SafetyInsights.org

I found this to be an interesting paper from Fariña, Arce and Novo (2003). It explored the effects of cognitive heuristics and biases on judicial decisions.

555 Spanish sentences were evaluated.

The authors suggest that rather than legal judgements relying primarily on formal reasoning, the majority were based on informal reasoning (74.95% of cases), e.g. cognitive biases like information salience and availability, preconceived ideas or theories concerning people or events, and the phenomena of anchoring and perseverance.

Some key findings in the attached image.

Note, the authors are careful to point out that these findings may not automatically transfer to different legal systems (e.g. civil law vs case law). However, other research has supported these findings within the common law arenas.

E.g. Peer & Gamliel (2013) reviewed a number of papers and found that, for instance, anchoring effects affected both novice and experienced judges when they were presented with two different demands for sentence by an alleged offender.

Also, quoting Peer & Gamliel: “Anchoring affected the ruling sentence even when the judges declared that the anchor was not relevant to their decision”.

Moreover, Kahneman et al. in their book ‘Noise’, also discussed a number of effects, like how the ambient temperature or time of day affects sentencing.

There’s heaps of research on the effects of heuristics, priming, agentive language, bias etc. on judicial sentences, so I plan to post more in the future.

Ref: Fariña, F., Arce, R., y Novo, M. (2003). Cognitive bias and judicial decisions. En M. Vanderhallen, G. Vervaeke, P.J. Van Koppen, y J. Goethals (Eds.), Much ado about crime (pp. 287-304). Bruselas: Uitgeverij Politeia NV. I

Link to the LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benhutchinson2_i-found-this-to-be-an-interesting-paper-from-activity-7078527814299242496-Hrkw?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop