No abstract

How do people decide what is reasonable? People often have to make those judgments, judgments that can influence tremendously consequential decisions—such as whether to indict someone in a legal proceeding. In this article, we take a situated cognition lens to review and integrate findings from social psychology, judgment and decision-making, communication, law, and sociology to generate a new framework for conceptualizing judgments of reasonableness and their implications for how people make decisions, particularly in the context of the legal system. We theorize that differences in structural and social contexts create information asymmetries that shape people’s priors about what is and is not reasonable and how they update their priors in the face of new information. We use the legal system as a context for exploring the implications of the framework for both individual and collective decision-making and for considering the practical implications of the framework for inequities in law and social policy.

Surveys, commonly employed in the social and behavioral sciences, are practical tools that can be used to assess the needs and attitudes of a given population. If not implemented in thoughtful ways, however, surveys can be inefficient or even harmful. With surveys often informing critical policy decisions, survey administrators must make careful methodological choices in order to obtain meaningful results and make sound decisions. In this paper, we review the social scientific literature on survey administration to aid policymakers, practitioners, and other survey administrators in understanding their position, identifying their participants, and establishing a plan for their surveys. We provide an overarching framework for survey design, guided by the idea that surveys are conversations between administrators and participants, in order to help creators of surveys make better decisions and engage more effectively with the communities they serve.

r Many studies have explored the impact of message strategies to build support for policies that advance racial equity, but few studies examine the effects of richer stories of lived experience and detailed accounts of the ways racism is embedded in policy design and implementation.r Longer messages framed to emphasize social and structural causes of racial inequity hold significant potential to enhance support for policies to advance racial equity.r There is an urgent need to develop, test, and disseminate communication interventions that center perspectives from historically marginalized people and promote policy advocacy, community mobilization, and collective action to advance racial equity.

Legal decision-making is a complex psychological process with weighty consequences. This has led some to question why a group of lay citizens with no relevant background or training in the law should decide legal cases. This chapter addresses these concerns by summarizing psychological theory and research that sheds light on how jurors approach their task and that confirms the general soundness of the jury as a fact-finding body. The chapter outlines current psychological models of decision-making that map out how individual jurors and juries come to their decisions in civil and criminal trials. It describes how the diversity of juries contributes positively to the jury’s fact-finding competence and the fairness of its decisions. The chapter also presents evidence about the effectiveness of various jury reforms, from the jury’s size and decision rule, to trial aids such as notetaking and question-asking, to instructions on the law and on implicit biases. The chapter concludes with suggestions for future jury research, including research on global systems of lay legal decision-making.