COGNITIVE BIASES IN THE LEGAL FIELD: A MEETING PLACE OF LEGAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE Cover Image

КОГНИТИВНЕ ПРИСТРАСНОСТИ У ПРАВНОЈ ОБЛАСТИ: МЕСТО СУСРЕТА ПРАВНЕ И БИХЕВИОРИСТИЧКЕ НАУКЕ
COGNITIVE BIASES IN THE LEGAL FIELD: A MEETING PLACE OF LEGAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE

Author(s): Aleksandar Mojašević, Ljubica Nikolić
Subject(s): Law, Constitution, Jurisprudence, Cognitive Psychology, Behaviorism
Published by: Правни факултет Универзитета у Нишу
Keywords: Cognitive biases; legal field; anchoring; framing effect; hindsight bias;representativeness heuristic; egocentric bias

Summary/Abstract: The paper presents typical cognitive biases of representatives of different legal professions and participants in court and other proceedings (judges, arbitrators, mediators, lawyers, parties), including: the anchoring, the framing effect, the hindsight bias, the representativeness heuristic, and the egocentric bias. The goal of this paper is to examine their implications on the legal and other decision-making processes, as well as the importance they have in the legal field. The starting assumption is that the making of legal decisions is not solely determined by legal norms, but also by a number of factors that have a nonlegal character, whose cognitive factors are distinguished by their importance. On these grounds, the paper presents numerous studies of cognitive biases of those participants who decide in the legal field which belong to the domain of behavioral science. All of them clearly prove the existence of numerous systematic thinking mistakes of participants in court and other proceedings. Based on this research, the authors discuss the implications of these mistakes in making legal and other decisions, as well as techniques for their alleviation or elimination (the so-called debiasing techniques), thus setting the conceptual framework for future research in this field, particularly related to the domestic legal system.

  • Issue Year: LVII/2018
  • Issue No: 79
  • Page Range: 253-273
  • Page Count: 21
  • Language: Serbian