Niek Strohmaier

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Assistant) at Leiden University

Transformations in moral character can be perceived to disrupt a person's identity persistence (i.e., being "the same person" through time and change). Previous research finds that the magnitude of perceived disruption depends on the direction of change: moral deterioration is perceived to be more disruptive than improvement. This result is known a...

“Reasonableness” sets countless legal standards in America. It also informs standards within foreign jurisdictions, from Lithuanian contract law to Dutch tort law. Legal theorists often assume that reasonableness is vague and variegated, a flexible term with no essential conceptual core across languages, cultures, and jurisdictions. This Article qu...

Insolvency practitioners (IPs) manage and liquidate bankrupt estates. While their primary responsibility lies in prioritizing the interests of the collective creditors, they must also consider various other (societal) interests in their decision making. The law typically grants IPs discretion in balancing these interests, but this flexibility leads...

This article adopts a psychological lens to investigate whether cognitive biases might obscure insolvency practitioners’ perceptions. Through an experimental study among members of INSOL International (N = 272), we find that insolvency practitioners’ judgments of business valuations and business valuators in an insolvency situation are affected by...

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across ( k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inc...

A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a widespread tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which acts violate the rule. This tendency’s strength varied markedly across (k = 15) field sites, owing to cultural variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared to laypeople, legal exper...

Corporate governance: gedrag en cultuur als determinant voor ketenverantwoordelijkheid. Waarom wet- en regelgeving niet toereikend is Als reactie op grootschalige (boekhoudkundige) fraude bij beursvennootschappen is veelal soelaas gezocht in vernieuwde wet- en regelgeving (zoals de Amerikaanse SOX-wetgeving). De vraag kan echter worden gesteld in h...

The role of character evidence in court as a potential source of bias has been hotly debated, yet the empirical evidence on the effects character evidence might have on legal reasoning is scarce and has rendered mixed results. In this paper, we aim to (1) shed more light on the potentially biasing effect of character evidence, and (2) directly test...

In this paper we explore whether an action’s severity of outcome (somewhat bad v. very bad) influences attributions of intentionality, knowledge and moral judgment. In between-subjects studies conducted in twelve countries from the Americas, Asia and Europe, we found a robust severity effect on all DVs (except for India). The effect arises to simi...

The role of character evidence in court has been hotly debated. Those in favour of banning such evidence are worried that jurors will be disproportionately affected by such evidence and highlight the potentially prejudicial effect character evidence might have. Those in favour of allowing character evidence in court stress its probative value and b...

Business valuations of the same company made by different valuators frequently diverge, resulting in lengthy and costly disputes. This paper takes a novel approach in explaining inconsistencies in business valuations by adopting a psychological perspective and offering a first investigation into the role of cognitive biases in valuations. In two ex...

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law?...

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in eleven different countries. Are there cross-cultural principles of l...

For entrepreneurs in financial distress, it is of vital importance that investors and bankers accurately assess the viability of their business, free of unwanted biases that bear no relevance to the assessment of the chance of survival. Despite the prevalence of entrepreneurs facing financial distress, little research has yet investigated the role...

Gegeven discussies over de T-shaped lawyer en de aandacht voor Empirical Legal Studies, pleiten wij in deze bijdrage voor versterking van het empirische profiel van rechtenstudenten met basiskennis van statistiek. Enerzijds om de aannames waar het recht op berust te kunnen toetsen en de uitwerking van het recht beter te begrijpen. Anderzijds vanweg...

Following a corporate disaster such as bankruptcy, people in general and damaged parties, in particular, want to know what happened and whether the company's directors are to blame. The accurate assessment of directors’ liability can be jeopardized by having to judge in hindsight with full knowledge of the adverse outcome. The present study investi...

The Theory of Event Coding (TEC) predicts that exposure to affective cues can automatically trigger affectively congruent behaviour due to shared representational codes. An intriguing hypothesis from this theory is that exposure to aversive cues can automatically trigger actions that have previously been learned to result in aversive outcomes. Prev...