IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ucp/jlstud/doi10.1086-696879.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Does Reason Writing Reduce Decision Bias? Experimental Evidence from Judges in China

Author

Listed:
  • Zhuang Liu

Abstract

Anecdotal evidence and academic research show that judges' subjective feelings toward litigants have undue influence on their judgments. This article suggests a simple debiasing procedure, namely, requiring judges to write their reasons before making a decision. I conduct experiments on incumbent Chinese judges to test its effectiveness. Study 1 uses a between-subjects design to explore the interaction of reason writing and a stimulus that induces a judge to have negative feelings toward a defendant. Judges who are required to write down their reasons before they decide a case are significantly less affected by the stimulus than those who directly enter the decision-making stage. Study 2 provides evidence that a forced deliberation period achieves a similar debiasing effect. Study 3 examines the opposite of reason writing-- the delegation of reason writing, which resembles the delegation of opinion writing by judges to law clerks. I find that delegation serves to reinforce biases.

Suggested Citation

  • Zhuang Liu, 2018. "Does Reason Writing Reduce Decision Bias? Experimental Evidence from Judges in China," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 47(1), pages 83-118.
  • Handle: RePEc:ucp:jlstud:doi:10.1086/696879
    DOI: 10.1086/696879
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/696879
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/696879
    Download Restriction: Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1086/696879?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Cécile Bourreau-Dubois & Myriam Doriat-Duban & Bruno Jeandidier & Jean-Claude Ray, 2023. "Do child support guidelines result in lower inter-judge disparity? The case of the French advisory child support guidelines," European Journal of Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 55(1), pages 87-116, February.
    2. Cécile Bourreau-Dubois & Myriam Doriat-Duban & Bruno Jeandidier & Jean Ray, 2020. "Do sentencing guidelines result in lower inter-judge disparity ? Evidence from framed field experiment," Working Papers hal-02978348, HAL.
    3. Cécile Bourreau-Dubois & Myriam Doriat-Duban & Bruno Jeandidier & Jean Claude Ray, 2020. "Do sentencing guidelines result in lower inter-judge disparity? Evidence from framed field experiment," Working Papers of BETA 2020-28, Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg.
    4. Cécile Bourreau-Dubois & Bruno Deffains & Myriam Doriat-Duban & Bruno Jeandidier, 2021. "Guidelines: Decision-Making Tools for Litigantsand Judges [Les barèmes, outils d’aide à la décision pour les justiciables et les juges]," Post-Print hal-03054417, HAL.
    5. John Zhuang Liu & Xueyao Li, 2019. "Legal Techniques for Rationalizing Biased Judicial Decisions: Evidence from Experiments with Real Judges," Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 16(3), pages 630-670, September.
    6. Christoph Engel, 2022. "Judicial Decision-Making. A Survey of the Experimental Evidence," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2022_06, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucp:jlstud:doi:10.1086/696879. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Journals Division (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/JLS .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.