Spot and Develop Narrative Triggers
“If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn’t.”
– Roger Ebert
Symbols come in many forms. We encounter and assimilate them every day in ways that translate to life or death: a light at an intersection signals it is safe to walk across a car-filled street. A simple drawing in our new product’s packaging warns how to avoid serious injury to our loved ones. These and a million other daily signs and symbols are simple, powerful, and meaningful. They alter our view of reality, and we change our behavior because of them. We change our behavior. Because of them.
Rosemary and her fellow jurors listened to hours of detailed arguments and evidence about obscure electrical components, sifting through a book of over 40 exhibits. The plaintiffs were arguing that the massive, multinational corporate defendant designed and manufactured a defective product and failed to warn of its dangers. There were twenty-five million dollars on the line. The explosion had seriously injured multiple workers. There was little evidence left of the electrical components to closely examine and determine what happened.
Each side’s experts developed theories about how the miracles of electricity caused the explosion, but with neither side offering a “Bill Nye the Science Guy” tutorial to understand the science, jurors felt widespread confusion with few willing to offer their thoughts out of fear that it might become painfully clear that they had no idea what they were talking about. The search for meaning was on. In complex cases, jurors look for it anywhere they can find it and cede control of deliberations to whoever is willing to step up to the plate and offer opinions with a hint of confidence or conviction.
Rosemary needed one exhibit. To the corporate defendant and its attorneys, the exhibit had no bearing on the facts whatsoever. It was irrelevant. Yet to Rosemary, Exhibit #6 explained it all. Shortly after learning about the explosion, a product manager had written and sent an email to lower-level managers, imploring them not to let the incident disrupt the nearly $8 million sales in the pipeline. It provided no details about the incident itself. It put forth no theories about what happened. It cited no similar, prior incidents. It made no references to questionable testing results. It had none of the “hot doc” elements we often see in similar cases. But, Exhibit #6 was more than enough for Rosemary to decide and argue her beliefs about what happened and who should win the case. It became a powerful symbol for Rosemary.
This column focuses on signs and symbols we use to derive deeper meaning about the stories that unfold in litigation: The signs that serve as triggers for larger narratives about what happened and why it means what you say it means.
The Psychology of Symbols. Philosopher Jean Baudrillard has written and spoken about how we desperately search for meaning when we are drowned in information. You can see this today. Authenticity is the new marketing ploy. Religious institutions are seeing active resurgence and increases in interest, members, and book sales — Bible sales in America were up 22% in October of 2024 according to the Wall Street Journal. (With that sentence we likely made bible sales a symbol of meaning-seeking in 2025.) Even tech-savvy Gen Z jurors are overwhelmed and looking for ways to manage. We don’t want to read instructions, we want to see them in pictures or videos. Symbols provide shortcuts to understanding and most importantly, to providing meaning, and as you know from reading this column, shortcuts are jurors’ favorite route.
Symbols make people feel safe and comfortable. By definition symbols are a thing that indicates another thing, typically a more complex and involved idea, concept, or experience that is captured by the symbol. Symbols require shared context, behavior, and most of all, meaning. Here are three ways the psychology of symbols matters to jury economics.
Symbols As Narrative Triggers. Common stories have core elements. The best symbols represent one of those unmistakable elements: a shortcut way for the audience to understand a larger, more complex system, and fill in the rest. This is the reason plaintiffs recycle some of the same, successful tropes about bad corporate conduct and defendants benefit from themes asking jurors, “What would you expect?” Both trigger a familiar, egocentric story that jurors can feel proud to (mostly) build on their own. Symbols are a critical piece of leveraging the power of jurors’ egocentric stories born of familiarity and comfort. We write (and say) best what we know best. Familiar narratives have legs as well as persistence. If we can envision a product manager sitting in a non-descript office typing an email to his sales team — voila, an entire narrative is born.
Exhibit #6 proved to Rosemary something about the corporate defendant that she would not hear from the testimony and could trust in the face of slick and sophisticated trial lawyers. While injured plaintiffs lay in hospital beds, the defendant worried about sales. Rosemary imagined a powerful conspiracy unbound by facts or evidence, of a company that must have known there were problems with its product but set those concerns aside to maximize its profits. She drove a plaintiff verdict of $25 million in the face of her fellow jurors’ confusion that prevented them from effectively rebuffing her strong belief in a narrative she recognized from her experience, symbolized in documented “hard” evidence, and argued effectively in deliberations.
How can you look for and develop your best symbolic narrative triggers? Consider three criteria.
Symbolic “Narrative Triggers” Familiarize. The best symbols take a new, complex, or unfamiliar concept or event and reflect something your audience already knows. It suddenly feels comfortable, relatable, and trustworthy because of the connection. It triggers in our minds a related set of familiar human behaviors, actions, and motives. A product manager writing an email about protecting sales after a catastrophe is inherently an employee worried about his own job with an employer who has either put undue profit-pressure on its employees or has failed to establish norms in the workplace that promote and protect appropriate conduct. You can picture this person and this workplace right now, just like Rosemary did. As a litigator, seek out and listen for testimony in your case that feels familiar in small or unexpected ways and be creative about ways to link the unfamiliar evidence to jurors’ familiar experiences. How does it relate to what most people do most days (e.g. work, care for loved ones, experience the world around them)? How does it relate to common challenges people face every day (e.g. persisting in the face of challenges, choosing between two options in a dilemma, maintaining loyalty to self or others)?
Symbolic “Narrative Triggers” Visualize. The best symbols take a new, complex, or unfamiliar concept or event and make it something everyone can see in their mind’s eye. Sure, it helps if the symbol is already visual: smoking gun language in an email, or video evidence of the incident in question (which everyone assumes exists these days). But do not give up on finding or developing symbols from testimony alone that can serve as a visual trigger. Ask questions that develop visual details about key facial expressions, the colors, locations and proximities of physical structures, and more. You want to be able to describe and present the symbol of a victim crying in front of a sunset or a villain in a black shirt inappropriately smiling. So, ask the questions that elicit those moments. Give color to the world you want jurors to imagine.
Symbolic “Narrative Triggers” Generalize. Finally, the best symbols take a new, complex, or unfamiliar concept or event and communicate an entire narrative rather than simply explain an isolated or limited event. This element is critical. It means your audience takes a shortcut to understanding not just what happened in a given moment but how and why it came to pass because of the overarching story in which that moment occurred. Objectively, Exhibit #6 tells jurors nothing about whether a product was defectively designed or manufactured and does not speak to the product’s warnings at all. Objectively, the defense attorneys were right that it seems irrelevant. But jury economics tells us something very different about the power of a symbol — a product manager sending an email one day after an explosion — that generalizes to broader behavior, patterns, and motives that ring true and that jurors can use as a key lens through which they see other evidence.
Do not shake your head in frustration and disbelief the next time you see a Rosemary or an Exhibit #6. We’ve seen hundreds of each in our nearly 50 combined years of experience. Rosemary was doing nothing different than what we all do, and nothing you should not expect to discuss in your next mediation or observe in your next focus group. She was searching for and finding important meaning in symbols.
Thomas M. O’Toole, Ph.D. is President of Sound Jury Consulting in Seattle, WA. Kevin R. Boully, Ph.D. is Senior Consultant at Perkins Coie in Denver, CO.
