Law and human behavior
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Law and human behavior · Apr 2006
Randomized Controlled TrialChaos in the courtroom reconsidered: emotional bias and juror nullification.
A widespread presumption in the law is that giving jurors nullification instructions would result in "chaos"-jurors guided not by law but by their emotions and personal biases. We propose a model of juror nullification that posits an interaction between the nature of the trial (viz. whether the fairness of the law is at issue), nullification instructions, and emotional biases on juror decision-making. ⋯ Only when jurors were in receipt of nullification instructions in a nullification-relevant trial were they sensitive to emotionally biasing information. Emotional biases did not affect evidence processing but did affect emotional reactions and verdicts, providing the strongest support to date for the chaos theory.
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This paper draws on research in social and cognitive psychology to show how theories of judgment and decision making that incorporate decision makers' affective responses apply to legal contexts. It takes 2 widely used models of decision making, the rational actor and lens models, and illustrates their utility for understanding legal judgments by using them to interpret research findings on juror decision making, people's obedience to the law (e.g., paying taxes), and eyewitness memory. The paper concludes with a discussion of the advantages of modifying existing approaches to information processing to include the influence of affect on how legal actors reach judgments about law and legal process.
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Law and human behavior · Apr 2006
Randomized Controlled TrialGruesome evidence and emotion: anger, blame, and jury decision-making.
Judges assume that gruesome evidence can influence juror verdicts, but little is known about the manner in which the influence is manifested. In a 2 x 3 study that varied the gruesome content of photographic and verbal evidence, gruesome verbal evidence did not influence mock juror emotional states, and had no impact on the conviction rate. ⋯ Mean ratings of the inculpatory weight of prosecution evidence by mock jurors presented with gruesome photographs were significantly higher than those by mock jurors who did not view any photographs. Further analyses revealed that mock juror anger toward the defendant mediated the influence of the gruesome photographs in enhancing the weight of inculpatory evidence.
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Law and human behavior · Apr 2006
Emotions and attributions of legal responsibility and blame: a research review.
Research on the effects of emotions and moods on judgments of legal responsibility and blame is reviewed. Emotions and moods may influence decision makers in 3 ways: by affecting their information processing strategies, by inclining their judgments in the direction of the valence of the emotion or mood, and/or by providing informational cues to the proper decision. A model is proposed that incorporates these effects and further distinguishes among various affective influences in terms of whether the affect is provoked by a source integral or incidental to the judgment task, and whether it affects judgment directly (e.g., by providing an informational cue to judgment) or indirectly (e.g., by affecting construal of judgment target features, which in turn affects the judgment). Legal decision makers' abilities to correct for any affective influences they perceive to be undesirable and normative implications for legal theory and practice are briefly discussed.
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Scholars from diverse fields have begun to study the intersection of emotion and law. The notion that reason and emotion are cleanly separable--and that law rightly privileges and admits only of the former--is deeply engrained. ⋯ Drawing on the analytic value of the proposed taxonomy, any exploration of law and emotion should strive to identify which emotion(s) it takes as its focus; distinguish implicated emotion-driven phenomena; explore relevant and competing theories of the emotions; limit itself to a particular type of legal doctrine; expose underlying theories of law; and make clear which legal actors are implicated. Directions for future research are discussed and cross-disciplinary collaboration encouraged.