Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Publication
- Publication Type
Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Cognitive Psychology
The Influence Of Prosecutorial Overcharging On Defendant And Defense Attorney Plea Decision Making: Documenting And Debiasing The Anchoring Effect, Stephanie Aurora Cardenas
The Influence Of Prosecutorial Overcharging On Defendant And Defense Attorney Plea Decision Making: Documenting And Debiasing The Anchoring Effect, Stephanie Aurora Cardenas
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
Strategic overcharging, a practice that some prosecutors readily employ to threaten defendants with excessively severe sentences, undermines the Sixth Amendment right to trial by coercing defendants to plead guilty rather than face penalties disproportionate to their alleged misconduct. Legal scholars and psychologists have long suggested that strategic overcharging may elicit powerful anchoring effects that bias defendants’, but not attorneys’ evaluations, of the plea offer. The current research sought to examine (a) the extent to which mock defendants and legal professionals were susceptible to the anchoring bias, (b) elucidate the mechanism underlying susceptibility to the anchoring effect in plea contexts, and …
Is Anchoring On Estimates Of Severity An Adaptive Heuristic?, Joy E. Losee
Is Anchoring On Estimates Of Severity An Adaptive Heuristic?, Joy E. Losee
Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Decisions to either to prepare or not prepare for weather threats involve uncertainty. Uncertainty in decision making often involves the potential for making either a false positive (preparing for a storm that never arrives) or a false negative error (not preparing for a real storm). Error Management Theory (EMT; Haselton & Buss, 2000) posits that, depending on the uncertain context, people select a decision-making strategy that favors one error over the other. Related to weather, research has shown that people prefer a false positive, or an overestimation (Joslyn et al., 2011). Particularly, this overestimation appears when people receive severe information …
Confronting Conventional Thinking: The Heuristics Problem In Feminist Legal Theory, Nancy Levit
Confronting Conventional Thinking: The Heuristics Problem In Feminist Legal Theory, Nancy Levit
Nancy Levit
The thesis of The Heuristics Problem is that the societal problems about which identity theorists are most concerned often spring from and are reinforced by thinking riddled with heuristic errors. This article first investigates the ways heuristic errors influence popular perceptions of feminist issues. Feminists and critical race theorists have explored the cognitive bias of stereotyping, but have not examined the ways probabilistic errors can have gendered consequences. Second, The Heuristics Problem traces some of the ways cognitive errors have influenced the development of laws relating to gender issues. It explores instances in judicial decisions in which courts commit heuristic …