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Question

How do stories shape jury verdicts, according to Tania Lombrozo?

Answered from The Story of Stories · Hidden Brain · 2026-10-26

Tania Lombrozo points to the story model of juror decision-making from Pennington and Hastie. Jurors build a mental story of what happened from the testimony and convict or acquit depending on which side's story accounts for the evidence better. The troubling result is that changing only the order of testimony, so one side's story is easier to assemble, changes which version jurors believe, even with identical facts.

▸In their words

“What makes it a better story is just the fact that it was presented in the right temporal order” Tania Lombrozo · at 42:58 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on Hidden Brain (2026-10-26). Read the whole episode summary →

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