When claimants press their claims without counsel, they fail at virtually every stage of civil litigation and overwhelmingly fail to obtain meaningful access to justice. This research program harnesses psychological science to experimentally test a novel hypothesis: mainly, a claimant's pro se status itself sends a signal that biases decision making about the claimant and her claim. We conducted social psychological experiments with the public (N = 157), law students (N = 198), and employment discrimination lawyers (N = 39), holding the quality and merit of a Title VII sex discrimination case constant. In so doing, we examined whether a claimant's pro se status itself shapes stereotypes held about the claimant and biases decision making about settlement awards. These experiments reveal that pro se status influences stereotypes of claimants and settlement awards received. Moreover, the signaling effect of pro se status is exacerbated by socialization in the legal profession. Among law‐trained individuals (i.e., law students and lawyers), a claimant's pro se status generates negative stereotypes about the claimant and these negative stereotypes explain the adverse effect of pro se status on decision making about settlement awards.
Five experiments ( N = 2,251) and a meta-analysis examine how group labels shape Americans’ levels of prejudice, behavioral intentions, and policy preferences toward immigrants living in the US without authorization. These studies extend research documenting how the perceived negativity of group labels (e.g., those describing gay people) affects people’s downstream attitudes. To this end, Study 1 examines the perceived negativity of the five most commonly used labels to describe unauthorized immigrants. Study 2 found that relatively negative (vs. neutral) labels (e.g., illegal aliens vs. noncitizens) engendered more prejudice, punitive behavioral intentions, and greater support for punitive policies. Study 3 replicates these effects and examines the role of familiarity. People who personally knew members of the group were more positive towards them overall, but were nevertheless susceptible to the labels’ influence. Studies 4 and 5 provide additional replications and explore prejudice as a mediator of behavioral intentions and policy preferences.
Objective: People encounter institutional rules in many settings of their lives-from schools to workplaces, from commercial places to public spaces. Often these everyday rules are indeterminate, requiring people who apply them to use their own discretion. Psychological processes help explain how lay people decide whether others have violated these everyday rules. Hypothesis: We predicted that when lay people empathize with others, they are less likely to decide that the people they empathize with violated everyday indeterminate rules. Method: We performed two correlational studies (Studies 1 and 2) and two experiments (Studies 3 and 4) using MTurk. We asked participants to read 3 dilemmas involving indeterminate institutional rules (Studies 1-3) or one dilemma (Study 4) and decide whether people violated such rules. Results: Greater empathy for people in these dilemmas was associated with a lower likelihood of deciding that rules were violated-even when controlling for the perceived harmfulness of the infraction-regardless of whether empathy was independently rated in explanations provided by lay people about their decisions (Study 1; N = 725; 51% female; 76.8% White), measured in the form of self-reported empathic concern and inclusion-of-self-in-other (Study 2; N = 1,159; 58% female; 78.9% White), or manipulated based upon whether a person transgressed a rule for selfish versus altruistic reasons (Studies 3; N = 1,073; 53% female; 77.7% White). Moreover, when we manipulated both empathy (selfish vs. altruistic transgression) and rule indeterminacy by altering whether the rule was silent about potential exceptions (indeterminate rule) versus absolutely rejected all exceptions (determinate rule), the likelihood of deciding a rule was violated was lowest when the rule was indeterminate and transgressed for altruistic reasons (Study 4; N = 239; 42% female; 77.0% White). Conclusions: Overall, results reveal a robust effect of empathy on how lay people resolve rule indeterminacy in everyday life, which may foster or frustrate law and public policy, and has implications for the resilience of institutions. Public Significance StatementFour studies suggest that empathy for people who transgress everyday institutional rules may promote institutional change and resilience. By understanding how lay people interpret these everyday indeterminate rules, researchers and experts may better understand and predict how people and institutions will administer rules in unexpected or changing circumstances, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and volatile social environments.
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