| Abstract [eng] |
„The Factors of Perceived Court Decisions“. Akvilė Rybelytė. Vilnius, Vilnius university, 2018. 55 pages. The way people perceive court decisions is related to attitude toward law system and public authorities. Positive attitude towards these authorities has an impact on whether people accept and abide by the courts’ decision and by the law. But court decisions often are affected by the intuitive decision-making strategies, also known as cognitive heuristics. The confirmation bias and anchoring effect are often explored in legal context. Most of the research on intuitive decisions in courts investigates only factors of decision making but not an evaluation of these decisions. The objective of this research is to explore the relations between the evaluations of court decision, judges’ behavior, legal reasoning and attentiveness to case material. Also we aim to investigate how cognitive heuristics (confirmation bias and anchoring effect) will affect these evaluations and what impact on these evaluations has the knowledge. The present study was designed to investigate the factors that could affect evaluation of court decisions. The participants were 368 students of two universities of Vilnius, aged between 18-43 years old (26,6% - males and 73,4% - females). Also 60,1% of participants were the law students and 39,9% - students of other programs. The design of this study is quasi-experimental. The results of this study indicate that people are tend to evaluate court decision more favorably, when it is consistent with their opinion. Also, results indicate that evaluation of court decisions depends on the assumptions about the guilt of litigants. Besides that, the numeric value mentioned in experimental material affects the decision related with the size of value. These results revealed the important factors that could influence the evaluation of court decisions - confirmation bias and anchoring effect. |
