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Playing Dice With Criminal Sentences: The Influence of Irrelevant Anchors on Experts' Judicial Decision Making
Abstract and Figures
Judicial sentencing decisions should be guided by facts, not by chance. The present research however demonstrates that the sentencing decisions of experienced legal professionals are influenced by irrelevant sentencing demands even if they are blatantly determined at random. Participating legal experts anchored their sentencing decisions on a given sentencing demand and assimilated toward it even if this demand came from an irrelevant source (Study 1), they were informed that this demand was randomly determined (Study 2), or they randomly determined this demand themselves by throwing dice (Study 3). Expertise and experience did not reduce this effect. This sentencing bias appears to be produced by a selective increase in the accessibility of arguments that are consistent with the random sentencing demand: The accessibility of incriminating arguments was higher if participants were confronted with a high rather than a low anchor (Study 4). Practical and theoretical implications of this research are discussed.
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... The researchers found that the effect of the anchor on participants' prediction of trial outcome depended on their legal role-with plaintiffs' estimates being significantly higher than those of defendants. Conversely, Englich et al. (2006) found no difference between the effect of an anchor on the sentencing decisions of judges and prosecutors (id., Study 1). However, this null result was obtained using a small sample of 23 judges and 19 prosecutors. ...
... The key conclusion stemming from this corpus of research in the criminal context is that sentencing decisions can be influenced by a wide range of irrelevant anchors. For example, in one experimental study, German judges changed their assessment of the required penalty following the toss of a rigged die (Englich et al., 2006). In another study, the street number where the crime had been committed, coupled with the date it was committed, changed the sentencing decisions of undergraduate students (Conklin, 2019). ...
... Legal-anchoring studies have used a diverse set of subjects-including mock jurors, professional judges in numerous jurisdictions, and experienced international arbitrators (Englich et al., 2006;Franck et al., 2017;Guthrie et al., 2001). While these studies have generally documented an anchoring effect across all groups, they have not systematically compared the decisions of legal experts to those made by the general public. ...
Previous studies of judgment and decision‐making in adjudication have largely focused on juries and judges. This body of work demonstrated that legal training and professional experience sometimes affect attitudes and mitigate the susceptibility to cognitive biases, but often they do not. Relatively few experimental studies examined the decisions of prosecutors and defense lawyers, although they play a major role, especially in legal systems where prosecutors have a broad discretion in charging decisions, courts' discretion regarding sentencing is constrained, and plea bargains abound. This study directly compares laypersons, law students, and legal practitioners—including prosecutors and defense lawyers—in terms of their attitudes about the criminal justice system and their cognitive biases. It was found that the outcome bias and the anti‐inference bias influenced all groups similarly, but an irrelevant anchor only impacted the decisions of laypersons and law students, and not those of legal professionals. Prosecutors were significantly more inclined to judge a behavior as negligent and reach factual conclusions supporting a conviction. However, the hypothesis that the susceptibility of prosecutors and defense lawyers to cognitive biases would be affected by their role was not borne out. The article considers possible explanations for the reported findings, and discusses their policy implications.
... Research have use control experiments to show that irrelevant anchors are just as strong as relevant anchors. Moreover, Experts' decisions are just as affected as non-experts' decisions (Englich et al., 2006) ...
As a result of changing and evolving times, there is a growing realization that dogmatic economic theories cannot meet the practical needs of market analysis. Under such circumstances, behavioral economics came into being. This paper briefly introduces the origins of behavioral finance, highlighting the role of anchoring and adjustment effects, two psychological heuristic bias in the financial market, and analyzing the pros and cons and countermeasures. From the Nobel Prize of Richard Thaler in 2017, people began to realize the importance of behavioral finance and separating it with normal economic. To understand the way to introduce social psychology phenomenon to economic, we start from explaining anchoring bias on customers and then point out how people use adjustment behavior to correct it and the importance of this behavior. The explain of concept is followed with four familiar and detailed examples of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic in behavioral finance. The examples are all about how to use anchoring and adjustment strategy. First, we will talk about product display and marketing using this strategy. The brands set up an expensive and luxury product to give customers a high prediction of the price of the product they will actually buy. When they see the actual price of the product they are going to buy, it would be much lower that there expect. As a result, they would regard themselves as picking up a bargain and purchase it without hesitation. Similarly, in a court of law, judges are influenced by juries, proving that the anchoring effect does not change depending on the amount of knowledge base (non-experts can influence experts). Also, the anchoring effect can be applied to games. People can judge the psychological price floor of their opponents by first offer thus gaining higher returns. The emergence and popularity of the interdisciplinary discipline of behavioral economics also reflects the need for interdisciplinary connections and innovation.
... The result showed that these anchors affected the decision of German judges. The judges sentenced severe punishment when shown higher randomly determined anchors (Englich et al. 2006). ...
The judges' decision-making always plays a very significant role in governance and the judicial system. The fortification of judicial decision-making is generally considered different aspects that operate on different levels: external and internal factors. This study examines the various Psychological flaws, i.e. Implicit Biases, Heuristics (mental shortcuts), and Noise (varied judgments at different times) in judicial decision-making. This research incorporates the shreds of evidence from various documents, articles and books. Then it explores the internal factors of environment, fatigue, mood, multitasking, and others which cause judges to be inclined toward these flaws. Furthermore, this doctrinal research tries to find valuable ways to reduce these effects. Eventually, it is concluded that judges are mostly being accountable for the code of their conduct, not for the decisions they make. Whether they are free from implicit bias, heuristics and noise? The more conscious and effortful decisions, along with the Checklists, Feedback and Accountability system of judges, can improve fairness and justice in the 21st century.
Governing modern rule-based societies involves making countless legal decisions. Thus far, these decisions have been made exclusively by humans. However, the human decision-making process does not always correspond to the ideal image of fact based objective legal reasoning. This chapter introduces different theories on human decision-making and points out its strengths and flaws. It also shows how the functioning of human decision-making processes as the default for legal decisions have influenced and shaped the law. Automated decision-making is introduced as a potential alternative, describing its functioning and its limits. This chapter also examines some of the reasons for the rise of automated decision-making despite its weaknesses. Finally, it examines current and possible future applications of automated decision-making by the executive and judicial branches in a case study ranging from predictive policing to automated administration of benefits to automated decision-making technology’s use in courts.
We conducted three randomized experiments to investigate whether and to what extent citizens' expectations toward waiting times for public service delivery is influenced by reference points, either in the form of social or numerical references. Consistent with our theoretical expectations, our results provide convergent evidence of reference dependence. Specifically, informing citizens that waiting times are longer (shorter) relative to a social reference causes an increase (decrease) in expected waiting times. Additionally, due to an anchoring bias, priming citizens with a higher numerical value for waiting times extends their expected waiting times. Furthermore, in line with the expectancy‐disconfirmation model, citizens' satisfaction with the service is causally impacted by the extent to which actual performance exceeds their expectations.
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Research on higher-level thought has revealed many principles of reasoning and decision-making but has rarely made contact with how we perceive the world in the first place. Here we show how a lower-level property of perception—the spontaneous and task-irrelevant segmentation of continuous visual stimulation into discrete events—can restrict one of the most notorious biases in decision-making: numerical anchoring. Subjects walked down a long room in an immersive three dimensional (3D) animation and then made a numerical judgment (e.g., of how much a suitcase is worth, or of how many hours of community service a minor crime deserved). Critically, some subjects passed through a doorway (a visual event boundary) during their virtual walk, while others did not—equating time, distance traveled, and visual complexity. The anchoring manipulation was especially innocuous, not appearing to be part of the experiment at all. Before the online trial began, subjects reported the two-digit numerical value from a visually distorted “CAPTCHA” (“to verify that you are human”)—where this task-irrelevant anchor was either low (e.g., 29) or high (e.g., 92). With no doorway, we observed reliable anchoring effects: Higher CAPTCHA values produced higher estimates. With the doorway, however, such effects were attenuated or even eliminated. This generalized across tasks involving item valuations, factual questions, and legal judgments and in tests of both incidental and explicit anchoring. This demonstrates how spontaneous visual event segmentation can have profound consequences for higher-level thought.
Objective
For years, scholars have employed Justice Harry Blackmun's private grades of attorneys to measure attorney oral argument quality. Using archival data, I analyze whether Justice Blackmun experienced order effects.
Methods
I estimate numerous ordinary least squares regression models on private archival data.
Results
Blackmun's respondent grades appear to have been influenced by his perceptions of how the petitioners performed. This finding holds across a series of checks, including those that examine whether some cases simply attract better or worse attorneys.
Conclusion
The results suggest that scholars should not use the Blackmun grades as “point estimates” but, instead, as rankings. They also suggest that previous findings may have overstated the influence of oral argument. The fact that one justice displayed evidence of a cognitive illusion also suggests that such effects may exist in various aspects of decision making.
The ‘black box’ quality of contemporary algorithmic tools raises concerns related to their use in court because of the law’s emphasis on explanations, transparency, and public reasons. We argue that the problems of explainability associated with contemporary algorithmic tools are, from a legal perspective, neither sui generis nor irreconcilable with existing norms. We distinguish between the types of explanations required by fact-finders and those required from judges. We conclude that apparent tensions can be reconciled by attending to the epistemic division of labour between the legal and scientific communities, contextualizing expert evidence appropriately, and distinguishing between explanation as reconstruction and as justification.
If there is one conclusion about the United States criminal justice system with which most knowledgeable observers of the system would agree, it is that the sentencing of convicted felons is blatantly unfair. Not only does the average length of prison sentences given to offenders convicted of virtually identical crimes vary from one locale to another (see, e.g., Bottomley, 1973; Green, 1961; Hogarth, 1971; O’Donnell, Churgin, & Curtis, 1977), but different judges seem to give completely different sentences to the same offender. For example, in one instance (reported in O’Donnell et al., 1977), after reading the same file describing characteristics of an offender and the nature of his criminal activity (transporting stolen securities across state lines), one federal judge imposed a three-year prison term while another released the offender with only one year of probation.
Results of four studies support the notion that anchoring effects are mediated by mechanisms of hypothesis-consistent testing and semantic priming. According to the suggested Selective Accessibility Model, judges use a hypothesis-consistent test strategy to solve a comparative anchoring task. Applying this strategy selectively increases the accessibility of anchor-consistent knowledge which is then used to generate the subsequent absolute judgment. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that absolute estimates depend on the hypothesis implied in the comparative task, suggesting that a hypothesis-testing strategy is used to solve this task. Study 3 shows that limiting the amount of knowledge generated for the comparative task retards absolute judgments. This suggests that knowledge rendered easily accessible in the comparative judgment is used for the subsequent absolute judgment. Finally, Study 4 suggests that self-generation of knowledge contributes to the robustness of the effect, thus resolving the seeming inconsistency that anchoring effects are at the same time remarkably robust and mediated by typically fragile semantic priming mechanisms.
Anchoring effects—the assimilation of a numeric estimate to a previously considered standard—have proved to be remarkably robust. Results of two studies, however, demonstrate that anchoring can be reduced by applying a consider-the-opposite strategy. Based on the Selective Accessibility Model, which assumes that anchoring is mediated by the selectively increased accessibility of anchor-consistent knowledge, the authors hypothesized that increasing the accessibility of anchor-inconsistent knowledge mitigates the effect. Considering the opposite (i.e., generating reasons why an anchor is inappropriate) fulfills this objective and consequently proves to be a successful corrective strategy. In a real-world setting using experts as participants, Study 1 dem-onstrated that listing arguments that speak against a provided anchor value reduces the effect. Study 2 further revealed that the effects of anchoring and considering the opposite are additive.
Many decisions are based on beliefs concerning the likelihood of uncertain events such as the outcome of an election, the guilt of a defendant, or the future value of the dollar. Occasionally, beliefs concerning uncertain events are expressed in numerical form as odds or subjective probabilities. In general, the heuristics are quite useful, but sometimes they lead to severe and systematic errors. The subjective assessment of probability resembles the subjective assessment of physical quantities such as distance or size. These judgments are all based on data of limited validity, which are processed according to heuristic rules. However, the reliance on this rule leads to systematic errors in the estimation of distance. This chapter describes three heuristics that are employed in making judgments under uncertainty. The first is representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event belongs to a class or event. The second is the availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development, and the third is adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value is available.
Research on juridical decision making has demonstrated that largely disparate sentences are often given for identical crimes. This may be the case because judges' sentencing decisions are influenced by a recommended or demanded sentence. Building on research on judgmental anchoring (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), the present investigation examines whether a sentencing demand has a direct influence on a given sentence. Using criminal trial judges as participants, Study 1 demonstrates that such a direct influence does, in fact, exist. Sentencing decisions are assimilated to the sentence demanded by the prosecutor. Study 2 further reveals that this influence is independent of the perceived relevance of the sentencing demand. Study 3 demonstrates that this influence is also independent of judges' experience.
Do similar offenders who commit similar offenses under similar circumstances generally receive similar sentences? The evidence suggests that they do not. Both correctional officials and judges have reported their impressions of wide disparities in criminal sentencing (cf. Bennett, 1964, p. 319, Frankel, 1973, p. 6).
In almost every personal injury trial the injured person's attorney must decide how much to ask the jury to award in damages. Research regarding attitude change in other settings indicates that the more extreme the persuading message is, the more attitude change occurs. This tendency suggests that the more money requested in damages, the more a jury will award. In an analogue experiment of juror behavior, the effect of amount of damages requested on amount awarded was examined. One hundred fifty-eight American college students read two detailed case summaries of real personal injury cases, with each summary containing one of four amounts requested for damages by the injured person's attorney. The results showed a significant effect of amount requested upon the amount awarded. The effect was consistent across cases and across injured persons of different sexes and ethnic groups.