Playing Dice With Criminal Sentences: The Influence of Irrelevant Anchors on Experts’ Judicial Decision Making

Englich, Birte; Mussweiler, Thomas; Strack, Fritz

doi:10.1177/0146167205282152

Cited by 417 publications

(302 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…In another study, municipal court judges fined a nightclub three times as much when its name (after its street address) was Club 11,866 rather than Club 58 (Rachlinski & Wistrich, unpublished manuscript). Finally, in an experiment on German judges, even a roll of the dice affected judges' sentencing decisions in a hypothetical case (Englich et al 2006). …”

Section: Anchoring In Judgesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Judging the Judiciary by the Numbers: Empirical Research on Judges

Rachlinski¹,

Wistrich²

2017

Preprint

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 AbstractDo judges make decisions that are truly impartial? A wide range of experimental and field studies reveal that several extra-legal factors influence judicial decision making. Demographic characteristics of judges and litigants affect judges' decisions. Judges also rely heavily on intuitive reasoning in deciding cases, making them vulnerable to the use of mental shortcuts that can lead to mistakes. Furthermore, judges sometimes rely on facts outside the record and rule more favorably towards litigants who are more sympathetic or with whom they share demographic characteristics. On the whole, judges are excellent decision makers, and sometimes resist common errors of judgment that influence ordinary adults. The weight of the evidence, however, suggests that judges are vulnerable to systematic deviations from the ideal of judicial impartiality.

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Section: Anchoring In Judgesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Judging the Judiciary by the Numbers: Empirical Research on Judges

Rachlinski¹,

Wistrich²

2017

Preprint

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“…Further, [2] asked participants to estimate the age of something ("Xianglong") regardless of whether the subject was real or fictitious. The following examples were considered by previous researchers as demonstrators of the anchoring effect: general knowledge questions [3], estimates of real estate prices [4], estimates of self-efficacy [5], probability assessments [6], decisions about criminal sentences [7], evaluations of lotteries and gambles [8], math problems [9], and negotiation [10]. Moreover, the anchoring effect can occur whether it is an experiment conducted in a lab or an investigation in the field.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Knowledge and Anchoring: Verification of Three Circumstances in Which Knowledge Does Not Interfere with Anchoring

Tang¹,

Lin²

2017

JSS

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Many researchers have demonstrated that those people with higher knowledge are less subject to the impact of a given anchor. In real life, however, a situation might be quite complicated and not simply a question of an existing high (or low) anchor. We have designed four tests to demonstrate the relation between knowledge and anchoring. We hold that only in general situations can knowledge interfere with the anchoring effect. Study 1 was used to demonstrate this hypothesis. The research result in turn served as the foundation for our follow-up studies. Based on this foundation, we conducted three experiments to demonstrate that, when faced with a complicated and difficult estimation that must be completed within a short period of time (Study 2), when the source of information possesses a high degree of reliability (Study 3), and when practical experience is lacking (Study 4), the anchoring effect will still exert influences on people with higher knowledge.

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“…Anchoring is one of the cognitive biases discovered by Tversky and Kahneman (1974). It impacts many important aspects of our lives including the outcome of salary negotiations (Galinsky & Mussweiler, 2001), economic decisions (e.g., Simonson & Drolet, 2004), criminal sentences (Englich, Mussweiler, & Strack, 2006), and even our ability to understand other people (Epley, Keysar, Van Boven, & Gilovich, 2004).…”

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confidence: 99%

The anchoring bias reflects rational use of cognitive resources

et al. 2017

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Cognitive biases, such as the anchoring bias, pose a serious challenge to rational accounts of human cognition. We investigate whether rational theories can meet this challenge by taking into account the mind's bounded cognitive resources. We asked what reasoning under uncertainty would look like if people made rational use of their finite time and limited cognitive resources. To answer this question, we applied a mathematical theory of bounded rationality to the problem of numerical estimation.Our analysis led to a rational process model that can be interpreted in terms of anchoring-and-adjustment. This model provided a unifying explanation for ten anchoring phenomena including the differential effect of accuracy motivation on the bias towards provided versus self-generated anchors. Our results illustrate the potential of resource-rational analysis to provide formal theories that can unify a wide range of empirical results and reconcile the impressive capacities of the human mind with its apparently irrational cognitive biases.Keywords: bounded rationality; heuristics; cognitive biases; probabilistic reasoning; anchoring-and-adjustment; rational process models A RATIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON ANCHORING-AND-ADJUSTMENT 3The anchoring bias reflects rational use of cognitive resources Many classic theories in economics, philosophy, linguistics, social science, and psychology are built on the assumption that humans are rational (Frank & Goodman, 2012;Friedman & Savage, 1948;Harman, 2013;Hedström & Stern, 2008;Lohmann, 2008) and therefore act according to the maxims of expected utility theory (Von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1944) and reason according to the laws of logic (Braine, 1978;Fodor, 1975;Mill, 1882;Newell, Shaw, & Simon, 1958) or probability theory (Oaksford & Chater, 2007). The assumption that people are rational was challenged when a series of experiments suggested that people's judgments systematically violate the laws of logic (Wason, 1968) and probability theory (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974).For instance, Tversky and Kahneman (1974) showed that people's probability judgments appear to be insensitive to prior probability and sample size but are influenced by irrelevant factors such as the ease of imagining an event or the provision of an unrelated random number. These systematic deviations from the tenets of logic and probability are known as cognitive biases. According to Tversky and Kahneman (1974), cognitive biases result from people's use of fast but fallible cognitive strategies known as heuristics.The discovery of cognitive biases was influential because following the rules of logic and probability was assumed to be the essence of rational thinking. Evidence that people deviate from these rules brings human rationality into question. This doubt is shaking the foundations of economics, the social sciences, and rational models of cognition. If the human mind does not follow rational principles, then there is little hope that we will be able to able derive unifying laws of cognition from a basic set of axio...

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Playing Dice With Criminal Sentences: The Influence of Irrelevant Anchors on Experts’ Judicial Decision Making

Cited by 417 publications

References 44 publications

Judging the Judiciary by the Numbers: Empirical Research on Judges

Judging the Judiciary by the Numbers: Empirical Research on Judges

Knowledge and Anchoring: Verification of Three Circumstances in Which Knowledge Does Not Interfere with Anchoring

The anchoring bias reflects rational use of cognitive resources

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