Law, Politics, and Perception: How Policy Preferences Influence Legal Reasoning

Chapter Six: Motivated Reasoning as an Empirical Framework: Finding Our Way Back to Context

In the part  of this book, I argued that existing models of attitudinal influence in legal decision making provide incomplete and unsatisfactory accounts of legal behavior that do not comport with the subjective experience of decision makers. In part , I tested two mechanisms of influence taken from intuitions about how legal experts consider evidence and arguments in real-world cases using highly stylized decision norms. I also explored the limits of such influence by looking for evidence of constraint in studies testing each of the hypothesized mechanisms of influence. I hope I have convinced readers that motivated reasoning accounts have the potential to fill gaps left by other models of decision making and offer a richer, more complete understanding of the precise role of attitudes in decisional behavior. In this concluding chapter, I have two goals. The first is to summarize findings from the empirical chapters highlighting what we have learned about each of the mechanisms and potential avenues for future investigation . Consistent with Kinder and Palfrey’s () characterization of experimental research, findings from both studies provide important insights into cognitive processes of legal decision makers and significant fodder for future research. My second goal is to outline the broad contours of what a research paradigm incorporating motivated reasoning as empirical framework might look like. Ideally, it would be interdisciplinary ; the approach should appeal to researchers from different disciplines interested in legal cognition. Moreover, the research agenda should be organized around substantive questions and assumptions rather than any particular empirical method. I suggest several lines of inquiry and ways scholars may take motivated reasoning inquiries outside the experimental lab using methods that are more familiar to political scientists and legal scholars. I also point to existing research addressing questions that should SIX MOTIVATED REASONING AS AN EMPIRICAL FRAMEWORK Finding Our Way Back to Context Motivated Reasoning as an Empirical Framework  be of interest to researchers who might be attracted to using motivated reasoning as an empirical framework. Summary of Results Like most research that studies political phenomena from a new perspective, this inquiry raises at least as many questions as it answers. Overall, however, this study advances our knowledge of how preferences interact with case facts and norms of decision making to influence legal reasoning processes. I hope we will see more attempts to understand the interaction of these forces in future research; motivated reasoning provides an excellent framework to pursue this inquiry. Consistent with results presented here, future research adopting this perspective will probably reveal a more complex picture of decision making than “purely legal” or “purely attitudinal” models of decision making suggest. The influence of preferences may be more resistant to constraining decisional norms in some issue areas than others. Or, as suggested in the experiment on separable preferences, there could be individual differences in how decision makers respond to controlling authority. As with all empirical inquiries, researchers invoking this framework will need to be explicit about their expectations, and allow for the distinct possibility that those expectations are wrong and that other factors may come into play in unexpected ways. All of these things happened here. But, consistent with experimental hypotheses, findings revealed significant evidence of attitudinal influence in the context of norms actively used and subjectively experienced by legal decision makers. First, in line with what was suggested in the doctrinal analysis of Commerce Clause cases from chapter , the experiments on analogical perception demonstrated that perceptions of precedent can be shaded by policy predispositions. This mechanism is consistent with bottom-up characterizations of attitudinal influence. The effect was observed for lay observers of court outputs as well as experimental participants with legal training. Significantly, however, the influence of policy attitudes was constrained by objective similarity in both samples. The interaction between policy attitudes and case outcomes was significant only in the “middle range” of cases for undergraduates in the first experiment and law students in the second. There was evidence in Experiment  that lay observers and law student participants used a different “metric” of distance, perhaps due to  Testing the Mechanisms their differential familiarity with the case scenario presented in that study. Clearly, law students drew sharper distinctions than did undergraduates and acted more skeptically in judging the similarity of all cases. Moreover , contrary to expectations, law students seemed particularly sensitive to whether outcomes were...