PT146 · S3 · Q8 Numerous studies suggest that when

This one feels somewhat tempting to me because it looks like it might be hinting at an Alternate Explanation -- jurors don't think of scientific evidence in the courtroom differently because they trust that the judge has pre-screened it for accuracy, they think of it differently because their fellow jurors convince them to think of it differently. Here's the problem with that ... if we stick to the actual wording of the answer choice, it's not leading us far enough into that story we were just telling. We can either say NO, jurors' reactions to sci evid isn't influenced by other members of the jury at all. (that would have no impact on the argument, other than maybe to strengthen it a little bit by ruling out the influence of other jurors.) or we can say YES, jurors' reactions to sci evid are influenced by other members of the jury. But is that our big weakener? We're saying, "Not so, author! You forget -- jurors' reactions to scientific evidence are influenced by other members of the jury." It's such a weak truth to say that one's reaction is influenced by other people. We don't know in what way or in what direction it's influenced, so we're just telling ourselves too much of a story to say, "the other jurors are convincing us to trust this scientific evidence more than we would trust similar evidence presented outside the courtroom". Because the hypothesis of the legal theorists was that the trusting effect was primarily due to the pre-screening process, the author would still allow for the idea that other jurors influence us too, somewhat (just not the primary reason).

Even though an expert witness who is presenting scientific evidence is definitely one source of scientific evidence within a courtroom context, you don't need to have an expert witness in order to have scientific evidence presented. So learning about how jurors determine the credibility of an expert witness would only partially inform us about why jurors in general trust scientific evidence more in the courtroom. The curious comparison is that the jurors trust "evidence X" more if they hear it in a courtroom than they would if they heard the exact same "evidence X" the courtroom. Since we would never be gauging the credibility of an expert witness outside the courtroom, by talking about an expert witness, we're no longer talking about the sort of situation the Curious Fact is describing. If this answer said, "how jurors determine the credibility of the scientific evidence that is being presented at a trial" we'd pick it.

Whether people do or don't draw upon their own scientific knowledge in assessing scientific evidence, that wouldn't explain why they are more trusting in a courtroom vs. outside of a courtroom. If they were exclusively using their own knowledge to assess, then there would be no difference between assessing evidence inside vs. outside a courtroom context. Since we already know for a fact there IS a difference between how evidence is assessed in each of those two contexts, we know that something changes when these jurors are inside a courtroom, but their own scientific knowledge isn't the sort of thing that would be different in one case vs. the other.

This is getting way too far removed from what we're trying to examine. We're just looking to explain why "evidence X" is more trusted if viewed in a courtroom context than if viewed outside of one. The sort of situation described in this answer, in which two experts have conflicting assessments, is just too different and too messy to inform our thinking on the issue we are trying to examine.