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Actually, not including face, tone of voice, etc. is probably going to make the jury more accurate, not less.
A while back they did a set of mock trials, where they gave one set of juries a black defendant giving testimony, another set of juries a tape recording, and a third set just a transcript. The more aware the jury was of the race of the defendant, the more likely they were to find him guilty…
I realize you’re just abstracting it, but that’s one of those cases where knowing the precise procedure would be useful. Particularly I’m interested in knowing what instructions they gave to the mock defendant when giving testimony.
Was he told that he was in fact guilty, or completely innocent of all charges? Or did they just tell him to read lines? I’m assuming they constructed this trial to make a point about racial biases in juries, but there’s a hell of a lot of stuff you’d have to control for first before you can assert it’s due to the race difference before other more obvious causes like body language and tone, etc.
I like how you narrow down “witness” to “defendant”, and ignore the fact that the jury has to decide if the guy is telling the truth or lying through his teeth, all to make some ham-fisted point about race.