Law and human behavior
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Law and human behavior · Dec 2007
The role of societal benefits and fairness concerns among decision makers and decision recipients.
Four experiments examined the role of costs and benefits versus procedural and distributive justice for procedural fairness and procedural evaluations among decision makers and decision recipients. Experiments 1 and 2 examined the responses of actual judges in a 2 (high versus low benefit) x 2 (search procedure conducted respectfully versus disrespectfully) randomized factorial. ⋯ Studies 3 and 4 varied role (authority versus subordinate), procedural respect, and societal benefits. Both experiments supported our predictions that procedural criteria would dominate the procedural evaluations of subordinates whereas outcome concerns such as societal benefits would dominate the procedural evaluations of authorities.
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Law and human behavior · Dec 2007
Hot cognition in investigative judgments: the differential influence of anger and sadness.
The authors predicted that the cognitive appraisal tendencies associated with sadness and anger would exert different influences on investigators' crime-related judgments. Supporting evidence was found in an experiment with 61 experienced criminal investigators. ⋯ Second, when making judgments of the case, sad participants were sensitive to the consistency of a witness statement with the central hypothesis of the investigation, indicating substantive processing, whereas angry participants were unaffected by statement-hypothesis consistency, indicating heuristic processing. The findings suggest that the process of reliability assessment can be better understood by consulting theories of attribution and information processing.