The More the Better? Effects of Training and Information Amount in Legal Judgments

Stephan Dickert (), Britta Herbig, Andreas Glöckner, Christina Gansen and Roman Portack
Additional contact information
Stephan Dickert: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn
Britta Herbig: Institute for Occupational, Social and Environmental Medicine, Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich, Germany
Andreas Glöckner: Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn
Christina Gansen: University of Bonn
Roman Portack: University of Bonn

No 2010_34, Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods

Abstract: In an experimental study we investigated effects of information amount and legal training on the judgment accuracy in legal cases. In a two (legal training: yes vs. no) x two (information amount: high vs. low) between-subjects design, 90 participants judged the premeditation of a perpetrator in eight real-world cases decided by the German Federal Court of Justice. Judgment accuracy was assessed in comparison with the Court’s ruling. Legal training increased judgment accuracy, but did not depend on the amount of information given. Furthermore, legal training corresponded with higher confidence. Interestingly, emotional reactions to the legal cases were stronger when more information was given for individuals without legal training but decreased for individuals with training. This interaction seems to be caused by fundamental differences in the way people construct their mental representations of the cases. We advance an information processing perspective to explain the observed differences in legal judgments and conclude with a discussion on the merits and problems of offering more information to lay people participating in legal decision making.

Date: 2010-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-law
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2010_34online.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2010_34

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods from Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marc Martin ().