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Reach jurors across the generations: recognizing the effects of life experiences will help you segment a jury pool into groups whose values and prejudices you can accommodate.

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This article addresses persuading jurors from different generations, but it may be more productive, and certainly more fun, to first discuss pickles--specifically, Vlasic pickles.

Cucumbers are mentioned at least twice in the Bible, and history records people eating pickles more than 3,000 years ago. (1) It would seem that civilization has never been without them. When the vice president of marketing for Vlasic, the country's best-known pickle manufacturer, realized no one really knew much about the types of pickles people like, he asked psychophysicist Howard Moskowitz to help. (2)

Along the way to discovering that Vlasic pickles tasted good but not great, Moskowitz found that most mass-marketed pickles had a weak or moderate--certainly not strong--taste. Yet more than half of consumers who participated in taste tests gave strong-tasting pickles a high-liking rating.

Strong-tasting pickles were not available in the grocery store; instead, pickle makers chose to make middle-of-the-road pickles that satisfied only about 40 percent of the market. (3) Their pickles offended no one, yet delighted no one.

None of this surprised Moskowitz, who knew that in appealing to the likes or dislikes of human beings, universality is a myth, but "horizontal segmentation" can be successful. (Horizontal segmentation is grouping people by their preference patterns, which may be altogether different from dividing them by age, by income, or even by the pickles they previously purchased.) In other words, there is no such thing as a perfect pickle.

Moskowitz's research revealed there are three distinct pickle customers: some like strong-tasting pickles, others prefer a moderate taste, and yet another group likes weak-tasting--but crunchy--pickles. Shortly afterward, Vlasic introduced a line of pickles ranging from weak-tasting Low Salt to strong-tasting Zesty. Understanding horizontal segmentation allowed Vlasic to crack the pickle code by tailoring its pickle choices to the preferences of each consumer segment. (4)

In the courtroom, instead of pickles with different tastes, there are jurors who vary, one from the other. They differ in age and life experiences and typically bring divergent points of view to bear on a case, along with other variables that will influence their opinions.

Some characteristics are common in the cohort to which they belong. Other differences will have to be established, just like taste preferences have to be established. You can't look at a person and really know what pickle he or she would like. The same goes for jurors. You can get a sense of what cohorts faced as a group and some general trends, but science can help you look even deeper.

Horizontal segmentation not only can be used to find a way to appeal to a population's varying pickle tastes, it can also be applied in the courtroom to appeal to a jury composed of members of distinct age groups with different experiences and beliefs that affect their thinking about a case.

Any meaningful study of a generation requires examining the life-shaping events its members shared. Sociologists call these people "generational cohorts." They "are people born over a relatively short and contiguous time period who are deeply influenced and bound together by the events of their formative years.... [I] t is the events that occur at various critical points in the group's lifetime that create cohorts and define core values." (5)

Scientists who study cognitive processes say that when these life-shaping events occur is as important as the event itself in forming a person's values and beliefs. People of similar ages have similar memories, recalled predominantly from adolescence and young adulthood. People also "connect," or appear to have personal experiences with, the events they recall, suggesting that these events are likely to influence them in the future.

Experiences from young adulthood are likely to influence jurors well into their adult years. Cognitive scientists have discovered that consumers' are most prone to the socialization of preferences for music around age 23 and preferences for movie stars at age 14.

The...

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