By Yoel Inbar and David Pizarro
The Jury Expert
Originally published March 2009 (but still relevant)
Here is an excerpt:
We experience a wide range of emotions every day: a bad mood because we skipped breakfast, anger because we got cut off in traffic, and even nostalgia from receiving an old picture of high school friends over email. To be sure, the insight that emotions influence judgment existed long before psychologists were able to confirm it experimentally. Yet a great deal of psychological research in the last few decades demonstrates that emotions just like those described above can subtly alter a wide range of judgments, including judgments that are completely unrelated to the original source of the emotion. In his Rhetoric, Aristotle exhorted his pupils to learn how emotions might influence human judgment so that they might best utilize these emotions to persuade their audience (Aristotle, 350 B.C.E./1991). But the explosion of research on the topic has allowed us to document exactly how these emotions influence judgment, as well as what kinds of judgments are particularly prone to their influence. For instance, we know that anger over the traffic incident on your way to work may lead to an increased reliance on racial stereotypes moments later when interviewing a job candidate (anger seems to encourage the use of cognitive “shortcuts” such as stereotypes; DeSteno, Dasgupta, Bartlett, & Cajdric, 2004). Mild sadness, on the other hand, would have an opposite effect—because it tends to make people more careful, analytic thinkers, it would actually lead to less reliance on stereotypes when evaluating a candidate.
Not surprisingly, legal scholars have taken a keen interest in understanding exactly how emotions influence the kinds of judgments that are central to the legal process, such as judgments of blame and responsibility (Feigenson, 2008). Here we examine disgust, an emotion that has received little attention historically—at least relative to emotions such as fear, anger, or sympathy—but about which much more has become known in the past few years. On its face, disgust may seem less relevant to legal judgments than emotions such as sympathy or anger. Unlike those emotions, its influence on courtroom proceedings is not intuitively obvious. Nonetheless, it has become increasingly evident that disgust plays an important role in a much wider set of social and moral judgments than was once believed. This article sheds light on what disgust is, how it influences judgments, and why legal scholars, judges, and attorneys should pay attention to it.
The entire volume is here.
