“Gazing” is believing: a multimodal construction of litigants’ rhetorical testimonial credibility during the direct evidential presentation

In courtroom interaction, the pervasive assumption that “seeing is believing” grants visual conduct, especially gazing behavior, a crucial role in shaping perceptions of testimonial credibility. While prior legal and psychological research has acknowledged that gaze may influence credibility judgments, little is known about how litigants themselves actively mobilize gaze as a rhetorical resource during direct evidential presentation, particularly within the interactional complexity of authentic trials. Drawing on multimodal conversation analysis, this study conducts a fine-grained examination of gazing behavior in coordination with co-occurring verbal and embodied resources. Based on video data from the 2022 Depp v. Heard defamation trial, the analysis identifies three functional gazing categories and integrates the Aristotelian rhetorical triad to illustrate how litigants strategically mobilize visual conduct to fulfill distinct persuasive objectives: evaluative gazing grounds logos to reinforce logical coherence; regulatory gazing projects ethos to display institutional legitimacy; affective gazing embodies pathos to solicit emotional empathy. These findings demonstrate that testimonial credibility is an interactional accomplishment constructed through the interplay of verbal accounts and embodied conduct. By foregrounding gaze as a multimodal rhetorical resource, this study contributes to multimodal discourse and legal rhetoric research by offering an empirically grounded framework for analyzing how credibility is visually enacted in courtroom testimony, with implications for both scholarly analysis and judicial credibility assessment practices.