Order effects and the evaluation bias in legal decision making.

The following article from European Journal of Social Psychology, “Racist biases in legal decisions are reduced by a justice focus” by Joris Lammers and Diederik A. Stapel published online on 1 December 2010 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com), has been retracted by agreement between the co-author, the journal Editor in Chief, Tom Postmes, and John Wiley and Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed following the results of an investigation into the work of Diederik A. Stapel (https://www.commissielevelt.nl/). The Levelt Committee has determined that this article contained data that was fabricated as supplied by Diederik A. Stapel. His co-author was unaware of his actions, and not in any way involved. REFERENCE Lammers, J. & Stapel, D. A. (2011). Racist biases in legal decisions are reduced by a justice focus. European Journal of Social Psycholology, 41, 375–387. DOI:10.1002/ejsp.783

Although the influence of gender ideology on lay decision-making has been established, it is not known to what extent expertise may mitigate gendered biases and improve decision-making quality. In a set of controlled experiments, trial court judges and laypeople evaluated a hypothetical child custody case and a hypothetical employment discrimination case. The role of expertise was tested in two ways: by comparing judges’ and laypeople’s decision-making and by examining relative differences in expertise among judges. Judges were no less influenced by litigant gender and by their own gender ideology than the lay sample. Judges with greater subject-matter expertise were also no less influenced by gender ideology than other judges. In some cases, expertise was associated with greater, not less, bias. The results of this study suggest that expertise does not attenuate gendered biases in legal decision-making.

Within the United States, declines in the overt expression of racial prejudice over several decades have given way to near universal endorsement of the principles of racial equality as a core cultural value. Yet, evidence of persistent and substantial disparities between Blacks and Whites remain. Here, we review research that demonstrates how the actions of even well‐intentioned and ostensibly non‐prejudiced individuals can inadvertently contribute to these disparities through subtle biases in decision making and social interactions. We argue that current racial attitudes of Whites toward Blacks in the United States are fundamentally ambivalent, characterized by a widespread contemporary form of racial prejudice, aversive racism , that is manifested in subtle and indirect ways, and illustrate its operation across a wide range of settings, from employment and legal decisions, to group problem‐solving and everyday helping behavior. We conclude by describing research aimed at combating these biases and identify new avenues for future research.

When deliberating, jurors may introduce misinformation that may influence other jurors’ memory and decision-making. In two studies, we explored the impact of misinformation exposure during jury deliberation. Participants in both studies read a transcript of an alleged sexual assault. In Study 1 (N = 275), participants encountered either consistent pro-prosecution misinformation, consistent pro-defense misinformation, or contradictory misinformation (pro-prosecution and pro-defense). In Study 2 (N = 339), prior to encountering either pro-prosecution or pro-defense misinformation while reading a jury deliberation transcript, participants either received or did not receive a judicial instruction about misinformation exposure during deliberation. Participants in both studies completed legal decision-making variables (e.g., defendant guilt rating) before and after deliberation, and their memory was assessed for misinformation acceptance via recall and source memory tasks. In Study 1, misinformation type did not influence legal decision-making, but pro-prosecution misinformation was more likely to be misattributed as trial evidence than pro-defense or contradictory misinformation. In Study 2, pro-defense misinformation was more likely to be misattributed to the trial than pro-prosecution misinformation, and rape myths moderated this. Furthermore, exposure to pro-defense misinformation skewed legal decision-making towards the defense’s case. However, the judicial instruction about misinformation exposure did not influence memory or decision-making. Together, these findings suggest that misinformation in jury deliberations may distort memory for trial evidence and bias decision-making, highlighting the need to develop effective safeguards for reducing the impact of misinformation in trial contexts.

Six studies investigate whether the effect of racist biases on judges' legal decisions on minority defendants is reduced by a “justice focus.” Given that people associate legal decision-making with the need to do so in a colorblind manner, a justice focus blocks the effect of racist biases on legal decisions. Experiment 1 shows that explicit instructions to adopt a justice goal decrease biases. Experiment 2 shows that a primed justice focus also decreases biases. Experiments 3a and 3b show the role of pre-existing legal expertise, which makes people more susceptible a justice goal. Experiments 4a and 4b apply these findings by studying the role of a justice focus among professional courtroom judges. Together, these results demonstrate the importance of a justice focus in preventing racist biases in legal decision-making. Importantly, a justice focus is a necessary but no sufficient condition for the colorblind administration of justice. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A LONG-STANDING puzzle to economists is that some manufacturers prefer that their products are sold at not less than "fair trade" retail prices.' Before the courts upset the legal status of resale price maintenance, some of these manufacturers spent millions to prevent distributors from selling their products below the list price. The manufacturers' interests seem to be best served when distributors resell their products under such competitive conditions as may exist at the level of distribution and at the lowest prices resulting from that competition. If manufacturers set a floor to the resale price then they also set a ceiling to their sales and thus apparently support a policy that runs counter to their own self-interest. Let the manufacturers fix a price at the factory gate at which all distributors may buy the product. Would not the manufacturers' sales and profits be greater the lower is the price at which distributors resell their products to consumers? If so, then what explains the strong desire of some manufacturers to prevent distributors from

The goals of this paper are twofold. First, it proposes a basic organizing framework for when a plaintiff’s race, ethnicity, and gender may impact civil jury awards. The framework takes into account psychological and structural sources of bias and the ways in which they may interact systematically with instructions that provide jurors with more or less discretion. Second, the paper employs a methodological innovation to overcome one of the primary barriers to empirical field research on race bias in civil legal decisions: The absence of plaintiff demographic information. The dataset is comprised of jury verdicts in tort cases combined with information from the U.S. Census Bureau regarding race and ethnicity. Statistical tests measure the relationships between race, ethnicity, gender and awards for economic damages and pain and suffering. Overall, the results were consistent with the psycho-structural framework. Where jurors had discretion (i.e., pain and suffering damages), they awarded less to Black plaintiffs than to White plaintiffs, indicating potential psychological bias. Where jurors had less discretion (i.e., lost income) they awarded less to female plaintiffs and more to Asian plaintiffs than to male and White plaintiffs, respectively, a reflection of structural income disparities. Thus, the framework and method have promise for exploring relationships between structural and psychological bias and differential civil jury awards.Supplemental material to this article is available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2811266.

This essay seeks to explicate hindsight bias as a pervasive cognitive heuristic and discusses its manifestation in everyday judgment and decision-making, incorporating the representative psychological factors that underlie different conceptual constructs. With the combination of theoretical frameworks with past contextualized experiments, three essential applications of hindsight bias in financial investment, legal decisions, and medical diagnosis, including their significance in society, are introduced respectively by extrapolation. Judgment concerning financial investment and economic outlook necessitate an unprejudiced future-centric perspective but is often susceptible to a biased retrospection that results in unwise decisions. Similarly, in the criminal justice system, hindsight bias may be responsible for numerous impartial decisions made, which would interfere with legal impartiality. In medical settings, people also have a habitual tendency to overestimate their diagnostic abilities, which may have negative implications for future therapeutic treatment. Finally, potential methods to ameliorate the influence of hindsight bias are suggested to guide more sound decisions and enhance societal efficiency.

Abstract. Hindsight bias is the tendency to overestimate the foreseeability of an outcome once it is known. This bias has implications for decisions made within the legal system, ranging from judgments made during investigations to those in court proceedings. Legal decision makers should only consider what was known at the time an investigation was conducted or an offense was committed; however, they often review cases with full knowledge of a negative outcome, which can affect their judgments about what was knowable in the past. We conducted a systematic review of the literature on hindsight bias and law. We present five areas of law that hindsight bias affects (medical malpractice, forensic investigation, negligence, patent, criminal), two types of evidence that may lead to hindsight bias (visual and auditory evidence), and hindsight bias in experts and judges. Finally, we discuss strategies for reducing hindsight bias in legal decisions and recommend future research.

Adversary Presentation and Bias in Legal Decisionmaking

This chapter critically evaluates how experiments are used to study cognitive processes involved in legal reasoning. Looking at research on legal presumptions, heuristic processing, and various types of bias in judicial decision-making, the analysis considers how experiments with judges, lay participants, and other legally trained populations have contributed to our understanding of the psychological processes involved in fact-finding and legal decision-making. It explores how behavioral economics, dual process models, cultural cognition, and motivated reasoning frameworks have been used to inform experimental research. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what findings add to our normative understanding of issues like accuracy and neutrality in decision-making and a call to better integrate knowledge gained through experimental methods across disciplinary boundaries.

Purpose The purpose of the paper is to investigate how judges and the general population formulate judgments on legal cases, considering both legal and extralegal factors, with a focus on the significance of the defendant’s sex. Design/methodology/approach The first experiment aimed to determine if non-lawyers’ judgments are affected by the defendant’s sex, using brief excerpts from indictments with the defendant’s sex interchanged. Study 2 aimed to verify if this effect applies to future lawyers, suggesting a peculiar approval granted by men to women displaying illegal sexual behaviour towards young men. Findings The findings showed that the sex of the offender only influenced judgments in sexual offences, with male participants being more lenient towards female offenders. Originality/value The originality/value of the paper lies in its examination of the influence of the defendant’s sex on judgments made by both judges and the general population, specifically focussing on non-lawyers’ judgments. While previous studies have shown that judges tend to be more lenient towards women in certain cases, this paper adds novelty by investigating whether a similar effect is observed among non-lawyers. Moreover, the research sheds light on the relevance of the defendant's sex in cases of sexual offences and identifies a gender-specific leniency towards female offenders, particularly among male participants. The study also explores how this effect might extend to future lawyers, providing insights into societal attitudes regarding illegal sexual behaviour involving women and young men. Overall, the paper contributes valuable information to the understanding of how sex-based biases can influence legal judgments and decision-making processes.

Diversity and Bias in Legal Decision-Making

Shifting Visual Attention to Reduce Bias in Legal DecisionMaking

For generations, there had been strenuous resistance to the notion that judges are purely rational beings in their legal decision-making. In 1921, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Benjamin Cardozo — who at the time was a judge on the New York Court of Appeals — agreed. Then, in 1930, legal realist Jerome Frank speculated that judicial decisions could reflect such mundane influences as what the judge ate for breakfast. A decade later, when Frank sat on the federal bench, he continued with this line of reasoning. Contemporary judges and legal scholars have underscored the same sentiment. In recent decades, social scientists have demonstrated that people’s cognitive resources are limited. Accordingly, people often use mental shortcuts — heuristics — to solve complex problems. While useful for approximating solutions to problems that would otherwise prove too difficult if tackled directly, these shortcuts sometimes result in erroneous cognitive biases. Research suggests that these errors may influence judicial decision-making. For example, these types of shortcuts may lead to racial stereotypes such as associating race and crime. In turn, such automatic associations may lead to sentencing disparities. In this Article I explore implicit, subconscious race bias in judicial decision-making and its implications for judicial recusal. In Part I, I describe an unmistakable instance of racial stereotyping and prejudice demonstrated by a federal judge, in order to exemplify that judges harbor such attitudes. In Part II, I explore examples of white judges being racially biased against black litigants and what this may mean for judicial recusal. In Parts III and IV, I explore the extent to which black judges can be racially biased against white and black litigants, respectively. Overall, I contend that in light of the complex nature of subconscious race bias, different recusal standards should be used for black and white judges depending upon other contextual considerations.