Abstract
This study investigates the effect of foreign accent on the believability of witnesses in a civil trial. Specifically, this study considers whether, in the context of a US medical malpractice trial, a doctor with a foreign accent is viewed as less believable than a doctor with a domestic accent presenting contradictory testimony. Participants in this study heard the fictional, recorded audio testimony in English of two doctors (portrayed by two different male actors, one a native English speaker and the other a native Korean speaker) who provide contradictory opinions as to the proper course of treatment of a patient. Each actor was recorded reading both the part of the treating physician and the expert witness. Two versions of paired recordings were created, one with the Korean-accented actor portraying the treating physician and the US-accented actor portraying the expert witness, and the other version with the actors' roles reversed. Forty participants heard one of the two randomly-assigned versions of the testimony. After listening to the testimony of both physicians, participants responded to four independent questions asking which of the two doctors they found to be (a) more believable, (b) more knowledgeable, (c) more competent, and (d) more likeable. The study's results indicate a bias in favor of the US-accented doctor in believability and likeability, regardless of whether he was the treating physician or the expert witness. Furthermore, the results show that this bias is present even when the US-accented doctor is considered to be a less knowledgeable or competent physician. These findings are consistent with research that has detailed numerous instances of discrimination based on foreign accent (e.g., Mastuda, 2001), and with previous studies that have found accent to influence potential jurors' opinions about eyewitnesses in mock criminal trials (Frumkin, 2007; Sobral Fernández and Prieto Ederra, 1994). The present study builds on this previous body of work and adds to the field by further defining this bias specifically in terms of relative believability between two equally-qualified expert witnesses and by addressing the potential impact of this bias on civil judicial proceedings. The present study's findings are significant in that they indicate that the perceptions of believability and likeability co-occur, and that those perceptions are not related to considerations of competence or knowledge.