure can can we get our jurors in here and tell them don't don't bring your bias in can we fix this what do you think knowing what you know about human bias I I would love that to be the case um you know I just don't see that as feasible when bringing jurors out of L County and I can tell you some problems with all the methods that people try to use it's just you know if you look at the research which they there are limitations to these and so one of them of course is juror selection let try to find people for example who haven't been exposed to publicity so there are problems with that can you recount all of the publicity that you've been exposed to no you know if I asked you to tell me about all of the interactions you had with people over the course of a week you're going to have forgotten some right uh but doesn't mean they're not going to be affecting you you know so maybe when I was at the grocery store the person checking me out had a negative expression on their face and I didn't recount that to you but maybe that memory is there and it's buried and when I go back in the grocery store I'm you know a little colder to them um and another possibility too is that retrieval cues can make some of these unconscious memories actually become conscious and maybe they affect us at that level you know so if I'm a jurer and I'm sitting in uh here and hearing all of this evidence uh something might remind me oh yeah and I remember they found this information and maybe it's something that's not admissible but now it's affecting me and I didn't report that I knew that because I didn't remember that I knew it until something cued that up and so a retrieval CU is basically something that reminds you of what you know and can't articulate yet or maybe don't have uh knowledge about it a conscious level uh and so that's there's a problem with that you know picking people who haven't been as exposed to a case and then and of course in Lea we talked about the saturation of media it would be hard to to find somebody to even say that but if they say that I I don't know if that really would be uh something we could rely on as being totally correct and then uh this is something that I I focus a lot of my research on and it's bias so there's a lot of research on how we overestimate ourselves you know we have overconfidence we tend to rate ourselves as better than average like better than average and intelligence there's one study where the vast majority of people rated themselves as better than average drivers you know but we can't all be better than average uh it included people who had gotten into multiple car accidents you know so while people might be thinking that they're making an accurate assessment of them themselves when they're asked hey do you have any bias you know for against the defendant do you have any uh you know or are you capable of setting aside your bias people probably often believe that they can set that bias aside um because it's it's in line with all of this research that we know about how we tend to overestimate ourselves uh so they're going to say they're less biased than they are uh that's been shown over and over again in a lot of settings and by the way the people who uh are the most bias have the most Distortion when they're estimating their bias in at least some cases that they've studied so far um that's some research I've done too uh and then also they're going to be biased about uh how much bias they have that's called the bias blind spot which has been studied too so I might acknowledge that other people might be biased but well I I won't be biased and I'll be capable of setting it aside so that's one process you know jury selection that we would hope would work uh but there are a lot of drawbacks to it so I wouldn't rely on that do you think that it's less likely to work in a situation like this with the amount of negative media coverage that has been going on for a long time yeah I mean if you ask somebody from Leah County to forget everything that they've heard about the case forget all the discussions they've had forget all the media they've been exposed to forget all the emotions that they've experienced you know set all that aside I mean can you really do that can you unar things and UNF things for an extended period of time uh to be objective that's that's quite an undertaking so yeah I think that's problematic you mentioned extended period of time this trial is projected to take three full months is that what you mean by extended period of time yeah yeah really any any the longer it is the the the more potentially Distortion there can be because your decision has grown legs and think things are getting filtered through filters uh and then uh emotion emotional things can carry a little bit more longevity so uh yeah so I wouldn't expect it to just go away if it's a long trial by any means but I'd expect to see it in a short or long is there anything else that can be attempted that might or might not work yeah my next slide is on instructions you know what and of course you know people would want to try to give instructions to jurors to to be unbiased and like I said people overestimate their ability to do this they don't even think they're that biased to begin with and the first step to not being influenced by bias is to acknowledge that you have bias so there's already an obstacle there and then you have to have the motivation to not be biased and I hope jurors have that you also have to have the cognitive capacity to be unbiased and that's where we run into a lot of problems because their cognitive capacity is going to be occupied by serving as a juror paying attention to information they don't have time to spend 80% of their mind uh you know trying not to be biased and catching all the bias and in fact there's research that suggests that when we try to suppress thoughts that we can think about them even more as soon as we let our guard down which is very soon because you have to think about other things at some point you know so if I try not to think about something like an argument I had with somebody or somebody said tries not to think about cigarettes but they're trying to quit smoking you know they could do that for a really short amount of time uh but as soon as they think about something else their mind gets flooded with those thoughts because in order for you to not think about something you have to think about it so that you can catch those thoughts and that process is automatic now most of what I've been talking about today is unconscious automatic processing and that's why it's so hard to control and with regard to instructions to disregard information whether it's something that people learned pre-trial or something they learned during trial that turns out to be inadmissible uh the research shows that those instructions typically don't work and sometimes they can backfire partly because of this thought suppression rebound effect uh and then uh there could be other reasons to like people want not wanting to be told how to think uh and I mentioned to that you know it applies to emotional information too so factual and emotional pre-trial publicity would still have influence even if people say don't let this affect you I I wouldn't assume that that works at all unfortunately okay how about um jury deliberation is that will that work if you have a juror in there who's going to maybe accidentally bring something in or interpret something based on something that heard before or they've remembered something over the course of trial will the other jurors push it out help them not to think about that will the group overcome that bi yeah so we would hope that you get a bunch of people together who are trying to be objective for them to sort of correct each other and uh while some of that might happen you what the research has shown is if if some people are exposed to pre-trial publicity and some aren't that can spread because you can't expect a juror to remember where they learned things like maybe they have information about DNA evidence and some of it came from trial and some of it didn't and how do you you disentangle that that's really really hard to do and so they might spread it unintentionally it might be spread intentionally too um but even if they we're we're assuming perfect jurors here you know it might spread unintentionally and then sort of contaminate the jurors during discussions and then there's also this phenomenon we've been studying for a long time of called group polarization which is when you get a group of people and if they're leaning towards a particular opinion when they discuss a topic that opinion gets stronger and stronger the more they discuss it another thing you could see potentially on social media like groups that you know are invested in a particular issue and so if the group is leaning towards negative judgments about Mr cober or judgments of guilt or anything even a little bit then discussions could actually make it worse and worse over time it could get a they could get polarized so I don't anticipate that discussions would fix the problem in fact I would expect it to exacerbate the problem and that might be why in that meta analysis I talked about the the effect of pre-trial publicity was Stronger when it came to Gro judgments verdicts versus individual judgments of guilt based on your years of teaching human bias and your extensive study of human bias do you have an opinion about whether the extensive pre-trial publicity has impacted the lot County jury pool I do I I think it would be it would be so hard to be a member of that community and be able to come in and be objective arguably impossible you know so uh we don't have a a known method for undoing things and the things have been done they've felt the emotions they've seen the publicity they've had the discussions you know they've been to the the vigils and and even if they want to be as objective as possible and even if we disregard some of the limitations I talked about before uh you know there's we we research has not uncovered a way to undo this after it's there uh and so the recommended best practice by the vast majority of researchers on this topic is find people who don't have that information you know restrict that information in the first plate find people who don't have that information and the same goes for that emotional experience and investment and so on you know utilizers who've had less exposure they have less reason for prejudgment Less motivation to find the defendant guilty it doesn't affect them their feelings of safety the community they don't have to worry about reporting back uh you know other people maybe ostracizing them if they didn't make the Judgment that was expected or wanted and so the my recommendation would be to find a community to recruit jurs from that's as far removed from leita as possible physically and psychologically thank you I don't have any other questions for you but if you hold on just a minute I think might okay thank you M Taylor your honor in any jurisdiction where there's been a tremendous amount of pre-trial publicity at least some of these biases would apply to a prospector jury pool correct yeah and the best thing if I'm understanding your testimony corly for this trial would be to have a jury pool with the largest amount the largest percentage of jurors who hadn't formed an opinion on this case already would that be fair to say I I mean you need I I can't speak to percentages you need somehow to find um uh enough people to serve on the jury who have not been exposed now this it's a high profile case so we know the exposure is all over the state and of course in priv but if you can have less exposure of FL uh buas in a case like this where there's been so much exposure across all counties are there unique challenges in selecting a jury that would apply anywhere so well I mentioned some unique things about Lea County and emotional investment in the community concern for community members and you know having felt that that fear uh wanting you know the defendant to be guilty so that they could resolve the fear and anger so you know there are all those emotional and social connections and of course Dr edelman's report which will come up later shows that a lot of people uh who live in Leah County are connected in some way to the university or the police involved in the case so they actually you know know people or or they live in L count and so that those kinds of things make uh because it's such a small community make Le unique experience and so you've reviewed Dr edelman's uh survey I have so does it sound correct that 75% of folks in lah County are not affiliated with University I I don't recall his percentages okay so off hand I would have to see the report I could I could look at if You' like okay and I should be more precise I believe the question was are you were a family member are you or a family member a student or employee at the University of Idaho in Moscow and the percentage of folks who responded know was 75 % does that does that sound right I I couldn't tell you without seeing it sorry remember um would it surprise you to find out that 60% of Lea County residents who were surveyed reported that they did not feel higher levels of stress or anxiety uh during the hunt for the killer in this case uh I don't know I don't know what percentage I would have estimated I just would have estimated it to be higher in L okay so is one strategy that the court could use in any jurisdiction whether the trial lives stays in Lea County or moves to Ada County would bringing in a larger jury pool alleviate some of these concerns across any jurisdiction uh well if we're talking about Lea County you know a lot of the things that I mentioned were not in the survey so you know there are emotions I mentioned that weren't assessed during the survey impressions of Mr cober that weren't in the survey so it could be that uh 90% of people think he's a bad guy but they don't think is guilty and then that still could influence judgment so it's really hard to to answer that question without you know I I didn't make the survey and even if I did there' be a lot of things that I would miss too you know so I I I can't make that determination about you said if you can maybe you can restate it and I can I appreciate answer thank you now I guess the last question I'll ask you is would you be surprised to find out that in the survey when jurors were asked jurors who were responding to the survey were asked what their opinion is of Brian coburger the highest percentage of prospective jurors that were surveyed who had no opinion of Mr coburger were Le County survey respondents so that surprised you uh that they have no opinion about whether he is guilty I think the question is just do you have an opinion of Mr cber uh um well it's a high-profile case that had a lot of coverage and the percentages are so high that people who have an opinion I imagine I don't have those in front of me but in statistics we call that a sealing effect when uh all the percentages are high you can't really see differences uh so I don't know if if if we're talking I don't know what numbers you're looking at but I don't know if that applies or not at this particular case thank you I have further questions uh M Taylor yes just a few questions for you this has been a special 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