Emotions and Attributions of Legal Responsibility and Blame: A Research Review.

Abstract

Research on the effects of emotions and moods on judgments of legal responsibility and blame is reviewed. Emotions and moods may influence decision makers in 3 ways: by affecting their information processing strategies, by inclining their judgments in the direction of the valence of the emotion or mood, and/or by providing informational cues to the proper decision. A model is proposed that incorporates these effects and further distinguishes among various affective influences in terms of whether the affect is provoked by a source integral or incidental to the judgment task, and whether it affects judgment directly (e.g., by providing an informational cue to judgment) or indirectly (e.g., by affecting construal of judgment target features, which in turn affects the judgment). Legal decision makers' abilities to correct for any affective influences they perceive to be undesirable and normative implications for legal theory and practice are briefly discussed.

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

“…In line with theoretical considerations (e.g., Herbig & Glöckner, 2009) and findings from expertise research (for an overview see Ericsson, Charness, Hoffman, & Feltovich, 2006) our results show that legal training can lead to different mental representations, differences in the accompanying integral emotions (Feigenson & Park, 2006), and also differences in judgment confidence. Moreover, for people in advanced professional training these representations should be better adapted to the complex reality of the domain (i.e., by containing more specific legal terms) and therefore lead to better judgments as shown in our results.…”

“…Moreover, laws accommodate for emotions to be causally related to criminal actions (e.g., crimes of passion are treated differently than coldblooded crimes). The link between emotional responses to criminal behavior and legal judgments is therefore not new, but has been an integral part of jurisdiction (Feigenson & Park, 2006). It is of note that emotional responses of judges to legal material are generally seen as a source of bias that degrade judgment quality.…”

“…Research on judgment and decision making provides plenty of evidence that emotions (Bechara, Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1997;Finucane, Alhakami, Slovic, & Johnson, 2000;Luce, Bettman, & Payne, 1997;Luce, Payne, & Bettman, 1999, 2001Naqvi, Shiv, & Bechara, 2006) and the amount of information to process (Dijksterhuis, Bos, Nordgren, & van Baaren, 2006;Payne, Bettman, & Johnson, 1992) strongly influence decision processes (e.g., Feigenson & Park, 2006). Contrary to the assumption that emotions degrade decision performance, research has also shown the merits of emotions in good decision making (e.g., Dickert & Peters, under review;Schwarz, 2002;Schwarz & Clore, 1983;Slovic, Finucane, Peters, & MacGregor, 2002).…”

Jurors’ Emotions and Judgments of Legal Responsibility and Blame: What Does the Experimental Research Tell Us?

“…Here are a few examples of studies that would help to address them. First, experiments manipulating independent variables to permit clearer tests between directional and informational paths of emotional influence, as opposed to differentiating between paths solely via statistical analysis, would be helpful (see Feigenson & Park, 2006). Second, the domain specificity hypothesis of moral judgment (e.g., Horberg, Oveis, & Keltner, 2011) posits that only anger, and possibly sympathy, should affect moral-legal judgments of responsibility and blame; further research examining the effects of other emotions, such as fear, would test this theory (cf.…”

A policy maker’s dilemma: Preventing terrorism or preventing blame

“…People also ascribe more blame in situations when the blameworthy outcome elicits greater negative emotions (Alicke, 2000). The connection between negative emotions and blame is well-documented in juror decision making (Feigenson & Park, 2006). For instance, gruesome photographs presented by the prosecution to mock jurors caused greater emotional arousal, in particular directing anger toward the defendant, which increased judged culpability (Bright & Goodman-Delahunty, 2006).…”