Motivated Cognition in Legal Judgments—An Analytic Review

Abstract

How and when do legal decision makers' preferred outcomes inadvertently drive their judgments? This psychological phenomenon, known as motivated cognition or motivated reasoning, has become an important topic of investigation among scholars conducting experimental research at the intersection of law and psychology. This article presents an overview of that literature, discusses some of its legal applications and implications, highlights areas that require further investigation, and considers some potential ways to curtail the covert operation of motivated cognition in the legal arena. 307 Annu. Rev. Law. Soc. Sci. 2013.9:307-325. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org Access provided by McMaster University on 02/03/15. For personal use only.

Moral Disengagement in Legal Judgments

“…The findings reveal that greater death penalty support among forensic psychologists was associated with increased disengagement of moral agency, which in turn was associated with increased likelihood of accepting CFE referrals. This means that the more supportive psychologists are of the death penalty, the more likely they are to construct cognitive justifications for engaging in the CFE evaluator role-a finding that is consistent with theories of motivated reasoning (Kunda 1990) and motivated justice (e.g., Sood 2013). These findings lend strong support to the theory of moral disengagement and its application to the legal context.…”

Do judges hate speculators?

“…Moreover, they allow studying judicial decision making in a more controlled environment, though this artificiality is also a disadvantage of experimental studies, raising questions particularly about the external validity of results. Overall, however, we believe that the benefits of experimental designs outweigh their disadvantages and therefore are the more promising approach (see Kahan et al 2016;Sood 2013). We find only a few experimental studies on legal reasoning by real judges: • Wistrich et al (2015) use a between-subjects design to assess whether U.S. judges (state and federal, trial and appellate; n > 1800) are more likely to favor parties displayed as likable or sympathetic over parties displayed as dislikable or unsympathetic, even though these features have no legal relevance.…”

“…The suggestion that judges are not able to completely ignore emotionally appealing but legally irrelevant decision determinants is rather unsurprising from a psychological standpoint. Judges often engage in what psychologists call "motivated reasoning" (Braman 2010;Kunda 1990;Sood 2013;Spellman and Schauer 2012). They want to convince their audience (e.g., individuals in the general public or the regulatory apparatus of the federal government, see Baum 2006;Black et al 2016) and are focused on reaching certain conclusions.…”

Untitled

“…There has been conducted a lot of research regarding the flaws of human reasoning in general (Kahneman, 2003), and in the forensic context specifically (Sood, 2013). There are many theories and traditions of research describing these flaws.…”