I’ve just started Never Split the Difference, a book about negotiation (by an FBI hostage negotiator), and he starts out by saying that logical reasoning is what academics had touted and it didn’t work in practice, because of emotions. Similarly, Beth Loftus, when at U of Washington, did research showing even how you framed the question could change people’s recollections. George Lakoff talks about frames affecting perceptions as well. I don’t doubt that lawyers are on top of this, creating plausible alternate hypotheses and portraying stories that justify them, complete with plays to emotion. There’s some evidence that we can make people more resistant, but we’d have to bake that into education, and we can’t even get good critical thinking training there. Sigh.

In that case, I don’t know what you could do about it, to stop your emotions being played upon for, as you say, purposes not entirely benign, without also taking away from either – or both! – of the ability for the state to enforce laws, and the rights of the accused to defend themselves. I wonder if there is some sort of training that could help people to realize when they’re being manipulated? That you could give to prospective jurors and readers of headlines alike?