Oral Arguments before the Supreme Court: The Interplay of Gender, Emotional Content, and Cognitive Complexity

• In Event: Navigating sexism: attorneys and judges

Abstract

Building upon the work of Gleason, Jones, and McBean (2018), we seek to assess if the effect of emotional content during oral arguments is not only conditional on gender, but also the cognitive complexity of the speakers rhetoric. Using LIWC, we code all attorney rhetoric during the 2015 United States Supreme Court term for both emotional content and cognitive complexity. We hypothesize, consistent with previous findings, that female attorneys will be more successful when they conform primarily to their stereotyped gender role, specifically, using rhetoric that is both cognitively simple and highly emotional. Men, juxtaposed, should be more successful when their rhetoric before the Court is emotionally low but has a higher degree of integrative complexity.

Authors

• Jessica Stone, University of Texas El Paso

• Ariana A. Perez, University of Texas at El Paso

• Todd Curry, University of Texas El Paso