The idea that racial prejudice contributes to discrimination not only deliberately but also in a more automatic fashion has been one of the most prominent topics in social psychological research in the last 30 years. Much of the evidence for theories of automatic prejudice stems from the use of indirect measures of implicit attitudes, yet meta-analyses give differing estimates regarding the predictive validity of such measures. The present adversarial collaboration provides a test of the relationships between prominent measures of implicit racial attitudes and discriminatory behavior using a set of established lab-based paradigms using a sample of White Americans (N = 2114). Using structural equation models that can account for measurement error, frequentist and Bayesian multiverse analyses confirmed that White Americans’ performance on indirect measures correlate modestly with these behavioral outcomes, and explain unique variance (~2.5%) beyond direct, self-report measures of racial attitudes. At the same time, self-report measures exhibited greater predictive and incremental validity than indirect measures (explaining ~45% of the variance) despite behavioral measures of discrimination displaying weak internal reliability. Results provided some support for greater predictive and incremental validity for indirect measures among participants scoring relatively low on measures of executive function and motivation to control prejudice. These results lend themselves to both relatively optimistic and pessimistic interpretations concerning scientific and practical significance. All collaborators agree that the best path forward is collaborative and focused on the generalizability of implicit racial attitudes to high-accountability organizational settings.

Ordinary people play crucial roles in our criminal justice system. They decide whether to report crimes, whether to assist the police in investigations, and, when serving as jurors, whether to convict those accused of crimes. When making these decisions, an ever-present concern is that one's actions may contribute to the conviction of an innocent person, while one's inaction may allow a guilty person to escape justice. The research reported here demonstrates that how lay people balance these competing concerns affects the criminal justice choices that they make. A nationally representative sample of Americans found that most do not agree with William Blackstone’s judgment that it is better to acquit ten guilty people than to convict one innocent person. Instead, most Americans consider a false conviction and a false acquittal to be equally harmful to society, and a substantial minority sees false acquittals as the more serious error. Furthermore, as concern about guilty people going free increases, willingness to assist in criminal investigations and to convict the accused increases. Efforts to increase concern about false convictions through lawyer arguments and judicial instructions proved futile. These results demonstrate that lay people’s criminal justice error aversions can have a profound impact on how they interact with the criminal justice system and that there may be little the criminal justice system can do to override these error aversions.

Elites can be differentiated from non-elites by their status-enhancing attributes: their accomplishments, expertise, and group memberships. Elitism is the belief that elites deserve epistemic deference because they better understand the workings of the world. Psychological elitism posits the existence of a class of elites who possess specialized knowledge of subconscious (motivational and cognitive) drivers of human judgment that is beyond the ken of non-elites. This article challenges whether psychological elites deserve deference. The central problem is the elusiveness of ground-truth standards for determining the true drivers of judgments. To warrant deference, psychological elites must demonstrate that their reasoning operates free of the same subconscious distortions ascribed to non-elites. Absent such demonstrations, it is fair game-under the very theories that psychological elites endorse-to question the competence of psychological elites to second-guess the true reasons underlying the views of non-elites.

Differences in employee evaluations due to gender bias may be small in any given rating cycle, but they may accumulate to produce large disparities in the number of women and men promoted to the top of an organization. A highly cited simulation by Martell et al. (1996) demonstrates this cumulative advantage process in a multilevel organization. We replicated this simulation to uncover important details about its operating assumptions, and we extended the simulation to examine a range of variables that may impact the cumulative effects of gender bias. The replication revealed that the male cumulative advantage in the Martell et al. simulation requires (a) decades of typical promotion cycles to produce, (b) constant mean differences in the performance ratings of women and men but equal within-group variances, and (c) attrition that occurs randomly at a low and constant rate. Our extended simulation demonstrates that (a) cumulative effects of gender bias are higher when the attrition rate is lower, (b) gender biases are mitigated when attrition is more strongly associated with good or poor performance, and (c) the cumulative effects of mean gender differences in performance ratings can often be smaller than the cumulative effects of variance differences between gender subgroups. Results suggest that talent development and recognition of high performers might have a greater positive impact on female representation at top levels of a firm than programs aimed at reducing bias in employee evaluations. We encourage additional simulation work that further explores the dynamics of cumulative advantage in employment settings. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The history of public policy is littered with failures to solve large-scale social problems using interventions derived from behavioral science theories. In contrast, numerous small-scale problems have been solved through applications of behavioral science. This difference in outcomes reflects a mismatch between methods and aspirations. Behavioral science research relies on small world studies to develop theories of behavior, but such studies will rarely capture the many important forces that combine to produce and sustain big world problems. However, small world studies can provide solutions to specific problems that arise repeatedly in particular contexts by identifying features of the person and environment that must be controlled to solve the problem. Using this bottom-up approach, organizations and professions have learned to reduce costly errors by structuring informational and decision processes, holding people accountable for following prescribed procedures, and providing feedback when errors occur. By turning decision situations into small worlds that focus actors on the right information and the right considerations, public and private organizations can promote accuracy, efficiency, and fairness.

William Blackstone famously expressed the view that convicting the innocent constitutes a much more serious error than acquitting the guilty. This view is the cornerstone of due process protections for those accused of crimes, giving rise to the presumption of innocence and the high burden of proof required for criminal convictions. While most legal elites share Blackstone’s view, the citizen jurors tasked with making due process protections a reality do not share the law’s preference for false acquittals over false convictions. Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we find that a majority of Americans consider false acquittals and false convictions to be errors of equal magnitude. Contrary to Blackstone, most people are unwilling to err on the side of letting the guilty go free to avoid convicting the innocent. Indeed, a sizeable minority view false acquittals as worse than false convictions; this group is willing to convict multiple innocent persons to avoid letting one guilty person go free. These value differences translate into behavioral differences: we show in multiple studies that jury-eligible adults who reject Blackstone’s view are more accepting of prosecution evidence and are more conviction-prone than the minority of potential jurors who agree with Blackstone. These findings have important implications for our understanding of due process and criminal justice policy. Due process currently depends on jurors faithfully following instructions on the burden of proof, but many jurors are not inclined to hold the state to its high burden. Courts should do away with the fiction that the reasonable doubt standard guarantees due process and consider protections that do not depend on jurors honoring the law’s preference for false acquittals, such as more stringent pretrial screening of criminal cases and stricter limits on prosecution evidence. Further, the fact that many people place crime control on par with, or above, the need to avoid wrongful convictions helps explain divisions in public opinion on important policy questions like bail and sentencing reform. Criminal justice proposals that emphasize deontic concerns without addressing consequentialist concerns are unlikely to garner widespread support.

Berryessa et al. (2022) consider how prior experience as a criminal prosecutor may influence judicial behaviour, but their concerns about prior experience apply much more broadly in the case of American judges. In the United States, unlike many other countries, lawyers with experience as advocates comprise the great majority of persons selected to be judges (Volcansek, 2010; Wilets et al., 2022), and most American lawyers focus their practice on particular areas and particular client types, such as representing employers or employees in employment disputes. Specialized experience of any kind, whether as a prosecutor or corporate attorney—and both these types of lawyers have been over-represented among recent judicial nominees to the federal bench in the United States (Shepherd, 2021)—may lead to preconceptions, preferences and blind spots that influence how judges discharge their duties. Berryessa et al. rightly question greater diversification of the bench as a solution because balancing biases across judges does nothing to protect the parties who must appear before the pro-prosecution, pro-business or pro-plaintiff judge. Furthermore, given the many prior advocacy roles judges bring to the bench, it is unrealistic to expect sufficient experiential diversification to achieve balance in the aggregate. Berryessa et al. also rightly question the power of short-term training to produce long-term debiasing effects (see, e.g. Bezrukova et al., 2016; Greenwald et al., 2022). We should not despair, however, for American legal systems employ several measures that constrain judges' idiosyncratic beliefs and personal values to produce merits-based decision-making. In particular, the use of adversarial presentation of arguments and evidence, paired with structured decision-making taking place inside a strong accountability matrix, should promote impartial decision-making. One of the most effective methods to reduce confirmation bias and biased assimilation of evidence involves considering opposing viewpoints and alternative possibilities (e.g. Lilienfeld et al., 2009; van Brussel et al., 2020). The adversarial presentation of evidence and arguments by parties with conflicting incentives, playing on a field levelled by procedures that reduce the significance of resource disparities, ensure that judges leaning to one side or the other are exposed to competing arguments and factual narratives. This process promotes individuation and perspective-taking that should disrupt preconceptions or stereotypes judges bring to a case (Devine et al., 2012). Judges do not have free reign to admit evidence and make decisions as they see fit but rather must act according to extensive procedural and substantive laws that govern how judges should handle and decide cases, along with rules directing judges to recuse themselves from cases in which their personal interests, as opposed to the law, might determine the outcome. Many laws employ bright-line rules or multi-factor tests that constrain judicial discretion and focus judges on the legally relevant considerations (e.g. Girvan, 2016). Judges who place their personal interests above the law can expect to have their actions challenged, for American judges act within an extensive accountability matrix. The most obvious check on judicial power is the hierarchical structure of American court systems, which ensures that all cases can be reviewed by at least one panel of disinterested judges sitting on a court of appeals. This appellate review is designed to detect both factual and legal errors after the conclusion of proceedings in trial courts (most cases cannot be appealed from the trial court until a final judgement by that court has been issued); thus, judges in the trial courts have a strong incentive to decide cases by applying governing law to a reasonable assessment of the facts to avoid having to expend more effort later on the same case. (Because the norm is for cases overturned on appeal to be remanded to the original judge (Heytens, 2014), judges understand the importance of issuing a defensible decision in the first instance.) Reversals of decisions also affect judicial reputations, which may be of particular concern to elected state court judges and federal judges who aspire to appointment to higher courts (Epstein et al., 2013; Paynter & Kearney, 2010). Another important part of this accountability matrix is the requirement that judges issue reasoned explanations for their actions (Oldfather, 2008). Typically these explanations take the form of written opinions following a bench trial or disposing of motions submitted to the court, but during trial judges usually offer oral explanations for their rulings on evidentiary objections, with the explanations captured by the transcript for the record on appeal. Knowing before issuing a decision that the decision will be reviewed by others for compliance with the law serves as an effective way of inducing judges to issue merits-based decisions. Decision-makers who know before deciding that they will be held accountable for following prescribed procedures in an unbiased way are more likely to reach unbiased decisions than unaccountable decision-makers (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999). The requirement of written decisions by appellate courts also facilitates learning: by providing clear feedback on how a case should have been handled or decided, lower courts should be less likely to repeat those mistakes in subsequent cases. Yet, another important part of the accountability matrix is the use of multi-member courts and the random assignment of judicial panels to cases in the courts of appeal. Because no particular viewpoint or perspective dominates on courts of review (though certainly some appellate courts lean left or right in their collective decisions over time) and because the composition of the review panel will be randomly determined, judges whose decisions are subject to review can only be sure that their factual findings will be evaluated for accuracy and their legal rulings will be evaluated for legal fidelity. In other words, a trial court judge will be uncertain about what biases the reviewing judges will hold other than a bias in favour of following the law. In sum, although Berryessa et al. offer good reasons to worry about former prosecutors (and any other former advocates) serving as judges, American legal institutions create conditions that should foster merits-based decision-making. Injustices no doubt occur—sometimes because of ineffective assistance of counsel, sometimes because judges fail to apply a critical eye to expert testimony and other evidence, and sometimes because judges fail to act impartially—but judges with different backgrounds often treat similar cases similarly, suggesting that existing constraints on judges work well to reduce the influence of judges' personal biases (see Harris & Sen, 2019; Mitchell, 2019). Nonetheless, further research is necessary to ensure that former prosecutors serving as judges are not uniquely immune from the constraints that American legal institutions impose on judges. The author has no conflict of interest with respect to authorship or publication of this article. No data was collection in connection with this commentary.

Scott Lilienfeld warned that psychology's ideological uniformity would lead to premature closure on sensitive topics. He encouraged psychologists to question politically convenient results and did so himself in numerous areas. We follow Lilienfeld's example and examine the empirical foundation beneath claims that positive illusions about societal change sustain inequalities by inducing apathy and opposition to reform. Drawing on data from a large-scale survey, we find almost the opposite: a pervasive tendency, across ideological and demographic categories, to see things as getting worse than they really are. These results cast doubt on functionalist claims that people mobilize beliefs about societal trends to support political positions and suggest a simpler explanation: Most laypeople do not organize information in ways that provide reliable monitoring of social change over time, which makes their views on progress susceptible to memory distortions and high-profile current events and political rhetoric.

Until social psychology devotes as much attention to construct and external validity as it does to internal validity, the field will continue to produce theories that fail to replicate in the field and cannot be used to meliorate social problems.

Behavioral scientists enjoy vast methodological freedom in how they operationalize theoretical constructs. This freedom may promote creativity in designing laboratory paradigms that shed light on real-world phenomena, but it also enables questionable research practices that undercut our collective credibility. Open Science norms impose some discipline but cannot constrain cherry-picking operational definitions that insulate preferred theories from rejection. All too often scholars conduct performative research to score points instead of engaging each other's strongest arguments-a pattern that allows contradictory claims to fester unresolved for decades. Adversarial collaborations, which call on disputants to codevelop tests of competing hypotheses, are an efficient method of improving our science's capacity for self-correction and of promoting intellectual competition that exposes false claims. Although individual researchers are often initially reluctant to participate, the research community would be better served by institutionalizing adversarial collaboration into its peer-review process. General Audience Summary Behavioral and social scientists have long enjoyed vast discretion in data-analysis choices. This permissive regime has enabled scholars to engage in many deceptive analytic techniques that facilitated false claims and undercut the field's collective credibility. Recent adoption of new transparency norms has slowed these trends and has shed light on the nonreplicability of many once-prominent empirical findings. But these transparency norms lack means of constraining researchers' flexibility to cherry-pick how they define their variables and design their empirical tests that make it easier for scholars to support their preferred hypotheses. This freedom continues to facilitate false claims in the social and behavioral sciences and enables contradictory conclusions to persist for decades with little to no convergence. We propose that adversarial collaborations, which call on disagreeing scientists to codevelop tests of their competing hypotheses, are a vital supplement to current scientific norms for improving science's capacity for self-correction. Adversarial collaborations disincentivize performative research aimed at like-minded colleagues, instead favoring intense intellectual competition designed to winnow false claims. We explain why it is in the best interests of the research community to incorporate adversarial collaboration as a routine component of science.

The present study examined whether a defense rebuttal expert can effectively educate jurors on the risk that the prosecution's fingerprint expert made an error. Using a sample of 1716 jury-eligible adults, we examined the impact of three types of rebuttal testimony in a mock trial: (a) a methodological rebuttal explaining the general risk of error in the fingerprint-comparison process; (b) a new-evidence rebuttal concluding the latent fingerprint recovered in this case was not suitable for use in a comparison; and (c) a new-evidence rebuttal excluding the defendant as the source of the latent fingerprint. All three rebuttals significantly altered perceptions of the prosecution's fingerprint evidence, but new-evidence rebuttals proved most effective. The effectiveness of the rebuttals depended, however, on whether jurors were more concerned about false acquittals or false convictions.

We can properly call a number of nudges libertarian nudges, but the territory of libertarian nudging is smaller than is often realized. The domain of libertarian nudges is populated by choice-independent nudges, or nudges that only assist the decision process and do not push choosers toward any particular choice. Some choice-dependent nudges pose no great concern from a libertarian perspective for rational choosers so long as there is a low-cost way to avoid the nudger’s favored choice. However, choice-dependent nudges will interfere with the autonomy of irrational choosers, because the opt-out option will be meaningless for this group. Choice-independent nudges should be of no concern with respect to irrational actors and in fact should be welcomed because they can promote the decision competence fundamental to libertarianism, but choice-dependent nudges can never truly be libertarian nudges.

Bereavement can be a precipitating and perpetuating factor for various psychiatric injuries. However, the normal experience of bereavement also causes significant disruption and stress in an individual’s psychosocial functioning. Both in the Netherlands and South Africa, a clear distinction is drawn between sadness and psychiatric injury. Dutch law, until recently, did not make provision for compensation for sadness, but only for psychiatric injury. This has changed with the coming into operation of the Wet Affectieschade on 1 January 2019. In terms of South African law, there is no claim for compensation for sadness or bereavement. The authors are of wby bereavement, sadness or grief resulting from bereavement causes significant distress and a continuum exists between normal and complex bereavement where a clear distinction does not exist. South African courts should, therefore, bear this is mind when in actions for compensation for non-patrimonial loss for bereavement.

Fingerprint examiners regularly participate in tests designed to assess their proficiency. These tests provide information relevant to the weight of fingerprint evidence, but no prior research has directly examined how jurors react to proficiency testing information. Using a nationally representative sample of American adults, we examined the impact of proficiency testing information on the weight given to the opinions of fingerprint examiners by mock jurors considering a hypothetical criminal case. The fingerprint examiner's level of performance on a proficiency test (high, medium, low, or very low), but not the type of error committed on the test (false positive identifications, false negative identifications, or a mix of both types of error), affected the weight that jury-eligible adults gave to an examiner's opinion that latent fingerprints recovered from a crime scene matched the defendant's fingerprints, which in turn affected judgments about the defendant's guilt. Jurors who had no information about proficiency gave similar weight to the testimony as jurors exposed to highly proficient examiners, suggesting that jurors assume fingerprint examiners perform at high levels of proficiency unless informed otherwise. We also found that a plurality of Americans deems false acquittals just as aversive as false convictions and a significant minority deems false acquittals more serious. These differences in error aversions predicted differences in evidentiary assessments, suggesting that error aversions of jurors may play an important role in criminal trials.

Biases in judgment and decision-making often arise at the level of firstorder thoughts. If these initial thoughts are not overridden by secondorder thoughts, they may lead to biased outputs. Current psychological models of legal actors assume that individuals are largely incapable of overcoming these first-order biasing thoughts and that these thoughts ultimately lead to irrational and discriminatory behavior. These models, however, ignore considerable evidence that individuals often naturally engage in self-correction and that situational pressures often encourage self-correction. I discuss the conditions under which self-correction may occur and the possibilities and limits for the law in promoting selfcorrection to overcome biased judgments, decisions, and behavior. Seals... exemplify one of the strongest impulses of legal ordering, to signal formally to people at critical moments that they are about to leave the world of social interaction for the world of compulsion, bureaucracy and impersonality. It is a way of saying "this counts," "this is for keeps," "we're not kidding around anymore" and similar things.... With seals, of course, the modern problem has been that as the form of the seal has been attenuated (down to a preprinted "seal"), its cautionary effect has been vitiated apace. -Arthur Lefo Our instincts and intuitions sometimes lead us in directions that, on second thought, we'd rather not go. The impulse to hit the brakes when one's car encounters a patch of ice can be consciously overridden by preparing for that possibility. The attractive actor's endorsement of a product may resonate at some affective level, but this appeal often falls flat when its informational content is analyzed. Our initial impressions of students and co-workers may be based on stereotypes of the groups to which they are perceived to belong, but these initial impressions often give way to more nuanced beliefs as we learn more about these * Daniel Caplin Professor of Law & E. James Kelly, Jr.-Class of 1965 Research Professor, University of Virginia School of Law, 580 Massie Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903-1738, greg-mitchell@virginia.edu. This paper benefitted from discussions with Hal Arkes, Richard Petty, and Philip Tetlock, as well as comments by participants at the McGeorge School of Law talk based on an earlier version of this paper and by students in the University of Illinois Law and Economics seminar. 1. Arthur Allen Leff, A Letter from Professor Leff to a Prospective Publisher, 94 YALE L.J. 1852, 185253 (1985) (entry on "seals" from Professor Left's legal dictionary proposal). 2009 / Second Thoughts people as individuals. These second thoughts, which may be the product of conscious effort or may come to us just as rapidly and unbidden as the initial thoughts, can serve as important checks on judgments, decisions, and behavior. We learn through experiences that initial reactions to stimuli should sometimes be distrusted or avoided, and we develop a variety of techniques for employing second thoughts to overcome suspect, undesirable, or maladaptive first thoughts.2 The propensity to engage in self-doubt and self-correction varies across persons and situations. Some people, due to their education, upbringing, values, or genetic endowment, naturally engage in reflection and revision more often than others. Nevertheless, all persons with cognitively normal functioning possess the ability to engage in some amount of deliberation, "metacognition," or thought about one's own thoughts-indeed, metacognition is sometimes described as a uniquely human characteristic. Metacognition often follows a feeling of difficulty, surprise, or unease when trying to process information. For example, a fleeting feeling of knowing something that cannot quite be expressed may prompt a memory search, while a feeling of unease upon encountering a member of another social group may lead to vigilance about what one thinks and says during the encounter. But metacognitive processes that lead to adjustments in judgments and beliefs may also occur without our awareness through the operation of automatic processes and associative networks within the mind. Both forms of second 2. By "first thoughts" I mean initial responses to stimuli, while "second thoughts" refer to any subsequent processing of the stimuli or thoughts initiated by the first thoughts. Cf. Deanna Kuhn, Metacognitive Development, 9 CURRENT DIRECTIONS PSYCHOL. SCI. 178, 178 (2000) (defining metacognition as "cognition that reflects on, monitors, or regulates first-order cognition"); Richard E. Petty & Pablo Brifiol, Persuasion: From Single to Multiple to Metacognitive Processes, 3 PERSP. ON PSYCHOL. SCI. 137, 142 (2008) ("Primary thoughts are those that occur at a direct level of cognition and involve our initial associations of some object with some attribute or feeling. Following a primary thought, people can also generate other thoughts that occur at a second level, involving reflections on the first-level thoughts."). A stimulus may at times trigger multiple, conflicting first thoughts, with second thoughts then mediating which of these first thoughts will gain dominance or attention (e.g., meeting another person may activate categories related to this person's sex, race, age, and occupation, with motivation and inhibition mechanisms determining which category, and its related content, captures attention and influences subsequent thought). See C. Neil Macrae & Galen V. Bodenhausen, Social Cognition: Thinking Categorically About Others, 51 ANN. REV. PSYCHOL. 93, 102 (2000). 3. See, e.g., Guy Lories et al., From Social Cognition to Metacognition, in METACOGNITION: COGNITIVE AND SOCIAL DIMENSIONS 1, 1 (Vincent Y. Yzerbyt et al. eds., 1998) ("The possibility of metacognition seems typical of the human species and may be related to our being linguistic animals. It stands as one of the important differences between animal and human cognition and the very existence of psychology is proof of our interest in our own mental processes."). Whether metacognition is in fact uniquely human is now the subject of debate. Compare J. David Smith & David A. Washburn, Uncertainty Monitoring and Metacognition by Animals, 14 CURRENT DIRECTIONS PSYCHOL. SC. 19 (2005) (summarizing research confirming animals' capacity for metacognition), with Peter Carruthers, Meta-Cognition in Animals: A Skeptical Look, 23 MIND & LANGUAGE 58 (2008) (arguing that metacognition processes within non-humans should not be accepted from the current public data). The capacity for metacognition appears to vary developmentally as well. Kuhn and Pease argue, for instance, that metacognitive executive control of first-order thoughts develops considerably during adolescence. See Deanna Kuhn & Maria Pease, Do Children and Adults Learn Differently?, 7 J. COGNITION & DEV. 279

As quantitative measures of scholarly impact gain prominence in the legal academy, we should expect institutions and scholars to engage in a variety of tactics designed to inflate the apparent influence of their scholarly output. We identify these tactics and identify countermeasures that should be taken to prevent this manipulation. The rise of bibliometrics poses a significant risk to the scholarly endeavor but, with foresight, we can maintain scholarly integrity in the age of bibliometrics.