van Aaken & Sarel: Framing Effects in Proportionality Analysis: Experimental Evidence

Anne van Aaken (Univ. of Hamburg) & Roee Sarel (Univ. of Hamburg) have posted Framing Effects in Proportionality Analysis: Experimental Evidence. Here's the abstract:

Proportionality analysis (PA), which is widely used by national and international courts to balance between conflicting public goals or private rights, is typically considered to be a rational process. But is it? Does the framing of the legal case affect the decision-making of (judicial) actors? And if so, are legal professionals more or less likely to be affected by the framing?

We analyze theoretically and experimentally how features of PA might influence the outcome of the decision through behavioral effects, such as biases, heuristics, and framing. In the experiment, subjects conduct a PA for legal cases that vary only in their framing, where the wording is designed to nudge subjects to either support or oppose the legal act that is challenged as disproportional. We contrast three groups of subjects: administrative judges, law students, and non-law students.

Our analysis yields three key findings. First, we find evidence of framing effects in PA; second, the effects are mitigated by legal training (non-law students are the most susceptible, followed by law students and then judges) and third, judges demonstrate only weak bias in PA, but do fall prey to other unrelated behavioral effects. The findings thus highlight the importance of framing effects but also the potentially debiasing effect of legal training and professional expertise when in a professional context.