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Keywords

judges, judgement, anchoring, deductive logic, numbers, cognitive strategies

Abstract

Society demands much from its judges. Notably, judges should never be illogical or inconsistent. The heart of what we expect of a judge is to apply the law to the facts in a logical and consistent way. The human mind, however, is not a giant syllogistic machine. People are obviously capable of using deductive logic, but decades of research on judgment and choice indicate that commonly used cognitive strategies to make decisions do not conform to the dictates of deductive logic. People rely on mental shortcuts, rather than logic. These shortcuts can be efficient and useful, but they do not track deductive logic. Furthermore, cognitive strategies that are effective in many settings can be overused and applied in the wrong setting, producing incorrect judgments. Human beings approach decisions with a mix of intuitive but potentially misleading intuitions, checked at times by careful deliberative logic.

Judges are no different. Decades of research we and other scholars have undertaken show that, like most adults, judges rely on cognitive strategies that can be misleading. They do so, even in legal contexts. For example, they rely excessively on numeric reference points when making numeric judgments—which psychologists refer to as “anchoring." Anchoring is a particularly pernicious cognitive vulnerability, which we describe in greater detail below. It exerts a pervasive and powerful influence on judgment. And it affects judges, often in dramatic fashion. In this Article, we assess the depth of the untoward influence of anchoring on numeric judgment in judges by reporting the results of a truly absurd anchor on judgment—a street address. With the aid of 563 judges from numerous different jurisdictions, we show that even this patently absurd anchor influences judgment. Although we have reported extensively on the influence of anchors on judges in a previous article, this piece shows that judges are deeply vulnerable to anchoring.

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