1,721,490 research outputs found
Preponderance of the Evidence versus Intime Conviction. A Behavioural Perspective on a Conflict between American and Continental European Law
Full text linkMost apparent differences between US and continental law lose their relevance once one looks beneath the doctrinal surface and checks how doctrine plays itself out in concrete cases. One of the few exceptions is standards of proof. Not only distinguishes US law between "preponderance of the evidence" and "beyond a reasonable doubt". It even constructs proof differently. In the US, proof is an objective, science-like affair. On the continent, proof is holistic and subjective. The decision maker is called upon to form a personal conviction, and to take on personal responsibility for her assessment of the facts. What seems utterly mystic actually has a sound scientific base. Continental law capitalises on the power of intuition. Intuition relies on unconscious mental machinery. This apparatus processes huge amounts of information in almost no time. It is programmed to come up with an assessment even if the evidence is patently incomplete. It does so by multiple feedback loops. At the end of this procedure, evidence conflicting with the final decision is devalued, whereas evidence supporting the decision is given greater weight. While instrumental in making most of the available evidence, the mental mechanism is not error proof. One particularly troublesome implication precisely concerns standards of proof. Given the mechanism is designed to force a decision, one might be afraid that it mutes the difference between standards of proof. A more stringent standard would be neutralised by an even stronger devaluation of conflicting evidence. Happily an experiment shows that the concern is misplaced. A plausible explanation is this: the standard of proof instruction tags convicting an innocent defendant by a somatic marker. If this hypothesis could be proven true, the presumption of innocence would have been rescued by an emotion.standard of proof, law of evidence, comparative law; storytelling model, unconscious decision-making, consistency maximisation, coherence shift, somatic marker
The Difficult Reception of Rigorous Descriptive Social Science in the Law
Full text linkMutual disdain is an effective border patrol at the demarcation lines between disciplines. Social scientists tend to react with disdain when they observe how their findings are routinely stripped of all the caveats, assumptions and careful limitations once they travel into law. Likewise, lawyers tend to react with disdain when they read all the laborious proofs and checks for what looks to them like a minuscule detail in a much larger picture. But mutual disdain comes at a high price. All cross-border intellectual trade is stifled. This paper explores the social science/law border from the legal side. The natural barriers turn out to be significant, but not insurmountable. Specifically the paper looks at the challenges of integrating rigorous descriptive social science into the application of the law in force by courts and administrative authorities. This is where the gap is most difficult to bridge. The main impediments are implicit value judgments inherent in models, conceptual languages and strictly controlled ways of generating empirical evidence; the difference between explanation, hypothesis testing and prediction, on the one hand, and decision-making, on the other; the ensuing difference between theoretical and practical reasoning, and the judicial tradition of engaging in holistic thinking; last but not least, the strife of the legal system for autonomy, in order to maintain its viability. If a legal academic assumes the position of an outside observer, she may entirely ignore all these concerns and simply follow the methodological standards of descriptive social science. This is, for instance, what most of law and economics does. The legal academic may, instead, choose to contribute to the making of new law. She will then find it advisable to partly ignore the strictures of rigorous methodology in order to be open to more aspects of the regulatory issue. But it is not difficult, at least, to follow the standards of the social sciences for analysing the core problem. The integration is most difficult if an academic does doctrinal work. But it is precisely here where the division of intellectual labour between legal practice and legal academia is most important. Academics who themselves are versatile in the respective social science translate the decisive insights into suggestions for a better reading of statutory provisions or case law.law and economics, law and statistics, explanation vs. decision-making, practical reasoning, psychology of judicial decision-making
Institutions for Intuitive Man
Full text linkBy its critics, the rational choice model is routinely accused of being unrealistic. One key objection has it that, for all nontrivial problems, calculating the best response is cognitively way too taxing, given the severe cognitive limitations of the human mind. If one confines the analysis to consciously controlled decision-making, this criticism is certainly warranted. But it ignores a second mental apparatus. Unlike conscious deliberation, this apparatus does not work serially but in parallel. It handles huge amounts of information in almost no time. It only is not consciously accessible. Only the end result is propelled back to consciousness as an intuition. It is too early to decide whether the rational choice model is ultimately even descriptively correct. But at any rate institutional analysts and institutional designers are well advised to take this powerful mechanisms seriously. In appropriate contexts, institutions should see to it that decision-makers trust their intuitions. This frequently creates a dilemma. For better performance is often not the only goal pursued by institutional intervention. Accountability, predictability and regulability are also desired. Sometimes, clever interventions are able to get them both. Arguably, the obligation to write an explicit set of reasons for a court decision is a case in point. The judge is not obliged to report the mental processes by which she has taken her decision. Justification is only ex post control. Intuitive decision-making is even more desirable if the underlying social problem is excessively complex (NP hard, to be specific), or ill-defined. Sometimes, it is enough for society to give room for intuitive decision-making. For instance, in simple social dilemmas, a combination of cheater detection and punishing sentiments does the trick. However, intuition can be misled. For instance, punishing sentiments are triggered by a hurt sense of fairness. Now in more complex social dilemmas, there are competing fairness norms, and people intuitively choose with a self-serving bias. In such contexts, institutions must step in so that clashing intuitions do not lead to social unrest.intuition, consciousness, rational choice, heuristics, ill-defined social problems, institutions
sj-pdf-1-jrc-10.1177_00224278231152625 - Supplemental material for How Little Does It Take to Trigger a Peer Effect? An Experiment on Crime as Conditional Rule Violation
No full textSupplemental material, sj-pdf-1-jrc-10.1177_00224278231152625 for How Little Does It Take to Trigger a Peer Effect? An Experiment on Crime as Conditional Rule Violation by Christoph Engel in Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency</p
Wenn sich die neugierige Katze in den Schwanz beißt: Rezension zu "Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know" von Ralph Hertwig und Christoph Engel (Hg.)
Full text linkRalph Hertwig, Christoph Engel (eds.): Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know. Cambridge: MIT Press 2021. 978-0-262-04559-
A Dictator Game Meta Study Based on Engel (2011)
No full textThis project builds on Engel’s [2011] meta study of dictator games. Here, we make available the study’s original dataset kindly provided by Christoph Engel (who would appreciate being contacted directly by researchers interested in using it to know who intends to do so and for what purposes), and a new version including some corrections concerning coding of standard errors in particular. Additionally, we supplement with further controls regarding payment-relevant protocol variations that were used in the underlying experiment, in particular the standard protocol, and variants with interactive dual role or role uncertainty (see Grech and Nax [2019]).
You will find detailed descriptions of data and analyses in the files attached to this project, as well as our new meta analysis. We also add our paper and supplementary materials in PDF form.
The original meta study is available here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10683-011-9283-7
Thanks for your interest
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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