Brian H. Bornstein

Brian Bornstein is a psychological scientist who focuses on law-psychology, specifically how juries make their decisions and the reliability of eyewitness memory. He is a professor at Arizona State University, Professor Emeritus at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and Adjunct Professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In his dissertation, he studied how sympathy, pertaining to either the plaintiff or defendant, influences a jury's judgment and decision-making. Afterward, he continued his education by earning his MLS in Legal Studies from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2001.

Throughout his career, Bornstein has published over 180 articles and contributed to 21 books. He found there is a profound effect on judgment when the expert testimony is central to a case. The researchers found that juries are more likely to make punitive decisions due to a defendant's immigration status and ethnicity. They discovered that in witnessing a negative emotional event, individuals recall less information preceding the event but could recall more information from the event itself. Repeated testing can also increase recall for individuals in negative emotional and non-negative emotional events. This award was renamed the Lawrence S. Wrightsman Book Award the same year. In one chapter of the book entitled Jurors Can Distinguish Accurate from Inaccurate Eyewitness, Bornstein and Greene explained how many jurors' beliefs are biased however judges believe juries can determine the difference between accurate and inaccurate eyewitness testimonies. Also by the American Psychology-Law Society, he received the Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award in 2011.

Editorial work With Monica Miller, Bornstein edited Advances in Psychology & Law which currently has 5 volumes as of 2024. This series makes the connections between psychology and law through many different studies produced by researchers. This editorial work looks at many different studies that examine the beliefs and expectancies that are associated with the legal system. This series consists of the work of researchers who evaluated the interaction of emotion and affective states with patterns of conduct in the legal system. Bornstein, B. H. (2017). Popular Myths about Memory: Media Representations versus Scientific Evidence. Lexington Books. Bornstein, B. H. & Greene, E. (2017). The Jury Under Fire: Myth, Controversy, and Reform. Oxford University Press.