Sections offered SPRING 2019:
#9545 |
LEAH SAVION |
SECOND EIGHT WEEKS
|
PH 10 |
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd S&H credit; COLL (CASE) S&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Rational decision-making is the cornerstone of justice and fairness. The decisions made along the continuum of the legal system, from police officers to the DA, lawyers, prosecutor, jury, and judge, are expected to follow careful legal guidelines and logical consistent contemplation, void of preconceptions, misconceptions, and biases.
We look back with horror at the history of judicial evidence which invoked the devil, rumors, exorcism, witchcraft, drowning, burning, madness, spirit possession, and the wisdom of the lay blood-thirsty crowd. Alas, our descendants will be no less horrified by the systematic cognitive and social biases that cloud the seemingly most enlightened judicial systems. We operate under the illusion that we know why people commit crimes, how to identify criminals, and what is a fair judgment. We rely heavily on our “innate moral code,” memories, ability to draw conclusions correctly, and intuitions that are actually often wrong for reasons we’d rather not know about, and so are difficult to glean and correct.
This course offers a comprehensive framework for tracking and understanding cognitive misconceptions and biases involved in legal decision making. The usual suspected biases (such as race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion) will be mentioned briefly, but our aim is to shine light on the more insidious, hidden, inevitable misjudgments stemming from of human dispositions, mind tools and operations, general cognitive principles, and the otherwise adaptive mental rules of economy and equilibrium.
Using two textbooks (Savion, “Quick and Dirty Mental Operations” 2017, and Benforado, “Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice” 2015), course grade consists of several team presentations, a midterm, and a final research paper.