Decision making and the law: Truth barriers

This chapter first examines how specific policy objectives, legal rules, and courtroom procedures are at odds with the goal of accurate Fact-finding. Next, it discusses the intellectual deficits of legal participants, reviewing some ways in which the statistical illiteracy of legal actors, including jurors, can cause scientific and statistical evidence to be evaluated incorrectly. In a review of cognitive biases, the chapter talks about some well-known cognitive biases: confirmation bias, hindsight, memory biases, framing, and anchoring, and how they affect key legal actors, including police investigators. Finally, the chapter argues that verdict accuracy may suffer in the American legal system. It highlights that the ability to achieve accurate legal decisions (particularly those that are made at trial) may be threatened by legal rules and policies that focus on other concerns and the intellectual shortcomings and cognitive biases of the relevant actors.