Dickert, S et al --- "The more the better? Effects of training, experience and information amount in legal judgments" [2012] LegEdDig 27; (2012) 20(2) Legal Education Digest 37

• The more the better? Effects of training, experience and information amount in legal judgments

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The more the better? Effects of training, experience and information amount in legal judgments

S Dickert, B Herbig, A Glöckner, C Gansen and R Portack

Applied Cognitive Psychology, Vol 26 No.2, 2011, pp 223-233

Legal judgments are often an inherently complex process. Often, an abundance of information about the specifics of the case and relevant legal rules has to be processed to arrive at a verdict. Notwithstanding this challenge, in many legal systems, judgments are not only made by expert judges but are also delegated to non-experts such as jurors (eg USA, England and Scotland) and/or lay judges (eg Germany and Japan). Although there is a large strand of literature on jury decision making, it is still unclear how courtroom experience influences legal decision making for lay judges.

A common way to investigate legal judgments of people concerned with law is to demonstrate systematic biases in their judgments and deviations from rules of logic and probability theory. Most relevant for the present investigation, these biases have been demonstrated for people with and without legal training, and judges with legal training showed a smaller magnitude for only a few of them. Much previous research has addressed differences between judgments made by judges and juries, some of which also focuses on the degree of congruency between judgments made by both groups. However, no studies involved experienced lay judges that might lie somewhere in between both groups as they possess the courtroom experience of professional judges and at the same time share the lack of formal training of juries.

There is good reason to believe that lay judges’ experience leads them to behave quite differently than jurors or lay controls.

Research on expertise has shown that experts exhibit high, outstanding and exceptional performance that is domain-specific, stable over time, and related to knowledge, experience and practice. One of the core mechanisms is that with intense training people develop complex knowledge structures that help them process large amounts of information. Higher overlap in knowledge structures as well as similarity in training should consequently lead to higher congruency of judgments.

Besides differences in congruency, factors that might differ for trained and untrained legal decision makers are the ability to handle more (and more complex) information, the mental representation of legal information, confidence in one’s own judgments and emotional reactions to the content of the legal scenarios.

Legal decision making is, in most parts, a highly complex task as it contains a high amount of information with manifold interrelations. However, not all information is equally relevant. Because of their elaborated knowledge structures, more complete information about a case could help trained legal decision makers to make more appropriate judgments compared with cases with lacking information. However, it is unclear whether more information has the same effect for untrained people, as they might not be able to process the information because of limited cognitive capacity. Moreover, because of their limited knowledge about legal decision making, untrained persons might be more susceptible to dilution effects. Therefore, persons with legal training and experience should be better equipped to sort between legally relevant and irrelevant information. A direct consequence of the differences in knowledge of people with and without domain specific training is the way complex tasks are mentally represented – both structurally and in terms of content. Moreover, concepts like encapsulated knowledge or chunking refer to structural dissimilarities depending on expertise; that is, people with training and experience being able to store large quantities of information as one chunk but having access to all information if the necessity for a more detailed mental representation arises.

Confidence in a legal judgment can be an important part in legal decision making as it may serve as an internal check for the quality of the judgment. When information is processed in a way that establishes a coherent mental representation of the legal material (e.g. a clear mental image of the sequence of events in a crime), confidence is usually higher.

Some research suggests that the biasing function of emotions may be reduced for individuals with better training and more experience possibly because of better calibrated mental representations that are based on abstract legal categories.

In the present experiment, we used legal cases recently decided by the German Federal Court of Justice (the highest appellate court in Germany for civil and criminal cases) to investigate the effects of amount of case-information (as one part of complexity) and legal training and experience on the congruency of legal judgments regarding premeditation of a crime.

In the current experiment, we compared legal decisions of individuals with formal legal training (i.e. advanced law students), individuals untrained but experienced in legal matters (i.e. lay judges) and individuals untrained and without experience in legal matters (i.e. students with other subjects) with judgments made by the German Federal Court of Justice. We expected that the congruency of legal judgments with the highest court depends on legal training, such that individuals with formal legal training possess knowledge structures with legal concepts and therefore would show higher congruency than those without training. Providing more (and less pertinent) information about a case could have differential effects. For persons without legal training, it might make it more difficult to focus on the more relevant parts, resulting in less congruency with the highest court judgments. Formal legal training and legal experience, on the other hand, should allow for selective weighting of the given information and the ability to ignore less pertinent parts of the information, making their judgments more in line with the highest court.

We expected that individuals with legal training process and integrate information in abstract categories that accord with their existing legal knowledge, resulting in less emotional reactions compared with controls.

Additionally, legal cases with more information should lead to more vivid mental representations of the crimes and thereby increasing emotional reactions particularly for individuals without legal training (i.e. experienced lay judges and untrained controls).

Ninety students from the University of Bonn and 47 lay judges from German local courts and district courts participated in this study that was part of a 2-3-hour experimental battery with other studies on unrelated topics. We recruited the lay judges with the help of the German Society of Lay Judges who forwarded our request to a number of lay judges from whom a subsample signed up for the study. The control group was comprised of non-law students of other subjects in various stages of their studies.

Cases were selected from the domain of criminal law, specifically cases of manslaughter with the crucial question of premeditation. From the available material, eight cases were chosen: A landlord causing a gas explosion and killing tenants, a deadly fight after a visit to the pub, a robbery at a newsstand, child abuse under the influence of alcohol, a rape attempt after an evening spent together, a shooting by a homeless person, aggressive driving leading to a serious accident and rape and robbery with fatal consequences. After reading each case, the participants had to answer the question if the offender’s action was premeditated or not.

Each selected case was prepared in two different versions: one with less information containing 11-13 basic propositions (as a measure of information content) and the other with more information comprising 20-24 propositions. The second version was exactly identical to the first except for the additional propositions. A critical point was that these additional pieces of information were chosen from the original case material but followed the main objective to be less informative for answering the question of premeditation than the basic information.

The participants were randomly selected to receive one of the two versions (high versus low amount of information). After reading each case material, the participants had to decide if the offender’s crime was premeditated.

The current study was designed to investigate the effects of legal training and experience together with information amount on judgment congruency, confidence and emotional reactions in legal cases concerning premeditation. We found that persons with legal training are more congruent with high court decisions in their premeditation judgments than student controls and lay judges with courtroom experience. Given that lay judges rated themselves as equally unfamiliar with formal legal theories on premeditation as untrained student controls, it is of special interest that lay judges made judgments that were even less in line with the high court (slightly below 50 per cent). We did not find that varying the information amount influenced the congruency of judgments and no differential effect based on legal knowledge and experience.

In line with research on (over)confidence and its relation to skill, the participants with legal training and legal experience were more confident in their decisions than student controls. We had also hypothesized that for individuals with legal training and experience more information would lead to higher confidence whereas the opposite effect would be observed for individuals without legal training. However, our data suggest that it is the untrained participants whose confidence increases most with the provision of more (but less relevant) information. Given that the additional propositions in the high information condition were less informative for the premeditation judgments than those in the low information condition, it is not surprising that the increase in confidence by untrained students is not matched by an increase in judgment congruency.

We had also expected that individuals with legal training would be less emotionally reactive to the content of the legal cases, that more information would lead to stronger emotional reactions driven by clearer mental representations, and that this latter effect would be stronger for individuals without legal training. The main effect for training and the interaction effect were supported by our data. Moreover, the lower affective reaction of trained participants seems to support the notion that individuals with formal legal training are less affectively influenced by the material and differ in their decision making from student controls and lay judges. We also observed a differential effect of amount of information: Legally trained individuals’ emotional reaction towards a case reduced with increasing amounts of information, whereas the emotional arousal for student controls and lay judges increased with more information. This suggests that legally trained persons seem to become even more analytic with added information, whereas the opposite is the case for untrained persons. However, it is also possible that, as the information amount is augmented, trained individuals recruit increasingly deliberative processing techniques (i.e. comparing the details of the case with existing knowledge structures relevant to the legal judgment) that abstract the given information to the point where the technical mental representation of the crime is no longer conducive to strong emotional reactions.

Trained persons construct mental representations using legal terms and become less aroused when they have more information to process. In contrast, due to their lack of explicit legal knowledge, untrained persons including student controls as well as lay judges seem to construct their mental representations mainly on the basis of comparable situations they know. They produce stronger affective reactions, particularly when given more information, and their judgments are considerably less congruent than those of trained persons. In line with theoretical considerations and findings from expertise research, our results show that legal training can lead to different mental representations, differences in the accompanying integral emotions, and also differences in judgment confidence. Moreover, for people in advanced professional training, these representations are more adapted to the complex reality of the domain (i.e. by containing more specific legal terms) and therefore lead to more congruent judgments.

Our research was motivated by the German legal system, which employs lay judges in a different way than the US system (e.g. German lay judges serve repeatedly in court and are both triers of fact and tasked with applying the law to these facts). Lay judges represent the common public and exhibit some interesting differences to trained legal decision makers. Although at first glance, it might be surprising and seen as problematic that lay judges made judgments that were quite different to the high-court rulings, our data also show that lay judges have opinions that do not merely replicate the opinion of (prospective and actual) judges. Law students, on the other hand, are more similar in legal knowledge to the judges of the Federal High Court that might indicate that legal education indeed leads to changes in judgments.

The influence of the difference in legal knowledge between the quasi-experimental groups on behaviour was further amplified by the fact that we did not provide participants with a legal definition of premeditation. The observed differences in judgment congruency, thus, may also reflect a deeper divide in the understanding of what premeditation means for lay judges versus trained legal decision makers.

As untrained legal decision makers are used in various functions in different legal systems, the presented results are generalizable, particularly, for this group. Nonetheless, our results show that even without extensive legal and practical experience in the courtroom, advanced law students already construct a different mental image and rely less on emotions than on legal knowledge compared with individuals untrained in legal matters.