"IDEOLOGY" OR "SITUATION SENSE"? AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF MOTIVATED REASONING AND PROFESSIONAL JUDGMENT

This Article reports the results of a study on whether political predispositions influence judicial decisionmaking. The study was designed to overcome the two principal limitations on existing empirical studies that purport to find such an influence: the use of nonexperimental methods to assess the...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:University of Pennsylvania law review 2016-01, Vol.164 (2), p.349-439
Main Authors: Kahan, Dan M., Hoffman, David, Evans, Danieli, Devins, Neal, Lucci, Eugene, Cheng, Katherine
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Attitudes
BIAS
CLIMATE CHANGE
Cognition & reasoning
Court decisions
Decision making
Ideology
Judges & magistrates
Judgment
Judgment (Logic)
JUDGMENTS
Judicial process
Law and legislation
Lawyers
Legal studies
Marijuana
Political aspects
Reasoning
RISK
STATUTORY INTERPRETATION
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This Article reports the results of a study on whether political predispositions influence judicial decisionmaking. The study was designed to overcome the two principal limitations on existing empirical studies that purport to find such an influence: the use of nonexperimental methods to assess the decisions of actual judges; and the failure to use actual judges in ideologically-biased-reasoning experiments. The study involved a sample of sitting judges (n = 253), who, like members of a general public sample (n = 800), were culturally polarized on climate change, marijuana legalization and other contested issues. When the study subjects were assigned to analyze statutory interpretation problems, however, only the responses of the general-public subjects and not those of the judges varied in patterns that reflected the subjects' cultural values. The responses of a sample of lawyers (n = 217) were also uninfluenced by their cultural values; the responses of a sample of law students (n = 284), in contrast, displayed a level of cultural bias only modestly less pronounced than that observed in the general-public sample. Among the competing hypotheses tested in the study, the results most supported the position that professional judgment imparted by legal training and experience confers resistance to identity-protective cognition—a dynamic associated with politically biased information processing generally—but only for decisions that involve legal reasoning. The scholarly and practical implications of the findings are discussed.
ISSN:0041-9907
1942-8537