Shay Lavie (Tel Aviv University – Buchmann Faculty of Law), Tal Ganor (Hebrew University of Jerusalem – Department of Psychology), & Yuval Feldman (Bar-Ilan University – Faculty of Law) have posted Adjusting Legal Standards (European Journal of Law & Economics, (2019), Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper seeks to explore whether the interpretation of legal standards is influenced by decision-makers’ substantive decision. Prior literature on motivated reasoning has shown that decision-makers “shift” their perception of evidence in their desired direction. To the extent this logic applies to legal-standards, we should expect decision-makers to adjust the perception of the legal standard accordingly — e.g., one’s decision to favor the plaintiff would induce a pro-plaintiff interpretation of the required threshold to win a case. We present the results of two experiments in which we asked subjects to report their interpretation of the applicable legal threshold after deciding a case, under different legal thresholds. Our participants, by and large, did not shift the legal standard to conform to their substantive decision, contrary to the theoretical expectations. We thus conclude that decision-makers treat the legal standard distinctly than regular evidence.