Law and Social Cognition – Abstract
Posted by The Situationist Staff on August 10, 2012
Barbara Spellman and Frederick Schauer recently posted their illuminating chapter, “Law and Social Cognition” on SSRN:
The body of research on law and psychology is vast, but the overwhelming proportion of it is on jury decision making, especially in criminal cases. In this chapter for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Social Cognition (D. Carlston ed.), we attempt to broaden this research agenda. We survey briefly the existing state of psychological research on jury decision making, but show that, even with respect to factual determinations, the jury is a less important decision maker than most psychologists appear to believe. Thus, further research on factual determination by judges, of which there is some but not much, could substantially enrich our understanding of the psychological dimensions of legal decision making. Moreover, the role of judges in finding, interpreting, and applying the law is itself a task necessarily involving social cognition, and we explain both this connection and how further research on the social cognition dimensions of legal reasoning and legal argument could be highly valuable. Finally, we explain how numerous issues of substantive law – questions of intent, reasonableness, and knowledge, to give just a few examples – are themselves dependent on assumptions about the social and cognitive psychological reasoning of the people affected and governed by the law. There is very little psychology research on such questions, and the agenda of law and psychology could usefully be expanded to include such themes.
Download the chapter for free here.
Related Situationist posts:
- The Historical Situation of Situationism at Harvard Law
- Jon Hanson on Law and Mind Sciences
- Situationism at University of Chicago Law
- Ideology, Psychology, and Law – Introduction
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This entry was posted on August 10, 2012 at 12:01 am and is filed under Abstracts, Book, Law, Social Psychology. Tagged: and law and psychology, judicial decision making, juries, jury decision-making. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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