Storytelling in criminal trials: A model of social judgment

Criminal trials require jurors to make sophisticated judgments about complex information. The absence of formal guidelines for making these judgments suggests that some more basic communication process must underlie the formal discourse of trial. Storytelling is the everyday practice that organizes information and guides the interpretation and judgment processses. A model of stories as judgment devices illustrates the communicational bases of justice and judgment and raises the possibility that there are common structural elements in cognition, communication, and forms of social action.