Stereotyping is seen as pejorative; a tool to promote racism and bigotry.

Even in its most benign form, it keeps people from processing new or unexpected information and biases their impression formation process.

Society has condemned stereotyping. But there’s a segment of society where it’s alive and well.

That segment is made up of “experts” who testify almost exclusively for insurance companies.

This, in a nutshell, is the playbook for defense experts:

The meta analytic research and other large scale studies with ____________________ largely shows full symptom resolution within a few weeks post-injury, and, in some cases, up to three months….

[Bonus points of course if “meta” is worked into the discussion.]

But there’s a big problem with that position.

It contains a fallacy. It’s referred to as a fallacy of division or an ecological inference/population fallacy. It occurs when inferences about the nature of individuals are deduced from inferences about the group to which those individuals belong.

The implicit or explicit defense argument is that because most people get better within a certain amount of time a specific individual must have also gotten better within that same period of time.

The flaw in this reasoning lies in the assumption that individual cases must conform to the statistical trend.

It overlooks the variability among individuals and fails to account for the possibility that some may not follow the typical pattern. The general trend observed in a group does not necessarily apply universally to every member of that group.

A more nuanced and logically sound approach would involve considering individual factors, such as the severity of the condition, the presence of complicating factors, or the effectiveness of the treatment. But that wouldn’t promote the defense agenda.

I really question whether a defense witness—who relies on opinions with embedded fallacies—qualifies to testify under ER 702.

It says:

If scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the trier of fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a witness qualified as an expert by knowledge, skill, experience, training, or education, may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise.

Do you think that an opinion built on fallacy really would assist the jury decide medical causation issues?