Appraisal Theory: Old and New Questions

I describe my current thinking on two old questions—the causal role of appraisals and the relationship of appraisal theories to basic emotions theories and constructivist theories, and three (sort of) new questions—the completeness of appraisals, the role of language, and the development of automaticity in emotional responses

Legal Reasoning

For more than a century, lawyers have written about legal reasoning, and the flow of books and articles describing, analyzing, and reformulating the topic continues unabated. The volume and persistence of this unrelenting discussion (Simon, 1998, p. 4) suggests that there is no solid consensus about what legal reasoning is. Legal scholars have a tenacious intuition - or at least a strong hope - that legal reasoning is distinctive, that it is not the same as logic, or scientific reasoning, or ordinary decision making, and there have been dozens of attempts to describe what it is that sets it apart from these other forms of thinking. These attempts generate criticism, the critics devise new formulations that generate further criticism, and the process continues. In this chapter, I describe the primary forms of legal reasoning, the most important schools of thought about legal reasoning, and some of the major differences between legal reasoning and scientific reasoning

Are Twelve Heads Better Than One?

Few advocates of the jury system would argue that the average juror is as competent a tribunal as the averagejudge. Whatever competence the jury has is a function of two of its attributes: its number and its interaction. The fact that a jury must be composed of at least six people,\u27 with different backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives, provides some protection against decisions based on an idiosyncratic view of the facts. Not only must the jury include at least six people, but they must be chosen in a manner that conforms to the ideal of the jury as representative of community opinion.2 The jury\u27s competence, unlike that of the judge, rests partly on its ability to reflect the perspectives, experiences, and values of the ordinary people in the community-not just the most common or typical community perspective, but the whole range of viewpoints. Representativeness is important not only for ensuring the essential nature of the jury as a tribunal embodying a broad democratic ideal, 3 but because it affects the jury\u27s competence directly. Failure to assure that any given group has a fair chance of participation deprives the jury of a perspective on human events that may have unsuspected importance in any case that may be presented.

Some Implications of Cognitive Appraisal Theories of Emotion

The opposition of cognition and emotion in psychological theory has, I believe, been one of those killer dichotomies (Berthoff, 1990) like nature and nurture, or language and thought, that has advanced many a scientific career while muddling science itself. The idea that reason and passion are alternative ways of responding to events is an ancient and persistent one, often accompanied by the companion ideas that reason is the more highly evolved, the more mature, the more masculine, the more civilized, the superior alternative. Human emotion resides somewhere beneath human cognition, somewhere under the frontal lobes, where it is stimulated by the body, the autonomic nervous system, and the primal hormonal soup, but not by the heavenly cerebral hemispheres, whose only relation to the emotions is that of gentlemanly victim attacked by the riffraff, struggling to quell the rebellion. I have exaggerated this idea but not invented it. Like all such dicho-tomies it makes us attend to the rather barren question whether , in this case whether cognition influences emotion, whether cognition is necessary for emotion, or whether cognition is antithetical to emotion, and not to the more interesting question how . For the time being, I am taking the perspective that the relation between cognition and emotion is mutual, dialectical, and marvellous

Legal Reasoning and Scientific Reasoning

In my presentation for the 2010 Meador Lectures on Rationality, I chose to compare legal reasoning and scientific reasoning. Both law and science pride themselves on the rationality of their intellectual methods and believe that those methods are designed to analyze questions and reach the correct conclusions by means of reason, free from cognitive or emotional biases. Of course, both law and science often fall short of this ideal at all levels, from the decisions about individual legal cases or scientific studies to the acceptance of general theories. In many ways, the biases that mislead legal and scientific thinkers are similar. But in other ways they are not. Training to think like a lawyer is not quite like training to think like a scientist, and, more important, the circumstances and constraints faced by lawyers and scientists when they undertake the task of solving a problem are quite different

Are Twelve Heads Better Than One?

The jury\u27s competence, unlike that of the judge, rests partly on its ability to reflect the perspectives, experiences, and values of the ordinary people in the community - not just the most common or typical community perspective, but the whole range of viewpoints

Some Reasons to Expect Universal Antecedents of Emotion

First, human beings are all of the same species. Their bodies, their autonomic nervous systems, their hormones, and their sense organs resemble each other in structure and in use, and there is no doubt that these brains, autonomic nervous systems, hormones, and sense organs are essential to emotion. Second, in order to survive in the world, human beings must be able to appreciate changes in the environment that have important consequences for their well-being, and they must be able to respond to these changes effectively. They must cope with immediate perils and take advantage of immediate opportunities, and they must be concerned with the various threats and opportunities that are not so immediate. There are commonalities in the kinds of external events that make life better or worse for human beings, just as there are commonalities in our internal equipment. Like all species, humans are built to respond to the things that matter, and the way humans do it is by emotion. Enormous loud objects rapidly bearing down on us must be escaped, and fear provides the motivating force. Encouraging behavior from an attractive member of the opposite sex comes to evoke desire in most people at about the time they reach sexual maturity. If our species is to survive, our babies must grow up, and so their mothers must love them. When we need something, and see an opportunity to get it, we feel hopeful, perhaps challenged if we also perceive an obstacle, and are moved to go after it. When we get it, we feel relief or joy. Although physical and social environments around the world are all different from each other, they all include novelty, hazard, opportunity, attack, gratification, and loss. These are changes that people must deal with, and these are the kinds of events that generate emotion. To ignore them would make learning impossible, and would jeopardize life itself. To respond appropriately to these consequential events, we must perceive them fairly accurately and recognize their importance. If our brains are similar, and our perceptions are accurate, it follows that this kind of important environmental event will be a universal antecedent of emotion across societies, although not necessarily among all individuals within any particular society. There are universal antecedents to emotion insofar as there are universal human needs and goals. (By universal I mean, as most psychologists do, very general. There may be societies that deviate from these very abstract propositions in some respects, but almost universal is the best most social psychologists dare to aspire to.

Enhanced Views

Cognitive dissonance has become one of those scientific terms that everyone knows and uses so freely and loosely that its original meaning has been obscured. We speak of cognitive dissonance when we find our glasses in the kitchen instead of the bedroom, when oestrogen replacement turns out to be unhealthy rather than healthy, whenever we are less than pleasantly surprised. In Leon Festinger\u27s original theory, cognitive dissonance arises when a person is forced to entertain two mutually inconsistent ideas, which creates an unpleasant tension that motivates the person to engage in various mental gymnastics to minimize the dissonance, usually by denying one of the inconsistent cognitions. Elliot Aronson, Festinger\u27 s most distinguished student, showed that cognitive dissonance is most common and most excruciating when new information is inconsistent with one\u27s concept of oneself as an honest, intelligent and well-meaning person, and that the urge to maintain a favourable self-conception usurps all other possible strategies for escaping the dissonance. Cognitive dissonance can be as immediate and powerful as the response to physical danger

Legal Reasoning and Scientific Reasoning

In my presentation for the 2010 Meador Lectures on Rationality, I chose to compare legal reasoning and scientific reasoning. Both law and science pride themselves on the rationality of their intellectual methods and believe that those methods are designed to analyze questions and reach the correct conclusions by means of reason, free from cognitive or emotional biases. Of course, both law and science often fall short of this ideal at all levels, from the decisions about individual legal cases or scientific studies to the acceptance of general theories. In many ways, the biases that mislead legal and scientific thinkers are similar. But in other ways they are not. Training to think like a lawyer is not quite like training to think like a scientist, and, more important, the circumstances and constraints faced by lawyers and scientists when they undertake the task of solving a problem are quite different