From meaning to money: Translating injury into dollars.

Abstract

Legal systems often require the translation of qualitative assessments into quantitative judgments, yet the qualitative-to-quantitative conversion is a challenging, understudied process. We conducted an experimental test of predictions from a new theory of juror damage award decision making, examining how 154 lay people engaged in the translation process in recommending money damages for pain and suffering in a personal injury tort case. The experiment varied the presence, size, and meaningfulness of an anchor number to determine how these factors influenced monetary award judgments, perceived difficulty, and subjective meaningfulness of awards. As predicted, variability in awards was high, with awards participants considered to be "medium" (rather than "low" or "high") having the most dispersion. The gist of awards as low, medium, or high fully mediated the relationship between perceived pain/suffering and award amount. Moreover, controlling for participants' perceptions of plaintiffs and defendants, as well as their desire to punish and to take economic losses into account, meaningful anchors predicted unique variance in award judgments: A meaningful large anchor number drove awards up and a meaningful small anchor drove them down, whereas meaningless large and small anchors did not differ significantly. Numeracy did not predict award magnitudes or variability, but surprisingly, more numerate participants reported that it was more difficult to pick an exact figure to compensate the plaintiff for pain and suffering. The results support predictions of the theory about qualitative gist and meaningful anchors, and suggest that we can assist jurors to arrive at damage awards by providing meaningful numbers. (PsycINFO Database Record

Numeracy in the jury box: Numerical ability, meaningful anchors, and damage award decision making

“…In line with that gist of injury severity, jurors make an ordinal gist judgment regarding whether the damage award that is deserved is nil, low, medium, or high, and then identify a number, that is, to them, nil, low, medium, or high, to match the deserved damages. This model has been tested in and supported by two reported experimental studies (e.g., Hans et al, 2018;Reyna et al, 2015).…”

“…Jurors seeing a long‐term case of pain and suffering will award more than jurors seeing a short‐term case of pain and suffering, even though jurors themselves do not view both cases and thus cannot compare them directly.Hypothesis Compared with less numerate jurors, more numerate jurors will show greater reliability in their awards. Specifically, more numerate jurors will show less variability in their damage award amounts.Hypothesis Compared with less numerate jurors, more numerate jurors will show greater verbatim–gist correspondence between their ordinal judgments of the deserved damages (nil, low, medium, or high) and dollar award amounts.Hypothesis Based on previous research findings (Hans et al, ), we expect that despite their advantages in handling numerical information, more numerate jurors will report finding it more difficult to reach a damage award to compensate for pain and suffering than their less numerate counterparts.Hypothesis The three identified benefits of numeracy will be emulated in all jurors by providing meaningful anchors to assist in their decision making. These benefits will not be present (or will at least be significantly reduced) when an anchor provided is meaningless.…”

“…A total of 345 undergraduate students (78.3% female, M Age = 19.81, SD = 1.28) took part in the experiment. We selected sample size based on previous work testing the Hans–Reyna model (e.g., Reyna et al, ; Hans et al, ). Participants received course credit in psychology, human development, or undergraduate law courses at a northeastern university.…”

“…Most importantly, because numeracy is associated with other individual characteristics such as gender and education, a strategy of selecting numerate jurors may compromise the representativeness of jurors making damage award decisions (Helm et al, ). In addition, evidence suggests that jurors with higher levels of numeracy are likely to be subject to predictable biases in decision making (e.g., Liberali et al, ) and, as noted above, find the task of awarding a dollar damage award amount more difficult (Hans et al, ).…”

“…Thus far, neither objective nor subjective numeracy has been associated with higher or lower damage award amounts (Hans et al, ; Reyna et al, ). In a mock juror study examining the differential impact of meaningful and meaningless anchors on juror damage award decisions, Hans et al () measured objective numeracy of jurors and found that even though damage awards were unrelated to mock juror's numeracy, more numerate mock jurors reported more difficulty in determining a money damage award for pain and suffering. The authors speculated that more numerate jurors were better able to recognize the challenge of attaching a dollar value to the intangible nature of an individual's pain.…”