This request is to bring together a group of scholars from several disciplines for two days of intensive and wide-ranging discussions at the intersection of judicial behavior and cognitive, social, and personality psychology. The mission given to scholars attending this meeting is to identify existing areas of psychological knowledge relevant to judicial decision making, critically evaluate the relevant research, and identify the key areas of future research most likely to yield important insights into the thinking and behavior of trial, appellate, and administrative judges. The immodest goal of the workshop is to set the agenda for the next decade's research into the psychology of judging.
Intellectual Merits Over the years, psychologists have devoted uncountable hours of study to understanding how human beings make judgments and decisions. Legal scholars and political scientists have expended immeasurable intellectual energy trying to understand why professional judges decide cases as they do. Yet as vast as each field of study is, the area of their intersection is tiny. Psychological concepts crop up in studies of judicial behavior from time to time, but it would be difficult to name a score of published studies that have relied extensively on current ideas and evidence in psychology to generate major theoretical propositions about judging. This is not hard to understand: few people possess expertise in two disparate fields. But it is unfortunate. Judicial decision making, often highly consequential and performed by people who have undergone extensive training and socialization in a peculiar form of decision making, should be a fascinating and fertile area of research for psychologists. Likewise, anyone who has ever tried to fairly evaluate competing serious legal arguments must have been struck by the complexity and mysteriousness of the reasoning process in which they engaged. Surely, the more we understand about the workings of the human mind generally, the better we will be able to understand the specific human activity of judicial decision making. The most important obstacle to rapid advancement in our understanding of the psychology of judicial decision making is that few people know both fields very well. Perhaps the best way to overcome this obstacle is to create a collaborative, interdisciplinary community of scholars who can draw on each other's expertise/work to acquire knowledge that would be difficult to achieve acting independently. The proposed workshop is intended to be the first major step toward developing such a community.
Broader Impact It is hoped that this community will eventually be quite large. To that end, the dissemination of ideas to other researchers is a central goal of the proposed workshop. In the short-term, the PIs aim to publish the proceedings of the workshop as a collection of essays arguing for the utility of taking psychology seriously in studying judging and identifying the most important research questions that become apparent once one does so. In the long-term, this workshop is expected to lead to other meetings of like-minded scholars and to help those scholars publish novel empirical studies that will both contribute to our understanding of judging and psychology and stimulate the interest of other researchers.
