title: Laws of cognition and the cognition of law.
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 of lawyers and judges, the paper notes, remains in need of investigation.
authors.affiliation: Yale University, United States. Electronic address: dan.kahan@yale.edu.
authors.forename: Dan M
authors.initials: DM
authors.lastname: Kahan
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D007603:Jurisprudence; D008960:Models, Psychological
keywords: Legal decisionmaking; Motivated cognition; Story telling model