Avani Mehta Sood's research while affiliated with Princeton University and other places
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Publications (7)
How and when do legal decision makers' preferred outcomes inadvertently drive their judgments? This psychological phenomenon, known as motivated cognition or motivated reasoning, has become an important topic of investigation among scholars conducting experimental research at the intersection of law and psychology. This article presents an overview...
The “harm principle,” which suggests that the State should criminalize conduct only if doing so is necessary to prevent harm to others, has long been at the center of debates about the legal enforcement of morality through the law. This Essay presents a series of original experiments that investigate the psychological “plasticity” of harm in the co...
Legal decision makers are often faced with dual motivations: an overt commitment to following the law, and a less conscious but arguably stronger drive to follow their punishment instincts. Sometimes these goals are congruent, but what happens when people’s internal retributive (and perhaps utilitarian) motives conflict with an external legal const...
This Article examines the application of the Supreme Court of India’s enterprising Public Interest Litigation (PIL) mechanism to a subject of compelling global concern: violations of women’s rights. India is currently receiving much international attention for its dynamism and innovation on various fronts, yet the country also remains steeped in ce...
Formally, the law purports to be based solely in reasoned analysis, devoid of ideological bias or unconscious influences. Judges claim to act as umpires applying the rules, not making them. They frame their decisions as straightforward applications of an established set of legal doctrines, principles, and mandates to a given set of facts. As schola...
This paper proposes an original model of motivated cognition in legal decision-making and presents supporting data from two experimental studies in the context of the Exclusionary Rule. As predicted by our proposed model, we found that when people were highly motivated to punish but faced with a legal constraint upon their punishment goals (in the...
The use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects is typically justified on utilitarian grounds. The present research suggests, however, that those who support such techniques are fuelled by retributive motives. An experimental study conducted with a broad national sample of US residents found that the desire for harsh interrogation i...
Citations
... In fact, some evidence suggests that the performance of intuitive and analytical types may be modulated by motivated cognition (see Kahan, 2012;Martel et al., 2020). Motivated cognitions are categories, beliefs, or meanings that influence and bias the performance of different types of reasoning (Mather and Carstensen, 2005;Sood, 2013). For example, people who believe in the existence of paranormal phenomena (as an example of magical ideation) would execute analytical and intuitive reasoning influenced by these acquired beliefs (Rogers et al., 2019;Ross et al., 2019). ...
... This Declaration reserves the responsibility of the Indian government to intervene in all cultural practices which result in violence against women and as such is impermissible under public international law. However, provisions of international human rights treaties have been read into the Indian constitution under Article 21 which enumerates one of the most fundamental rights of the Indian constitution-the right to life (Sood 2008). Therefore, this paper argues that the constitutional dilemma over the UCC can be resolved decisively in favor of the feminist movement by situating the debate under the CEDAW's DDO. ...
... We think variables that determine judgments about a target's deservingness are especially likely to influence people's responses to violations of the target's rights, because a motive to see individuals get what they deserve appears to be deeply ingrained (Hafer, 2011). However, researchers should also examine variables affecting other target-specific judgments that might affect toleration; for example, judgments relevant to utilitarian concerns (Sood & Carlsmith, 2012). ...
... 10 Political and ideological bias in particular was found in different legal settings. For example, in the criminal law setting, Sood and Darley (2012) showed that both liberals and conservatives are more apt to cite the legal principle of harm (which suggests that the state should criminalize conduct only when necessary to prevent harm) to criminalize and severely punish an out-group member as compared to an in-group member. ...
... However, judgments about others' true selves may be heterogenous (i.e., people view some individuals' true selves as better than others' true selves; Heiphetz, 2020;Zhang & Alicke, 2021). Furthermore, viewing others' true selves as immoral can have deleterious consequences: perceived badness typically augments, whereas perceived goodness buffers against, the likelihood of outcomes such as severe punishment and unfavorable attitudes toward individuals who receive punishment (e.g., Carlsmith & Sood, 2009;Dunlea & Heiphetz, 2022;Heiphetz, 2020;Nadler & McDonnell, 2011). For example, when people think the agent views humans' true selves as morally bad (versus good), they might expect the agent to show more severe punishment motives. ...
