Law and Psychology Commons^™

Inside The Arbitrator's Mind, Susan Franck

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Arbitrators are lead actors in global dispute resolution. They are to global dispute resolution what judges are to domestic dispute resolution. Despite its global significance, arbitral decision making is a black box. This Article is the first to use original experimental research to explore how international arbitrators decide cases. We find that arbitrators often make intuitive and impressionistic decisions, rather than fully deliberative decisions. We also find evidence that casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that arbitrators render “split the baby” decisions. Although direct comparisons are difficult, we find that arbitrators generally perform at least as well as, but never …

Tattoos And Criminal Behavior: An Examination Of The Relationship Between Body Art And Crime, Daniel D. Dajani

Student Theses

This thesis investigates the relationship between having tattoos and crime. A review of past research concerning tattoos, crime and other forms of deviancy demonstrates that a relationship exists to some extent. This thesis gathers new data concerning tattoos and crime and adds to the knowledge base by examining the alterations in the correlation and what may be causing said alterations. This thesis utilized the survey method and participants were recruited via a mix of in-person and online strategies. We aimed to garner participation from a varied group of respondents that would ensure data relevant to the study would be produced …

I Share, Therefore It's Mine, Donald J. Kochan

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Buying Happiness: Property, Acquisition, And Subjective Well-Being, David Fagundes

William & Mary Law Review

Acquiring property is a central part of the modern American vision of the good life. The assumption that accruing more land or chattels will make us better off is so central to the contemporary preoccupation with acquisition that it typically goes without saying. Yet an increasing body of evidence from psychologists and economists who study hedonics—the science of happiness—yields the surprising conclusion that getting and having property does not actually increase our subjective well-being. In fact, it might even decrease it. While scholars have integrated the insights of hedonics into other areas of law, no scholarship has yet done so …

Recollection Bias And Its Underpinnings: Lessons From Terrorism Risk Assessments, Richard J. Zeckhauser, W. Kip Viscusi

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recollection bias is the phenomenon whereby people who observe a highly unexpected event hold current risk beliefs about a similar event that are no higher than their recollection of their prior beliefs. This article replicates and extends the authors’ previous study of recollection bias in relation to individuals’ perceptions of the risks of terrorism attacks. Over 60% of respondents in a national U.S. sample of over 900 adults believe that the current risk of a future terrorist attack by either an airplane or in a public setting is no higher than they recall having believed, respectively, before the 9/11 attack …

Involuntarily Committed Patients As Prisoners, Matt Lamkin, Carl Elliott

University of Richmond Law Review

Part I relates several stories of involuntarily committed patients who were recruited into studies posing serious risks. Part II draws on these cases to argue that the involuntary commitment of these patients leaves them vulnerable to unethical treatment by researchers. Their inherently coercive circumstances present an overwhelming obstacle to voluntary consent, and their captive status makes them attractive targets for research that could be performed using less vulnerable subjects.

Part III argues that most research on this patient population is improper under generally applicable principles of informed consent and fair subject selection. However, existing protections have proved insufficient to prevent …

A Longitudinal And Experimental Study Of The Impact Of Knowledge On The Bases Of Institutional Trust, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Christopher D. Kimbrough, Ellie Shockley, Tess M.S. Neal, Mitchel Herian, Joseph A. Hamm, Brian H. Bornstein, Alan Tomkins

Lisa PytlikZillig Publications

This study examined a knowledge-centered theory of institutional trust development. In the context of trust in water regulatory institutions, the moderating impact of knowledge was tested to determine if there were longitudinal changes in the bases of institutional trust as a function of increases in knowledge about a target institution. We hypothesized that as people learn about an institution with which they were previously unfamiliar, they begin to form more nuanced perceptions, distinguishing the new institution from other institutions and relying less upon their generalized trust to estimate their trust in that institution. Prior to having specific, differential information about …

May It Please The Court?: The Perils Of Correcting A Justice's Pronunciation, James J. Duane

Seton Hall Circuit Review

No abstract provided.

Parental Blame Frame: An Empirical Examination Of The Media's Portrayal Of Parents And Their Delinquent Juveniles, Ashley Wellman, Eve Brank, Katherine Hazen

Center on Children, Families, and the Law: Faculty Publications

The most recent study discussed in this article examines how the media report issues of parental responsibility and blame regarding acts of juvenile delinquency. To accomplish this goal, we examined the frequency, context, and framing of parental responsibility in local and national print media via two content analyses. The results demonstrate that national media sources depict the notion of parental responsibility, whereas local media stories rarely mention parents. The national stories offer distant, more global statements of parental responsibility, while the local, specific stories tend to avoid any parental blame. The findings in this paper mirror public opinion polls that …

Employment Discrimination And The Domino Effect, Laura T. Kessler

Florida State University Law Review

Employment discrimination is a multidimensional problem. In many instances, some combination of employer bias, the organization of work, and employees’ responses to these conditions, leads to worker inequality. Title VII does not sufficiently account for these dynamics in two significant respects. First, Title VII’s major proof structures divide employment discrimination into discrete categories, for example, disparate treatment, disparate impact, and sexual harassment. This compartmentalization does not account for the fact that protected employees often concurrently experience more than one form of discriminatory exclusion. The various types of exclusion often add up to significant inequalities, even though seemingly insignificant when considered …

Law And Identifiability, Daphna Lewinsohn-Zamir, Ilana Ritov, Tehila Kogut

Indiana Law Journal

Psychological studies have shown that people react either more generously or more punitively toward identified individuals than toward unidentified ones. This phenomenon, named the identifiability effect, has received little attention in the legal literature, despite its importance for the law. As a prime example, while legislators typically craft rules that would apply to unidentified people, judges ordinarily deal with identified individuals. The identifiability effect suggests that the outcomes of these two forms of lawmaking may differ, even when they pertain to similar facts and situations.

This Article is a preliminary investigation into the relevance of the identifiability effect for law …

Digging Into The Foundations Of Evidence Law, David H. Kaye

Michigan Law Review

Review of The Psychological Foundations of Evidence Law by Michael J. Saks and Barbara A. Spellman.

Reducing The Dangers Of Future Dangerousness Testimony: Applying The Federal Rules Of Evidence To Capital Sentencing, Jaymes Fairfax-Columbo, David Dematteo

William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal

The United States Supreme Court has long held that the death penalty cannot be imposed arbitrarily, and that during sentencing in capital cases, jurors must be provided with guidelines to assist them in narrowing down the class of individuals for whom the death penalty is appropriate. Typically, this is accomplished through the presentation of aggravating and mitigating evidence. One aggravating factor is a capital offender’s future dangerousness, or the likelihood that the individual will engage in violent institutional misconduct while in prison. Future dangerousness may be assessed using a variety of measures; Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R), a measure of personality …

The Resilience Of Noxious Doctrine: The 2016 Election, The Marketplace Of Ideas, And The Obstinacy Of Bias, Leonard M. Niehoff, Deeva Shah

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The Supreme Court has recognized the central role that free expression plays in our democratic enterprise. In his dissenting opinion in United States v. Abrams, Justice Holmes offered a theory of how free expression advances our search for truth and our cultivation of an informed electorate. That model—often called the “marketplace of ideas,” based upon the metaphor used by Holmes—has proven to be one of the most persistent and influential concepts in First Amendment jurisprudence.

The marketplace of ideas model essentially holds that free expression serves our democratic goals by allowing differing proposed truths and versions of the facts …

Factors Affecting Mental Health Seeking Behaviors Of Law Enforcement Officers, Vincent M. Haecker

Dissertations

The intent of this study was to elicit perspectives from law enforcement counselors, clinicians, chaplains, and peer group leaders for factors affecting law enforcement officer’s (LEOs) seeking mental health assistance. The law enforcement and mental health communities have gone to great lengths to ensure assistance is available to LEOs in an effort to counter the stress and trauma associated with the policing profession. Past studies attempted to elicit LEOs attitudes on mental health services, generating mixed results and were unable to establish why available services were underutilized. This study employed a qualitative methodology to elicit perspectives on this phenomena from …

Recurrent Flooding And Social Vulnerability: A Model Ordinance, Sarah Edwards

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

No abstract provided.

Applying Motivational Interviewing To Parenting Act Mediation: The Promise Of The Process., Kristen M. Blankley, Lisa M. Pytlikzillig, Kathryn Speck

Lisa PytlikZillig Publications

Motivational Interviewing (MI) is a research-based method of helping people engage in behavior change. MI tools and strategies have been used successfully to help people tackle drug and alcohol addiction, weight loss, and other unhealthy behaviors. MI methods aim to uncover and support a person's desire to change while simultaneously respecting an individual's autonomy. Historically, Ml has been employed in support settings, such as counselors working with clients. In Nebraska, probation officers now employ MI practices to help encourage positive changes while still maintaining accountability if people choose not to follow the terms of their probation.

Mediation is all about …

Ideology, Race, And The Death Penalty: "Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics" In Advocacy Research, Anthony Walsh, Virginia Hatch

Journal of Ideology

We use the literature on race in death penalty to illustrate the hold that ideology has on researchers and journalists alike when a social issue is charged with emotional content. We note particularly how statistical evidence become misinterpreted in ways that support a particular ideology, either because of innumeracy or because—subconsciously or otherwise—one’s ideology precludes a critical analysis. We note that because white defendants are now proportionately more likely to receive the death penalty and to be executed than black defendants that the argument has shifted from a defendant-based to a victim-based one. We examine studies based on identical data …

Enemy Construction And The Press, Ronnell Anderson Jones, Lisa Grow Sun

Utah Law Faculty Scholarship

When the president of the United States declared recently that the press is “the enemy,” it set off a firestorm of criticism from defenders of the institutional media and champions of the press’s role in the democracy. But even these Trump critics have mostly failed to appreciate the wider ramifications of the president’s narrative choice. Our earlier work describes the process of governmental “enemy construction,” by which officials use war rhetoric and other signaling behaviors to convey that a person or institution is not merely an institution that, although wholly legitimate, has engaged in behaviors that are disappointing or disapproved, …

Moral Disengagement In Legal Judgments, Tess M. S. Neal, Robert J. Cramer

Community & Environmental Health Faculty Publications

We investigated the role of moral disengagement in a legally-relevant judgment in this theoretically-driven empirical analysis. Moral disengagement is a social-cognitive phenomenon through which people reason their way toward harming others, presenting a useful framework for investigating legal judgments that often result in harming individuals for the good of society. We tested the role of moral disengagement in forensic psychologists' willingness to conduct the most ethically questionable clinical task in the criminal justice system: competence for execution evaluations. Our hypothesis that moral disengagement would function as mediator of participants' existing attitudes and their judgmentsa theoretical bridge between attitudes and judgmentswas …