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Mindlessness And Nondurable Precautions, Paul J. Heald

Scholarly Works

Assuming initially that negligence law does not make the distinction between durable and nondurable precautions, this Article will first explain in economic terms why the failure of courts to take into account the cost of remembering may nonetheless be efficient. A substantial body of research on the phenomenon of mindless decisionmaking ("scripting") suggests that most remembering is automatic--a nonconscious response to frequently encountered patterns of stimuli. Script theory suggests that once the behavioral script is in place, an automatic response operates at a very low cost. If so, the failure of courts to account for the cost of remembering would …