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Full-Text Articles in Law

Gender And Deception: Moral Perceptions And Legal Responses, Gregory Klass, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan Feb 2023

Gender And Deception: Moral Perceptions And Legal Responses, Gregory Klass, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Decades of social science research has shown that the identity of the parties in a legal action can affect case outcomes. Parties’ race, gender, class, and age all affect decisions of prosecutors, judges, juries, and other actors in a criminal prosecution or civil litigation. Less studied has been how identity might affect other forms of legal regulation. This Essay begins to explore perceptions of deceptive behavior—i.e., how wrongful it is, and the extent to which it should be regulated or punished—and the relationship of those perceptions to the gender of the actors. We hypothesize that ordinary people tend to perceive …


Shooting The Messenger, Leslie K. John, Hayley Blunden, Heidi H. Liu Jan 2019

Shooting The Messenger, Leslie K. John, Hayley Blunden, Heidi H. Liu

All Faculty Scholarship

Eleven experiments provide evidence that people have a tendency to ‘shoot the messenger,’ deeming innocent bearers of bad news unlikeable. In a pre-registered lab experiment, participants rated messengers who delivered bad news from a random drawing as relatively unlikeable (Study 1). A second set of studies points to the specificity of the effect: Study 2A shows that it is unique to the (innocent) messenger, and not mere bystanders. Study 2B shows that it is distinct from merely receiving information that one disagrees with. We suggest that people’s tendency to deem bearers of bad news as unlikeable stems in part from …


What Makes A Good Judge?, Brian M. Barry Jun 2018

What Makes A Good Judge?, Brian M. Barry

Reports

This article overviews research demonstrating the factors beyond the law that can affect judicial decision-making.


The Influence Of Religion On The Criminal Behavior Of Emerging Adults, Christopher Salvatore, Gabriel Rubin Apr 2018

The Influence Of Religion On The Criminal Behavior Of Emerging Adults, Christopher Salvatore, Gabriel Rubin

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Recent generations of young adults are experiencing a new life course stage: emerging adulthood. During this ‘new’ stage of the life course, traditional social bonds and turning points may not be present, may be delayed, or may not operate in the same manner as they have for prior generations. One such bond, religion, is examined here. Focusing on the United States, emerging adulthood is investigated as a distinct stage of the life course. The criminality of emerging adults is presented, a theoretical examination of the relationship between religion and crime is provided, the role of religion in emerging adults’ lives …


Law And Psychology Grows Up, Goes Online, And Replicates, Krin Irvine, David A. Hoffman, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan Aug 2017

Law And Psychology Grows Up, Goes Online, And Replicates, Krin Irvine, David A. Hoffman, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan

All Faculty Scholarship

Over the last thirty years, legal scholars have increasingly deployed experimental studies, particularly hypothetical scenarios, to test intuitions about legal reasoning and behavior. That movement has accelerated in the last decade, facilitated in large part by cheap and convenient Internet participant recruiting platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk. The widespread use of MTurk subjects, a practice that dramatically lowers the barriers to entry for experimental research, has been controversial. At the same time, law and psychology’s home discipline is experiencing a public crisis of confidence widely discussed in terms of the “replication crisis.” At present, law and psychology research is arguably …


Contract Consideration And Behavior, David A. Hoffman, Zev. J. Eigen Jan 2017

Contract Consideration And Behavior, David A. Hoffman, Zev. J. Eigen

All Faculty Scholarship

Contract recitals are ubiquitous. Yet, we have a thin understanding of how individuals behave with respect to these doctrinally important relics. Most jurists follow Lon Fuller in concluding that when read, contract recitals accomplish their purpose: to caution against inconsiderate contractual obligation. Notwithstanding the foundational role that this assumption has played in doctrinal and theoretical debates, it has not been tested. This Article offers what we believe to be the first experimental evidence of the effects of formal recitals of contract obligation — and, importantly too, disclaimers of contractual obligation — on individual behavior. In a series of online experiments, …


Against Game Theory, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner Jan 2015

Against Game Theory, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner

Faculty Scholarship

People make choices. Often, the outcome depends on choices other people make. What mental steps do people go through when making such choices? Game theory, the most influential model of choice in economics and the social sciences, offers an answer, one based on games of strategy such as chess and checkers: the chooser considers the choices that others will make and makes a choice that will lead to a better outcome for the chooser, given all those choices by other people. It is universally established in the social sciences that classical game theory (even when heavily modified) is bad at …


The Mythology Of Game Theory, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nick Weller Jan 2012

The Mythology Of Game Theory, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nick Weller

Faculty Scholarship

Non-cooperative game theory is at its heart a theory of cognition, specifically a theory of how decisions are made. Game theory's leverage is that we can design different payoffs, settings, player arrays, action possibilities, and information structures, and that these differences lead to different strategies, outcomes, and equilibria. It is well-known that, in experimental settings, people do not adopt the predicted strategies, outcomes, and equilibria. The standard response to this mismatch of prediction and observation is to add various psychological axioms to the game-theoretic framework. Regardless of the differing specific proposals and results, game theory uniformly makes certain cognitive assumptions …


The Theory Of Minds Within The Theory Of Games, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nicholas Weller Jan 2012

The Theory Of Minds Within The Theory Of Games, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner, Nicholas Weller

Faculty Scholarship

Classical rationality as accepted by game theory assumes that a human chooser in a given moment has consistent preferences and beliefs and that actions result consistently from those preferences and beliefs, and moreover that these preferences, beliefs, and actions remain the same across equal choice moments. Since, as is widely found in prior experiments, subjects do not follow the predictions of classical rationality, behavioral game theorists have assumed consistent deviations from classical rationality by assigning to subjects certain dispositions— risk preference, cognitive abilities, social norms, etc. All of these theories are fundamentally cognitive theories, making claims about how individual human …


Rehabilitation Counselor Education And The New Code Of Ethics, Harriet L. Glosoff, Rocco Cottone Jan 2010

Rehabilitation Counselor Education And The New Code Of Ethics, Harriet L. Glosoff, Rocco Cottone

Department of Counseling Scholarship and Creative Works

The purpose of this article is to discuss recent changes in the Commission on Rehabilitation Counselor Certification Code of Professional Ethics for Rehabilitation Counselors , effective January 1, 2010, that are most relevant to rehabilitation counselor educators. The authors provide a brief overview of these key changes along with implications for ethical practice in rehabilitation counselor education.


Tolerance Of Sexual Harassment: A Laboratory Paradigm, D. J. Angelone, Damon Mitchell, Kara Carola Jan 2009

Tolerance Of Sexual Harassment: A Laboratory Paradigm, D. J. Angelone, Damon Mitchell, Kara Carola

Title IX Research and Resources

The present study attempted to develop a laboratory analogue for the study of tolerance for sexual harassment by using an online speed-dating paradigm. In that context, the relation between participants’ sexual harassment attitudes, perpetrator attractiveness, perpetrator status, and perceived dating potential of the perpetrator were examined as factors influencing participants’ tolerance of sexually harassing behavior. Participants were 128 female college students from a small northeastern public university. Results indicated that attractiveness, high social status, and attitudinal beliefs about sexual harassment were all predictive of tolerance for sexual harassment, providing preliminary support for the validity of this paradigm. In addition, participants’ …


Connected Coordination: Network Structure And Group Coordination, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Ramamohan Paturi, Nicholas Weller Jan 2009

Connected Coordination: Network Structure And Group Coordination, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Ramamohan Paturi, Nicholas Weller

Faculty Scholarship

Networks can affect a group’s ability to solve a coordination problem. We utilize laboratory experiments to study the conditions under which groups of subjects can solve coordination games. We investigate a variety of different network structures, and we also investigate coordination games with symmetric and asymmetric payoffs. Our results show that network connections facilitate coordination in both symmetric and asymmetric games. Most significantly, we find that increases in the number of network connections encourage coordination even when payoffs are highly asymmetric. These results shed light on the conditions that may facilitate coordination in real-world networks.


Knowing When To Trust Others: An Erp Study Of Decision-Making After Receiving Information From Unknown People, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Seana Coulson Jan 2009

Knowing When To Trust Others: An Erp Study Of Decision-Making After Receiving Information From Unknown People, Cheryl Boudreau, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Seana Coulson

Faculty Scholarship

To address the neurocognitive mechanisms that underlie choices made after receiving information from an anonymous individual, reaction times (Experiment 1) and event-related brain potentials (Experiment 2) were recorded as participants played 3 variants of the Coin Toss game. In this game, participants guess the outcomes of unseen coin tosses after a person in another room (dubbed “the reporter”) observes the coin toss outcomes and then sends reports (which may or may not be truthful) to participants about whether the coins landed on heads or tails. Participants knew that the reporter's interests either were aligned with their own (Common Interests), opposed …


The Methodology Of The Behavioral Analysis Of Law, Avishalom Tor Jan 2008

The Methodology Of The Behavioral Analysis Of Law, Avishalom Tor

Journal Articles

This article examines the behavioral analysis of law, meaning the application of empirical behavioral evidence to legal analysis, which has become increasingly popular in legal scholarship in recent years. Following the introduction in Part I, this Article highlights four central propositions on the subject. The first, developed in Part II, asserts that the efficacy of the law often depends on its accounting for relevant patterns of human behavior, most notably those studied by behavioral decision scientists. This Part therefore reviews important behavioral findings, illustrating their application and relevance to a broad range of legal questions. Part III then argues that …