From Yale U: Laws of cognition and the cognition of law

Cognition. 2014 Dec 12. pii: S0010-0277(14)00245-5. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2014.11.025. [Epub ahead of print]

Laws of cognition and the cognition of law.

Kahan DM1.

Author information

• 1Yale University, United States. Electronic address: dan.kahan@yale.edu.

Abstract

This paper presents a compact synthesis of the study of cognition in legal decisionmaking. Featured dynamics include the story-telling model (Pennington & Hastie, 1986), lay prototypes (Smith, 1991), motivated cognition (Sood, 2012), and coherence-based reasoning (Simon, Pham, Le, & Holyoak, 2001). Unlike biases and heuristics understood to bound or constrain rationality, these dynamics identify how information shapes a variety of cognitive inputs-from prior beliefs to perceptions of events to the probative weight assigned new information-that rational decisionmaking presupposes. The operation of these mechanisms can be shown to radically alter the significance that jurors give to evidence, and hence the conclusions they reach, within a Bayesian framework of information processing. How these dynamics interact with the professional judgment oflawyers and judges, the paper notes, remains in need of investigation.