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Full-Text Articles in Law
Shooting The Messenger, Leslie K. John, Hayley Blunden, Heidi H. Liu
Shooting The Messenger, Leslie K. John, Hayley Blunden, Heidi H. Liu
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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 …
Law And Psychology Grows Up, Goes Online, And Replicates, Krin Irvine, David A. Hoffman, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
Law And Psychology Grows Up, Goes Online, And Replicates, Krin Irvine, David A. Hoffman, Tess Wilkinson-Ryan
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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
Contract Consideration And Behavior, David A. Hoffman, Zev. J. Eigen
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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, …