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Defeasible reasoning with legal conditionals
Lupita Estefania Gazzo Castañeda1, Markus Knauff2
1Department of Experimental Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Giessen, Giessen, Germany. Estefania.Gazzo@psychol.uni-giessen.de.
Legal reasoning is influenced by emotions. Laypeople often disregard exculpatory circumstances in legal conditionals, especially when offenses provoke moral outrage, unlike legal professionals.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Legal Psychology
- Moral Psychology
Background:
- Conditional reasoning is fundamental to legal decision-making.
- Exculpatory circumstances (counterexamples) can invalidate a conditional conclusion.
- The influence of emotions on legal reasoning with conditionals is not fully understood.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate how individuals consider exculpatory circumstances when reasoning with legal conditionals.
- To examine the role of moral outrage in overriding logical adherence to legal rules.
- To compare reasoning processes between legal laypeople and legal professionals.
Main Methods:
- Participants (legal laypeople and lawyers) evaluated legal conditionals presented with exculpatory circumstances.
- Tasks involved deciding adherence to the rule and willingness to punish.
- Experiment 3 specifically tested the ability to imagine exculpatory circumstances for morally outrageous offenses.
Main Results:
- Laypeople frequently ignored exculpatory circumstances for offenses evoking high moral outrage.
- Lawyers did not exhibit this bias, consistently considering exculpatory information.
- Laypeople struggled to even imagine exculpatory circumstances for highly offensive acts.
Conclusions:
- Moral emotions, such as outrage, significantly impact laypeople's consideration of counterexamples in legal conditional reasoning.
- Emotional responses can override logical processing of legal rules for non-experts.
- Expertise (legal training) mitigates the influence of emotional bias in legal conditional reasoning.
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