Testing the waters: An investigation of the impact of hot tubbing on experts from referral through testimony.

Objective: The present research examined whether concurrent expert testimony ("hot tubbing") and court-appointed testimony reduced adversarial allegiance in clinical experts' judgments compared with traditional adversarial expert testimony.

Hypotheses: We predicted Hypothesis 1: Defense experts would render more not responsible judgments and lower ratings of criminal responsibility than would prosecution experts; Hypothesis 2: Adversarial allegiance effects on experts' judgments would be heightened for adversarial experts and attenuated for concurrent experts over time; Hypothesis 3: Adversarial and concurrent experts would report higher dissonance than would court-appointed experts and adversarial experts' ratings would increase over time, concurrent experts' ratings would decrease, and court-appointed experts' ratings would remain unchanged.

Method: Clinicians and advanced clinical doctoral students conducted simulated criminal responsibility evaluations for the prosecution, defense, or court.