Archive for the ‘Law and Psychology’ Category

A Breach Born Every Minute

posted by Dave Hoffman

In the Spring, I asked you folks for some help thinking of examples of true Holmesian agreements, “contracts which, when breached, have a similar psychological profile to a speeding ticket.”  It turned out to be pretty hard to identify such agreements, since most people believe breach to be a morally wrongful activity – not simply an option to pay damages at will.  As Jonathan Baron and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan previously have found, the degree to which individuals find breach to be “bad” is quite manipulable:  breaches to gain are worse than breaches to avoid loss, liquidated damages ameliorate feelings of reprehensibility, etc.  Missing from this research has been a psychological theory of what makes breach so aversive.

Tess and I came up with a working hypothesis: breach is seen as a form of interpersonal exploitation that makes the breachee a sucker.  We’ve put together a paper that reports on a series of experiments supporting this hypothesis, titled (naturally) “Breach Is For Suckers.“  Check out the abstract, after the jump.

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  August 15, 2009 at 9:41 am   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Contract Law & Beyond, Law and Psychology   Print This Post   6 Comments

The Law Gives Up on Beatty Chadwick

posted by Dave Hoffman

Two years ago, I noted that H. Beatty Chadwick was about to spend his thirteenth year in a Pennsylvania jail for civil contempt, arising out of his failure to comply with a 1995 order to turn over assets in a divorce litigation.  I opined that:

Unless circumstances change, Chadwick will die in jail to preserve an idea: even civil law must be obeyed. As Robert Cover wrote, “Legal interpretation takes place in a field of pain and death.”

So, I guess that Cover needs to be footnoted: “Except when judges blink.”  Beatty is out.  And his jailers are celebrating:

About 35 prison staffers gathered yesterday – some crying and hugging Chadwick – to say goodbye to the “model inmate” who had worked in the law library and forged friendships with everyone from guards to senior administrators, said prison Superintendent John Reilly.

“He’s done more time than maybe the majority of people convicted of homicide do,” said Reilly, a former prosecutor. “What person in his right mind is going to flaunt the authority of the court and say, ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my life in jail?’ People just aren’t made that way.”

Maybe so, but that claim seems to be another example of how we routinely ignore the tremendous emotional investment people have in being vindicated by courts.  As far as I can tell, the state courts of Pennsylvania have not abandoned their factual finding that Chadwick had the money and refused to comply with their order. They’ve just concluded that his ornery will would never bow to any legal pressure.

But just because the judges of Delaware County gave up on compliance doesn’t mean that Chadwick has paid his debt to the courts, his ex-wife, or society at large.  His conduct (as alleged) created a social harm which his ultimate freedom only made worse.  As the  attorney for Chadwick’s ex-wife pointed out, “[h]ere’s a guy who thumbed his nose at a court order for 14 years … There should be some kind of sanctions for doing that.”

  July 27, 2009 at 7:36 pm   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Criminal Law, Family Law, Law and Psychology, Weird   Print This Post   4 Comments

It Wasn’t Me

posted by David Gray

Thanks so much to Dan, Danielle, and the Concurring Opinions crew for this invitation. This is all pretty new to me, but I am looking forward to a fun and interesting month.

In describing the job of law professor, Stuart Benjamin (http://www.law.duke.edu/fac/benjamin/) once told me that “We teach for free and grade for money.” I’m sure it is not his originally, but it’s particularly fitting for this time of year as we face exam and paper piles of various heights and teeters begging our attention. As someone who spent a few years in a PhD program, this feels to me a bit like being a pledge for life—to borrow a phrase from fraternity culture. I spent all those years grading blue books for others’ classes with the promise that some bright-eyed hopeful would someday clean up my messes only to enter law teaching, where we carry our own water. Hard to sigh too hard, of course, but the fact remains that few of us love grading.

It was while putting off grading that I read this interesting and timely article by Paul Bloom in The Atlantic Monthly, cum “The Atlantic,” on models of the self. Anyone with even a moderately complicated internal life is familiar with the subjective phenomenon of wars in our heads between competing goals and desires. Be it a battle between Dionysus and Apollo or André Soltner and Jenny Craig, we all experience the competing pulls of devils and angels, and so it is with grading. I should really grade ten more exams, but I want to see Virginia in the . . . no wait, Virginia wasn’t even Bowl eligible . . . but there are games on, and I’ll have plenty of time to grade once the dust settles from the holidays.

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  January 5, 2009 at 9:20 pm   Posted in: Law and Psychology   Print This Post   7 Comments

The Frame’s The Thing: Rioting or Celebration?

posted by Dave Hoffman

After the Phillies won last night, I went out to Broad Street with tens of thousands of my fellow Philadelphians to celebrate. I felt happy, but in a vaguely distanced way, stunned as I was by the unexpected reality of a major sports team championship in Philly. Because Philadelphia is such a small place (in some ways) I saw three students on the street in fairly quick order. Good times.

As I watched the celebration gather steam (fireworks! champagne! mosh pits!) I thought back to a post I’d written about watching Naples soccer fans celebrate a soccer victory back in ‘07.

Apparently, Naples tied with Genova in a soccer match, resulting in both teams being promoted to Series A soccer, or the major league. This led to a general “celebration” consisting of an impromptu “parade” of thousands of mopeds and cars, flags flying and horns blaring, with the occasional firework (or pistol?) thrown into the mix. I expressed some doubt then and now about the celebratory atmosphere not just because there were some random acts of violence against Genovese fans, but because the scene was decidedly chaotic. I also question whether a parade can occur simultaneously on every main street in town.

Here, again, the naive foreign tourist might think to himself that the law had broken down, resulting in a potentially bad situation, a view itself reinforced by a Napolese citizens who told that tourist that it was “very dangerous” to walk to the train station. But a more realistic analysis demonstrated that so long as that tourist walked at a brisk pace while shouting “Forza Napoli” at intervals, he could effectively comply with the new set of norms and not be sanctioned by passing celebrants. Plus, I hailed a cab halfway through the walk.

This post was accurate, except that “brisk walk” really needs to be re-written as “a terrified shambling run, dragging luggage behind”. I remember thinking, while shambling, that if this were only happening in Philadelphia I wouldn’t be scared, because I would have a better situation sense of what was appropriate celebration and what was rioting. That is, a “riot” is a subjective thing, determined by your own contextual and culturally-determined view of what kind of public behavior is ok. I don’t speak Italian well enough to know what happy screams sound like, and without a nuanced sense of language, smiles start to look like the prelude to a mugging.

This is a long way of saying that while fireworks, smashing bottles, and random people screaming in Naples made me fear for my life, those same activities on Broad Street last night only made me feel closer to my fellow celebrants. I was right: when you are home, raucous celebrations feel entirely appropriate.

That said, it is true that I left the party around 11:30, before a night’s work of drinking kicked in and the scene turned a bit more ugly. (A few upturned cars, some smashed windows, but no reported serious injuries. (Cf. Boston).

(Image Source: Chris Bowers)

  October 30, 2008 at 2:02 pm   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Civil Rights, Current Events, Law and Psychology, Politics   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Truth about Multitasking

posted by Frank Pasquale

I’ve been of two minds about multitasking for some time. But growing evidence is suggesting that the very concept is a myth:

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and has written a book with the self-explanatory title CrazyBusy, has been offering therapies to combat extreme multitasking for years; in his book he calls multitasking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.” In a 2005 article, he described a new condition, “Attention Deficit Trait,” which he claims is rampant in the business world. ADT is “purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live,” writes Hallowell, and its hallmark symptoms mimic those of ADD. “Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points,” Hallowell argues, and this challenge “can be controlled only by creatively engineering one’s environment and one’s emotional and physical health.” Limiting multitasking is essential.

Walter Kirn concurs: “Neuroscience is confirming what we all suspect: Multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.”

Still, I think it all depends on the complexity of the secondary task. If I’m on a long phone call, I’m going to start checking my sage reader or Bookforum for interesting articles. Most TV shows take up very little “bandwidth;” it would seem a shame not to fold clothes or clean or cook during them. Perhaps it’s time for Birdthistlian sample of views on the matter.

  June 24, 2008 at 10:37 pm   Posted in: Blogging, Law School (Teaching), Law and Psychology   Print This Post   7 Comments

Neuroeconomics and Innovation

posted by Dave Hoffman

I’m in LA for the next few days, at the Law, Economics and Neuroscience Conference: Implications for Innovation, sponsored by The Southern California Innovation Project, Theoretical Research in Neuroeconomic Decision-making (TREND) and The Center for Communication Law & Policy. As the press-release says, the idea is to bring together neuroscience researchers, economists, and ordinary law professors and see if the whole is greater than the sum of their parts.

[Gillian] Hadfield [who is organizing the conference on the law side] hopes the symposium will lead to more collaboration among scholars who may appear to have very different goals and backgrounds.

“You don’t usually find scientists, economists and lawyers talking together about the same topic,” Hadfield said. “I think people will find that we can enrich the research agenda of all these disciplines with this kind of cross pollination.”

I hope to blog the conference, or at least my parts in in, over the next few days. I’ll be commenting on Mat McCubbins’ co-authored paper, The Effect of Institutions on Behavior and Brain Activity: Insights from EEGs and Timed-Response Experiments. In the paper, on Boudreau, Coulson, and McCubbins found that identical cooperative behavior in a trust game seems to arise from distinct neurological mechanisms, depending on whether trust in others arose from incentives or penalties. After the session tomorrow I’ll post some of my comments, which intend to connect this paper to the large law review literature on trust.

  May 13, 2008 at 8:15 pm   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Contract Law & Beyond, Corporate Law, Current Events, Law Rev (S Cal), Law School (Scholarship), Law and Psychology, Legal Theory, Securities   Print This Post   No Comments

Why Aren’t Prices Rounded Off?

posted by Dave Hoffman

From the blog “We’re Only Human” (which I’ve just discovered, but which seems great):

University of Florida psychologists Chris Janiszewski and Dan Uy suspected that something fundamental might be going on, that some characteristic of the opening bid itself might influence the way the brain thinks about value and shapes bidding behavior. In particular, they wanted to see if the precision of the opening bid might be important to how the brain acts at an auction. Or to put it in more familiar terms: Are we really fooled when storekeepers price something at $19.95 instead of a round twenty bucks?

Janiszewski and Uy ran a series of experiments to test this idea. The experiments used hypothetical scenarios, in which participants were required to make a variety of “educated guesses.” For example, they had participants think about a scenario in which they are buying a high-definition plasma TV, and asked them to guesstimate the wholesale cost. They were told the retail price, plus the fact that the retailer had a reputation for pricing TVs competitively.

But there were three scenarios involving three retail prices: Some hypothetical buyers were given a price of $5000, while others were given the price of $4988 and still others $5012. When all the buyers were asked to estimate the wholesale price, those with the $5000 price tag in their heads guessed much lower than those contemplating the more precise retail prices. That is, they moved farther away from the mental anchor. What’s more, those who started with the round number as their mental anchor were much more likely to guess a wholesale price that was also in round numbers. The scientists ran this experiment again and again with different scenarios, and always got the same result.

Why would this happen?

Read the post to find out!

  February 4, 2008 at 1:18 am   Posted in: Law and Psychology   Print This Post   3 Comments

The Future of Sensory Jurisprudence

posted by Dave Hoffman

[This post continues the debate about Whose Eyes are You Going To Believe, the draft paper Dan Kahan, Don Braman and I have recently begun to circulate. For previous installments, see posts on Balkin, CoOp, Volokh (Kerr), and CoOp (our reply).]

As I hope we’ve made clear, our ultimate claim is not (cf. Kerr) that “Justice Scalia was privileging a conservative white male view” of Scott, but that judges need to be generally mindful of the possibility that their views of facts, and factual dissensus, are as culturally contingent as the public more generally. Thus, we argue for rhetorical humbleness, and for deciding cases on grounds other than a holding that no reasonable juror could see the facts in a certain way. It’s a modest response to the large problem of cognitive illiberalism in legal decision making.

In this post, I’m going to make a bigger claim, one which isn’t so much based on the paper or my co-authors’ views, but is instead just the kind of irresponsible extension of the data that blogging encourages. In short: it’s my view that Scott is a harbinger of a whole mess of cases on the near horizon: a sensory jurisprudence enabled by a total surveillance society.

Total surveillance as a concept is one well-explored by other authors on this blog. But even in Dan Solove’s well-known post – and subsequent highly downloaded article – about the “I’ve nothing to hide” problem, the doctrinal consequences of total surveillance were virtually ignored. And by doctrinal, I do not mean the privacy law consequences: I mean the likelihood that as surveillance becomes omnipresent in most public and some private places, judges will use surveillance evidence ["SE"] in an increasing number of cases to resolve factual disputes.

This use of SE would seem to promise more accurate, efficient, and ex-post legitimate litigation outcomes. The theory would go that most litigation is driven by a dispute about the facts: SE should dispositively resolve such disputes, promoting settlement and (at worst) streamlining trials. Best of all, opinions enlisting SE would be more likely to be persuasive. Thus, if Judge Cardozo, ruling on the relative fault of the parties in, say Palsgraf, could have just embedded a video of the events instead of describing it in his beautiful but inscrutable prose, perhaps readers/viewers would have more likely to agree with him. Or in a sexual harassment case, if the workplace was totally taped, evidence of a hostile work environment would be both clearer and harder to refute. And in the case of coerced interrogations, a judge could simply embed a video, instead of describing it, and say: “look, it’s obvious!”

The connection between SE and surveillance is (ironically) made stark in a video … but to see it, you’ll need to read past the jump.

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  January 16, 2008 at 1:00 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Behavioral Law and Economics, Criminal Law, Current Events, Law School (Scholarship), Law and Psychology, Legal Theory, Media Law, Politics, Sociology of Law, Supreme Court   Print This Post   2 Comments

Violent Movies and Clueless Consequentialism

posted by Frank Pasquale

Researchers have recently “proven” that “violent films prevent violent crime by attracting would-be assailants and keeping them cloistered in darkened, alcohol-free environs.” In fact, they estimate that about 52,000 less assaults occur each year because of the showing of violent movies. It’s all part of the “Super Crunchers” trend, where economists “crunch . . . numbers to evaluate matters like cheating among sumo wrestlers or the effects of a crackdown on cocaine.” Pity that the urge for “clean identification” and headline-grabbing results produces a bizarre overconfidence about the study’s extrapolability.

The key mechanism identified here is a substitution of movie-watching for more dangerous activities:

“Economics is about choice,” [one study author] said. “What would these people have done if they had not chosen to go and see a movie? Whatever they would have done would have had a greater tendency to involve alcohol. If you can incapacitate a large group of potentially violent people, that’s a good thing.”

I’ll be the first to agree that the study helps demonstrate that, say, those with a propensity for violence are less likely to go out and be violent after watching such a film. But what about the next night, or the night after that? These aggregative, atomized studies do nothing to explore the long-term psychological impact of viewing violence. As Craig A. Anderson, director of the Center for the Study of Violence at Iowa State University, notes,

There are hundreds of studies done by numerous research groups around the world that show that media violence exposure increases aggressive behavior. People learn from every experience in life, and that learning occurs at a very basic level of brain function.

I’d trust individualized psychological research far more than I would follow brute aggregation here. Admittedly, I’m no expert, and I can envision a plausible theory whereby viewing violence substitutes for, rather than encourages, doing violence (though I would guess the “spillover” effect of viewing is far stronger than the “compensation” effect, to use Jon Elster’s terms). I can only congratulate the recent study authors on the limited finding that people are less likely to brutalize others on the very night they watch violent films–not on giving us much insight at all on the overall cultural impact of violent films.

  January 7, 2008 at 10:01 am   Posted in: Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Psychology   Print This Post   10 Comments

Too Much Happiness?

posted by Jeremy Blumenthal

Increasingly, the study of “happiness” is making its way into legal academic writing. In some analyses it is framed as an alternative to money as a measure of welfare; in others as a focus on addressing the recurring problem of law firm associates’ pessimism. It is applied to tax policy, the calculation of pain-and-suffering damages, democratic institutions, and more. And happiness is making its way into law schools—well, in a sense anyway—with seminars being offered at Yale and Temple Law Schools on, for instance, “Law, Happiness, and Subjective Well-Being.” The study of happiness, and the related research program in positive psychology, are becoming increasingly prominent in law and policy.

The connection to the also-burgeoning literature on paternalism is clear; to the extent different interventions might be able to increase people’s happiness and welfare, is government justified in promulgating such interventions (or even obligated to do so)? That’s a can-of-worms type of question that I won’t get into in this post, but it connects with an interesting new article that indirectly raises the question whether such intervention—even if justified—might in fact backfire. That article, “The Optimum Level of Well-Being: Can People Be Too Happy?,” suggests that even though higher happiness seems to correlate with higher success in other areas, simply continuing to increase happiness might not increase that success consistently. The abstract follows:

Psychologists, self-help gurus, and parents all work to make their clients, friends, and children happier. Recent research indicates that happiness is functional and generally leads to success. However, most people are already above neutral in happiness, which raises the question of whether higher levels of happiness facilitate more effective functioning than do lower levels. Our analyses of large survey data and longitudinal data show that people who experience the highest levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of close relationships and volunteer work, but that those who experience slightly lower levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of income, education, and political participation. Once people are moderately happy, the most effective level of happiness appears to depend on the specific outcomes used to define success, as well as the resources that are available.

We know that “money doesn’t buy happiness”—that simply increasing financial success doesn’t directly correlate with happiness above a certain (surprisingly low) point; here’s an interesting suggestion that above a certain point, happiness doesn’t “buy” success.

  December 28, 2007 at 2:13 pm   Posted in: Articles and Books, Behavioral Law and Economics, Economic Analysis of Law, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law Practice, Law School (Scholarship), Law and Psychology   Print This Post   2 Comments

Police on Steroids, Profs on Ritalin

posted by Frank Pasquale

There has been some excellent blawgospheric comment on the Mitchell Report, a Black Sox scandal for our age (see, e.g., Jeff Lipshaw, Howard Wasserman, Michael Dimino and Alfred Yen). My question is: what will be the cultural impact? I think two recent stories on performance enhancement in other fields provide some clues, and suggest the wisdom of the PCBE’s worries.

First, the Village Voice has a long story on some possibly inappropriate steroid/HGH use in the NYPD. I say “possibly” for two reasons: 1) the slippery “therapy/enhancement” distinction here and 2) the threat posed by bulked up criminals. The Voice reports that “the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office knows of 29 cops and at least 10 NYPD civilian employees—all well under the age of 60—who have received prescriptions for [steroids for] hypogonadism.” Doctors quoted in the story find it implausible that so many officers would have this disorder–but there are probably other physicians who have a much broader concept of disease. And if suspects are bulking up on illegal substances, who can blame the cops for trying to catch up?

The other story is on concentration-enhancing drugs increasingly used not only by students (an old problem), but now by professors. Andrew Sullivan asks, “So if a prof wants to do a little Provigil, it’s no worry for me. Why should it be a worry for anyone but the prof himself?” I think there are several reasons, not least the potential for medicalized competition to invade spheres of life we now deem constitutive of our identity. But for now let me just focus on how the police and profs examples intersect.

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  December 21, 2007 at 8:05 pm   Posted in: Bioethics, Culture, Current Events, Law and Inequality, Law and Psychology   Print This Post   One Comment

This is Your Brain on … the New York Times

posted by Jeremy Blumenthal

A recent NY Times bit talks about “neurorealism,” that is, people’s increased tendency to believe psychological or other scientific assertions when those assertions are accompanied by images from brain scans. The piece quotes Deena Weisberg, who wrote an article in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience documenting this empirically (in both laypeople and, if I remember the article correctly, in experts, though to a lesser extent), and the neologizer, Eric Racine. The piece mentions a newspaper article “about how high-fat foods activate reward centers in the brain,” and asks, “Couldn’t we have proced that with a slice of pie and a piece of paper with a check box on it?” Brian Leiter also noted the Times piece, with a plug for his paper criticizing legal academics’ use of evolutionary biology.

But the Times bit, and these scholars, conflate two very different points. The first is the “credulousness” issue—that people believe the assertions when accompanied by brain images. That’s an important point, especially in the legal context, where judges, jurors, or policy-makers might be exposed to such scans and misled by such scientific “explanations” of behavior. (Of course, it’s not enormously surprising, given past concerns about jurors’ understanding of complex scientific evidence.)

But that’s quite a different point from the dismissive “check box” question, criticizing even the usefulness of such neurological research. fMRI and other such scans can of course provide important and useful evidence, and certainly can tell us more than simple self-reports or even other behavioral studies. Matt Lieberman, a psychologist at UCLA [disclosure: we were in grad school together] and one of those most prominently associated with the newish field of social cognitive neuroscience, has addressed this well, in answering whether SCN provides something more than conventional social psychology. Summarizing just one of his papers on the issue: he points out that fMRI can provide evidence that “two psychological processes that experientially feel similar and produce similar behavioral results, but actually rely on different underlying mechanisms,” such as memory for social and non-social information. It can document “processes that one would not think rely on the same mechanisms, when in fact they do,” such as the common neurological pathways in the experience of both physical and social pain. And more speculatively, he suggests, as “more is learned about the precise functions of different regions of the brain it may be possible to infer some of the mental processes that an individual is engaged in just from looking at the activity of their brains.” This is an important advantage to overcome potential difficulties in, for instance, self-report.

There is of course danger in over-selling fMRI and similar neurological evidence—whether evaluating psychiatric patients, capital defendants, or others—and documenting people’s susceptibility to such over-sell is important. But it’s quite a different question whether such scans can be useful, and to dismiss them out of hand is just as obviously a mistake.

  December 19, 2007 at 10:57 am   Posted in: Articles and Books, Behavioral Law and Economics, Blogging, Empirical Analysis of Law, Law and Psychology, Philosophy of Social Science   Print This Post   2 Comments

How the Economics of the Well-Off Can’t Help the Uninsured

posted by Frank Pasquale

Two of the most perceptive health policy analysts, Drs. Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein, provide a good “reality check” for those who think a Massachusetts-style health plan can fully handle the problem of the uninsured. (Though it took me a long time to figure out their title, “I am not a Health Reform,” was a play on Nixon’s “I am not a Crook.”)

Woolhandler and Himmelstein observe that the past twenty years of failed state-based health care reform (and mandates) do not bode well for the plans now being discussed among presidential candidates:

In 1971, President Nixon sought to forestall single-payer national health insurance by proposing an alternative. He wanted to combine a mandate, which would require that employers cover their workers, with a Medicaid-like program for poor families, which all Americans would be able to join by paying sliding-scale premiums based on their income.

Nixon’s plan, though never passed, refuses to stay dead. Now Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama all propose Nixon-like reforms. Their plans resemble measures that were passed and then failed in several states over the past two decades.

W&H are particularly disappointed by the recent Massachusetts plan; “even under threat of fines, only 7 percent of the 244,000 uninsured people in the state who are required to buy unsubsidized coverage had signed up by Dec. 1. Few can afford the sky-high premiums.” W&H should also acknowledge that in some cases the uninsured themselves are responsible; according to one recent study, “twenty-five percent are eligible for public coverage.”

W&H suggest that mandates will not work, but do not have the space to fully explore why. I think they are right to emphasize lack of affordability in plans, but a recent book suggests some deeper issues. Charles Karelis’s The Persistence of Poverty: Why the Economics of the Well-Off Can’t Help the Poor argues that we cannot expect impoverished individuals to react to economic incentives the same way that middle- and upper-class people do.

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  December 16, 2007 at 10:01 pm   Posted in: Health Law, Law and Inequality, Law and Psychology, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Tax   Print This Post   3 Comments

Correlation and Causation in Lawyer Depression

posted by Jeffrey Lipshaw

The Wall Street Journal and its Law Blog focus again today on what seem to be irrefutable statistics on the higher incidence of depression among lawyers than among the general population. I don’t mean at all to make light of this; too many family and friends deal with this issue, and I realize how complex a combination of biochemistry and environment depression is. I wonder sometimes if environmental stimuli to depression outpaced the evolution of the human body’s ability to generate seratonin. (Hmm. Were people clinically depressed, in our modern sense, five hundred years ago?)

But do lawyers become depressed, or do people with a biochemical predisposition to depression become lawyers?

[Cross-posted at Legal Profession Blog]

  December 13, 2007 at 11:37 am   Posted in: Law and Psychology   Print This Post   9 Comments

Does the Phillies’ Pennant Mean It’s Good to be a Philadelphia Plaintiff’s Lawyer?

posted by Dave Hoffman

I had the tremendous pleasure of attending yesterday’s 6-1 Phillies victory over the Nationals. In the ninth, the crowd learned of the Mets’ loss (and consequent, miraculous, Phillies clinching of the National League East pennant) about five minutes before the scoreboard posted that result, demonstrating the quick response time of social networks. I screamed my head off, and as a result will be hoarse for class tonight. Ironically, I’m teaching acceptance by silence.

But I didn’t put up this post just to gloat. That would be wrong.

Well after the game, I wondered about the interaction between sports victories and legal decision making. I know there are studies out there that correlate a home-team’s victory with a limited bump in local discretionary spending, and that overall wins (and teams) have negligible effects on economic growth. That makes some sense to me. But sports victories certainly have noneconomic effects. Wins change the atmosphere in cities (like Philadelphia) where there are tightly-connected urban communities. Just to relay an anecdote: this morning, on the subway, I observed someone actually give up their place to a woman transporting two small children. I don’t think that happens on an ordinary day in Philly.

Does winning matter for law? It’s not implausible, and it is relatively easy to test. I bet that jury awards today for prevailing plaintiffs are higher than average, and that judges are slightly less likely to grant summary judgment. (And visa versa. I would not want to open a civil case before a Queens jury today.) Civic noise certainly matters to legal decisionmakers: if the narrative around town is “the underdog has prevailed,” that has got to have some impact on the legal system. All of which is to say: plaintiffs lawyers able to choose cases might consider picking clients likely to go to trial in jurisdictions with winning local sports teams.

  October 1, 2007 at 4:17 pm   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Current Events, Empirical Analysis of Law, Humor, Law School (Scholarship), Law and Psychology   Print This Post   3 Comments

“Facebook in the Flesh”

posted by Timothy Zick

The Web has often and, I think, justifiably been touted as a democratizing and empowering communications medium. But as with any communications phenomenon of this magnitude, there are bound to be some negative effects. I am not talking here about the threats to children or the ubiquity of online pornography. In more basic social and expressive terms, the manner in which people associate and communicate “online” may be producing certain deleterious effects with regard to such activities “offline.” Although there are likely others, I want to discuss two such potential negative effects.

The first possible negative effect relates to basic interpersonal skills and social networking. As some educators (the author included) are doubtless aware, students have a tendency to resort to email rather than make appointments for face-to-face meetings with instructors. Disembodied or “virtual” communication can of course be quite beneficial in terms of things like convenience and efficiency. But for students, emailing, texting, and participating in social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are not primarily related to convenience and efficiency; they are now the principal means of connecting to and communicating with others. What effect are these modes of online communication having on real space encounters and interactions? Consider a recent orientation seminar offered at New York University, entitled “Facebook in the Flesh.” As reported in the September 17 edition of The New Yorker, the seminar was apparently designed to teach students how to socialize and build social networks in person — social processes that a seminar brochure recognized could be very “intimidating” to students. At one point, participants were paired off and given instructions on how to do such elementary things as ask questions and discover commonalities and connections. Thus, one possible negative effect from online modes of expression is the difficulty, and in some cases even inability, to effectively interact with others located in the same physical space. This negative effect may have serious social and economic, as well as expressive, ramifications. (According to a recent survey, time spent at work has not decreased despite the availability of mobile technologies.)

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  September 17, 2007 at 10:45 pm   Posted in: First Amendment, Law and Psychology   Print This Post   5 Comments

Shunning Duke’s Faculty

posted by Dave Hoffman

A little while back, former Judge, and law school Dean, Joseph Bellacosa (St. John’s) proposed that members of the public shun the 88 Duke faculty members who sponsored an advertisement in the early days of the Nifong investigation implicitly condemning the accused lacrosse players. Bellacosa argued that

[A]lthough the group [of faculty members] can’t technically be charged with crimes – though abandoning your young and endangering youth sure do come close to real definable crimes – there are ways these professors can be held accountable. The identities of the 88 professors should be posted in significant ways and places, including in the media and on the Internet, so that they may be known for what they have done.

The likely howls of protest from the tenure police, university guild apologists and free-speech absolutists notwithstanding, the professoriat should not be shielded from appropriate public condemnation for their misconduct. Their dormant consciences and sensibilities should be reawakened to the abhorrent nature of the actions they inflicted on their own students.

I am regrettably late commenting on Judge Bellacosa’s article, and so this post may be stale. But still. What the heck is going on here?

Finding the original ad put up in 2006 isn’t so easy. A follow-up statement by Concerned Duke Faculty member has dead links, and Duke’s African-American studies department has removed the page from its server. Fortunately, this blog post pdf’d the ad, which I’ve copied to the right. Unfortunately, Bellacosa doesn’t say, and I don’t understand, exactly what was so wrong about this statement. There are some rumors that the students whose voices are being spotlighted are composites. That would be bad, but not a deadly sin. And the heart of the ad – the statement by the professors themselves – seems to me to consist of a set of vague generalities that verge on truisms, and aren’t objectionable:

“Regardless of the results of the police investigation, what is apparent everyday now is the anger and fear of many students who know themselves to be objects of racism and sexism, who see illuminated in this moment’s extraordinary spotlight what they live with everyday.”

Regardless, we’re supposed to shame and shun the signatories to the ad. Why?

  August 13, 2007 at 11:13 am   Posted in: Current Events, Education, Law School, Law and Psychology, Legal Ethics, Sociology of Law   Print This Post   11 Comments

It Took Me Years to Like . . .

posted by Frank Pasquale

As a recent victim of Sudden iPod Death Syndrome, I’ve returned to my antiquated Dell MP3 player. It’s a bit of a throwback to the four years or so when I bought it. . . . and I’m tired of most of the pop songs on it. But one album I never liked at the time strikes me as fantastic now–Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief. I found it pretty much unlistenable when I bought it.

What changed? When I took a poetry course from Helen Vendler, she once said: “If you don’t like a poem now, wait for 10 years, and re-read it.” That may sound a bit smug on the computer screen, but I think you’d have been as impressed as I was if you were there. She tended to declaim like the Iris Murdoch of Judi Dench’s Iris–always from a minimalist lectern surrounded by hundreds of square feet of empty polished parquet floor.

In any event, I’d love to hear about any book or music it took you years to like. I think the experience is a nice phenomenological confirmation of the problem of affective forecasting.

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  August 2, 2007 at 10:56 am   Posted in: Culture, Law and Psychology   Print This Post   5 Comments

Politics, Private Space, and Total Persuasion

posted by Dave Hoffman

A lunch today with a colleague at another school, coupled with an article in the Wall Street Journal, has brought me to back to a topic I blogged about back in January: Total Persuasion. As I suggested, there are analogies to be drawn between the government’s defunct secret possibly ongoing program to gather reams of information about its citizens and corporations’ desire to grab consumer mind-share by every persuasive avenue possible. Indeed, we’re rapidly approaching a time when it will be exceedingly difficult for the law to draw lines between advertising and not-advertising; between fraud and persuasion; and between censorship and consumer protection.

These claims are easy to overdraw, so let me give you an example and a theory to help set the stage for the discussion. In today’s Journal, John McKinnon has a interesting article about Sara Taylor’s decision to leave her job as the White House’s political director to join the private sector. Taylor is an expert in microtargeting, a marketing technique developed by corporations to segment their consumer markets by mining data to learn more about the structure of consumer’s preferences. According to McKinnon, microtargeting was “honed” by political operations to “more effectively zero in on voters’ emotion triggers,” and uncover groups of voters that are susceptible to future efforts. Taylor sees a “big future” for taking such political lessons back to the corporate world by “helping corporations focus on potential customers’ . . . feelings about buying a product or service.”

There are some roadblocks in this prosperous path, as the article points out. Most salient, businesses are “more constrained in the claims they can make” than politicians, presumably by the law of fraud (in its various guises). But there is a solution to this problem: encourage consumers to make their own persuasive advertising by creating “social networks around products and brands . . .” In the future, we should anticipate that such social persuasion will become an increasingly prevalent aspect of corporate marketing efforts, just as politicians have worked to co-opt social networking sites for their own ends.

Why? Because consumers have fewer defenses to social persuasion, and aren’t cynical about it yet. Moreover, social persuasion is probably less subject to legal sanction in the general case (indeed, it may be immune under circumstances where the same language if spoken by the corporation would be actionable). It is also, obviously, cheaper to produce. The downside (loss of control over message) is probably something that corporations will learn to live with. (I thank my lunch companion for pointing this problem out to me!)

What’s wrong with a society in which most speech that you hear is designed to persuade you to consume? When framed that way, some might immediately respond: nothing! After all, no one is being compelled to any particular purchase. If the consumer market is efficient, and consumers had a taste not to consume, wouldn’t savvy marketers satisfy the taste with a unpersuasive campaign? (The idea is silly on its face, but isn’t it sort of what Saturn and Berkshire Hathaway were/are up to?) Even assuming that the consumer product market is somehow irrational, marketers would presumably compete to satisfy whatever inefficient desires are extant.

But I doubt that market rhetoric is going to provide satisfying answers to whether the law should work to hinder a total persuasion society. I haven’t fully thought this issue through, but my starting point is an essay by Jonathan Franzen called Imperial Bedroom, in his book How to Be Alone. Franzen attacks privacy advocates for focusing on privacy as just problem of being from free from others’ (corporations, the government, space aliens, the U.N., etc.) prying eyes and grasping hands.

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  May 21, 2007 at 8:50 pm   Posted in: Advertising, Behavioral Law and Economics, Consumer Protection Law, Contract Law & Beyond, Culture, Economic Analysis of Law, Law and Psychology, Politics   Print This Post   3 Comments

Ten Smiles Per Hour: Tax on the Dour?

posted by Frank Pasquale

Taking a break from weighty topics like world hunger, Peter Singer reflects on an Australian City’s decision to encourage cheer among residents:

[T]he city of Port Phillip . . . has been using volunteers to find out how often people smile at those who pass them in the street. It then put up signs that look like speed limits, but tell pedestrians that they are in, for example, a “10 Smiles Per Hour Zone.” . . . . Mayor Janet Bolitho says that [smiling] . . . . encourages people to feel more connected with each other and safer, so it reduces fear of crime – an important element in the quality of life of many neighborhoods.

Singer backs the effort, based on some “happiness research” mentioned in my last post: “promoting friendship is often easy, cheap, and can have big payoffs in making people happier. So why shouldn’t that be a focus of public policy?”

I was reminded of Quentin Crisp’s classic comparison of England and America: the former combines a generous welfare state with icy social mores, while the latter has sunny individuals and comparatively stingy social provision. But we shouldn’t discount the role of happy cultures in creating happy people; as Barbara Ehrenreich has noted, perhaps the rise in rates of depression “can be connected with the decline in opportunities for pleasure, such as carnival and other traditional festivities.”

Some theorists of discrimination might argue that government intervention to change a sticky norm of unfriendliness amounts to a tax on the dour. Why are they being forced to affect sentiments they don’t authentically feel? But I think the problem has less to do with “faking it” than with the systematic substitution of, say, well-founded dread with carefree bonhomie. Consider U.S. teens’ expectations of future earning power:

American teens believe … that when they get older they will be earning an average annual salary of $145,500. Interestingly, boys expect to earn an average $173,000 a year and girls $114,200 … The fact is, only about 14 percent of U.S. households have incomes between $100,000 and $200,000, reports the U.S. Census Bureau. The median household income in the United States is actually $46,326.

Perhaps the boys’ keen understanding of current fiscal policy has led them to anticipate a hyperinflation.

Admittedly, the optimal level of cheer (or optimism) in a society is impossible to assess in the abstract. But I think Port Philip’s strategy may ultimately backfire. It threatens to set in motion a Gresham’s law of public gladness, whereby bad smiles drive out (or at least devalue) the good. Perhaps a certain seigniorage of cheer will increase gross happiness in the short run. But in the end, it may well set us on the road to a situation like that described in Vaclav Havel’s essay on the grocer in Power of the Powerless. Grinning done as public duty may be indistinguishable from a grimace.

Photo Credit: Flickr/TobyLeah.

  May 1, 2007 at 2:52 pm   Posted in: Behavioral Law and Economics, Law and Psychology, Legal Theory, Philosophy of Social Science, Tax, Weird   Print This Post   10 Comments

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