"IDEOLOGY" OR "SITUATION SENSE"? AN EXPERIMENTAL INVESTIGATION OF MOTIVATED REASONING AND PROFESSIONAL JUDGMENT

• Published in: University of Pennsylvania law review Vol. 164; no. 2; pp. 349 - 439
• Main Authors: Kahan, Dan M., Hoffman, David, Evans, Danieli, Devins, Neal, Lucci, Eugene, Cheng, Katherine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Philadelphia students of the University of Pennsylvania Law School 01.01.2016; University of Pennsylvania, Law School; University of Pennsylvania Law School
• Subjects: Attitudes; BIAS; CLIMATE CHANGE; Cognition & reasoning; Court decisions; Decision making; Ideology; Judges & magistrates; Judgment; Judgment (Logic); JUDGMENTS; Judicial process; Law and legislation; Lawyers; Legal studies; Marijuana; Political aspects; Reasoning; RISK; STATUTORY INTERPRETATION; UNITED STATES
• ISSN: 0041-9907; 1942-8537

This Article reports the results of a study on whether political predispositions influence judicial decisionmaking. The study was designed to overcome the two principal limitations on existing empirical studies that purport to find such an influence: the use of nonexperimental methods to assess the decisions of actual judges; and the failure to use actual judges in ideologically-biased-reasoning experiments. The study involved a sample of sitting judges (n = 253), who, like members of a general public sample (n = 800), were culturally polarized on climate change, marijuana legalization and other contested issues. When the study subjects were assigned to analyze statutory interpretation problems, however, only the responses of the general-public subjects and not those of the judges varied in patterns that reflected the subjects' cultural values. The responses of a sample of lawyers (n = 217) were also uninfluenced by their cultural values; the responses of a sample of law students (n = 284), in contrast, displayed a level of cultural bias only modestly less pronounced than that observed in the general-public sample. Among the competing hypotheses tested in the study, the results most supported the position that professional judgment imparted by legal training and experience confers resistance to identity-protective cognition—a dynamic associated with politically biased information processing generally—but only for decisions that involve legal reasoning. The scholarly and practical implications of the findings are discussed.