This essay replies to critics of our earlier article reviewing efforts to apply psychological research on implicit bias to antidiscrimination law. We document that we do not hold the normative position ascribed to us by our leading critic, Professor Bagenstos, and that he misconstrued our...

In this draft of a chapter forthcoming in a book on political psychology, we advocate blending thought experiments with laboratory experiments via a technique we call "the hypothetical society paradigm," which is designed to bring out the inferential advantages of both approaches while...

In two experiments, participants judged the fairness of different distributions of wealth in hypothetical societies. In the first study, the level of meritocracy in the hypothetical societies and the frame of reference from which participants' judged alternative distributions of wealth...

We report the results of three experiments examining the long-standing debate within tort theory over whether corrective justice is independent of, or parasitic on, distributive justice. Using a "hypothetical societies" paradigm that serves as an impartial reasoning device and permits...

Behavioral Law and Economics' effort to replace standard microeconomic assumptions with more realistic, yet still simple assumptions — without jettisoning a basic economic orientation toward behavior that emphasizes prices and utility maximization — has led to the acceptance of an...

This chapter considers the psychological, methodological, and normative paths taken by behavioral law and economics ("BLE") and alternative paths that BLE might have taken, and might still take. The counterfactual BLE imagined here stresses the B in BLE, with behavioral approaches to legal...

Biases in judgment and decision-making often arise at the level of first-order thoughts. If these initial thoughts are not overridden by second-order thoughts, they may lead to biased outputs. Current psychological models of legal actors assume that individuals are largely incapable of...

In Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the Ninth Circuit upheld the certification of the largest employment discrimination class in history, with more than 1.5 million women employees seeking over $1.5 billion in damages. A crucial piece of evidence supporting class certification came from a sociologist who...

Corporations must comply with a dizzying array of laws and regulations. To accomplish this complex task, corporations increasingly turn not just to the legal department and outside counsel but also an in-house group composed of non-lawyer specialists who seek to educate and motivate personnel...

This study compared two forms of accountability that can be used to promote diversity and fairness in personnel selections: identity-conscious accountability (holding decision makers accountable for which groups are selected) versus identity-blind accountability (holding decision makers...