Olivia Bullock

speaker

283 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 25 Mar

Olivia Bullock’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 2.

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The Last Show with David Cooper · Legal Jargon in Court Means More Guilty Verdicts · 25 Mar 2026 podcast

Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah, that's a great question.

So the idea for this study came because I was actually watching Forensic Files, like the late night TV show that's all about crime drama.

I was watching it and I realized that there is a ton of jargon that's present when we talk about legal proceedings.

I usually study jargon in health and science context, so I hadn't thought about it in the context of the legal system.

But when I was watching forensic files, I realized there's people in a trial proceeding who are really, really familiar with the terminology being used.

And you refer to like Latin and we think of like mens rea ad hominem, you know.

there's eminent domain there's people who are really familiar with that language like the lawyers on the cases the judges the expert witnesses and then there are the people in the room who this might be their first time ever hearing words like that before members of the jury and even the defendant themselves and i found myself really curious about what that knowledge gap or that familiarity gap might be doing for people who are actually trying to take part in legal proceedings

And so I ran an experimental study where I exposed people to trial transcripts that either contained legal jargon or had those legal jargon terms spelled out in plain language and asked people how they would vote to decide on those cases.

And what I found was that people who saw the legal jargon condition were much more likely to say that they would vote guilty in those cases.

Yeah, it's a great question.

So one of the things that I think is at play there is, I think you're right, that sometimes when we're uncertain, we can default to the status quo, which in this case would be presuming that somebody is innocent, right?

Because we have this presumption of innocence until proven otherwise.

But what I found in this study was that there's something that happens when our processing of information is disrupted.

As humans, we really like to process things at like a surface superficial level.

Imagine when you go to the grocery store, you're kind of on autopilot, right?

You're like going through the aisles, you're picking the things that you know, you might pick up some things that are like cool colors or logos, but you're not really thinking super effortfully about your experience.

And that's because as humans, we're motivated to not be super effortful.

We don't want to waste our resources.

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