Plea bargaining does not occur in a vacuum. There are several actors (e.g., prosecutors, defense attorneys, defendants) directly involved with plea negotiations and plea decisions. As approximately 95 percent of state and federal convictions result from guilty pleas, the decision-making process that defendants and other actors undergo during plea negotiations is important to understand. This chapter will address the unique and overlapping theoretical, practical, cognitive, and social influence factors that underlie the plea negotiation process and ultimate plea decision. Specifically, this chapter will focus on negotiations – particularly how attorneys approach negotiation ideologically and practically – and the power dynamics present when two or more actors attempt to influence each other. Furthermore, we will discuss the basic social (e.g., obedience to authority) and cognitive (e.g., heuristics) processes that drive defendant decision-making when interacting with prosecutors and defense attorneys. Finally, policy implications and future directions for research will be discussed throughout the chapter.

Immigrants in the United States without proper documentation face the risk of being subject to deportation (“removal”) proceedings and being detained. Decisions about deportation and immigration detention are made by immigration judges (IJs) in immigration courts (ICs) around the country. Some applications are also decided by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and are characterized as “benefits” rather than relief. Psychological evidence is a key component of many forms of removal relief and benefits (e.g., asylum applications, hardship, competency). Decisions made by IJs, immigration attorneys, and mental health professionals in IC can have serious consequences for immigrants, including deportation and detention. This chapter reviews some of the psychological issues involved in immigration law and the legal decision-making involved in removal relief applications. It also outlines the ways in which forensic mental health assessments can aid IJs in their decision-making process and offers recommendations for research and policy in this area.

This chapter describes crime victims’ decision to call or not to call the police, which we discuss in terms of the extent to which it is rational, social, and normative. Examining these decisions is especially important as citizens function as the gatekeepers of our system. Victimization is likely to cause distress, anger, fear, and disbelief, meaning that the reporting decision is subject both to biased judgment and to influence from others in the form of information, advice, and normative standards. Although crime seriousness is generally the most important predictor of the reporting decision, factors about the victim and the offender moderate this relationship. Serious crimes against women are often not reported, and although juveniles generally have higher rates of victimization than adults, they have lower rates of reporting. Recent concern about certain hate crimes also indicates low rates of reporting. Future research possibilities and policy implications are also discussed in this chapter.

This chapter takes a psychological perspective on tort law decision-making, drawing on psychological theory, empirical research, and legal practices in tort litigation to assess the state of knowledge about decision-making in tort cases. It examines how plaintiffs decide to bring a lawsuit, how defendants respond, and the process of dispute resolution in tort cases. Most tort cases do not go to trial, but trial decisions remain significant as a framework for negotiations. The chapter also draws on psychological theory and research to describe how the judge and the jury as decision-makers resolve legal issues and reach liability verdicts and damage awards in tort cases. Psychological heuristics, biases, and other psychological phenomena affect decision-making in intentional tort, negligence, and strict liability cases, and judgments about liability and damages. The chapter closes with suggestions for further investigations of understudied topics in tort law decision-making.

This chapter discusses the growing body of research that examines the social cognitive processes of jurors used when making verdict or sentencing decisions. This includes the empirical findings related to priming ideas and attitudes and impression formation. The chapter then discusses heuristics, or cognitive “shortcuts,” that jurors employ during their decision-making processes in trials and deliberations. For instance, there is a tendency for jurors to over-rely on dispositional attributions, stereotypes, and schemas. Cognitive biases that jurors are prone to, such as the hindsight bias, the outcome bias, and counterfactual thinking, will also be discussed in the context of evaluating evidence and making verdict decisions, along with the potential of debiasing techniques. Finally, jurors’ biases and prejudices regarding factors, such as race, gender, and religion, and how they relate to decision-making are examined. The chapter also addresses areas of social cognition that have not yet been explored in current research and provides recommendations for future directions.

My name is Alane Thomas. I have a Master’s degree in Social Work, a Master of Arts in Criminal Justice, and a clinical social work license. I have been in the social work field for 10 years and worked in the victim advocacy field for 2.5 years. I have worked with sexual assault survivors and domestic violence victims, families in child protective services, and clients in a behavioral health hospital setting, and have provided individual, couples, and family therapy in a private practice setting. I have had the opportunity to experience what goes into making decisions to protect children and adults who are at risk of or are actively experiencing abuse and neglect.

Although civil trials provide for the lawful resolution of many kinds of disputes, the vast majority of civil matters are resolved through other processes: Negotiation, mediation, and arbitration. This chapter provides an overview of the main psychological and structural factors that influence disputants’ decisions to select and use these primary alternative dispute resolution (ADR) processes. Further, the chapter discusses the psychology of decision-making in the context of alternative dispute resolution, including identifying what constitutes successful outcomes and how biases and other tendencies can prevent parties from realizing these outcomes. Finally, the chapter addresses research on the ways in which non-parties such as mediators, facilitators, arbitrators, and judges can improve (or diminish) the likelihood that parties’ voices will be heard, that parties will be satisfied with the process, and that the selected process will result in substantively satisfactory outcomes. Major research gaps and policy implications are identified and discussed.

Biases in decision-making based on race, ethnicity, social class, gender, sexual orientation, and other social identities are pervasive in the criminal justice and legal systems. Likewise, the positionality of legal actors and lay people from diverse groups both influences and constrains legally relevant judgments. This chapter uses a case study of racially biased judgments in the criminal justice and legal systems to illustrate how judgment processes can lead to unequal outcomes across social groups. It then describes ways in which law-psychology can expand research on diversity in legal decision-making, addressing issues related to social class, discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, and reproductive decision-making by women. It also discusses frameworks and perspectives that provide valuable insights on legal decision-making but which often are overlooked by psycholegal scholars, including intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the abolition movement. The chapter concludes by examining the limits of a decision-making framework for understanding unequal outcomes in legally relevant contexts, which frequently are the result of structural and implicit biases in addition to deliberate judgments.

Social workers make decisions every day involving the protection of children and/or adults who are at risk of, or are experiencing, abuse and neglect, exercising power and authority derived from law. Social workers must act within the law: “doing things right.” Accountable, legally literate practice additionally includes standards from administrative law when statutory duties are used. However, decision-making frequently also raises ethical dilemmas, including whether, when, and how to intervene in people’s lives. Practice must, therefore, be ethically literate: “doing right things.” Human rights, equality, and social justice issues will also feature in social work decision-making: “right thinking.” This chapter presents a framework for social worker decision-making that is legally and ethically, but also emotionally, relationally, organizationally and knowledge, literate. It proposes that this framework is transferable across the different jurisdictions within which social workers practice, and that it helps social workers to make good as well as lawful decisions.

This chapter discusses decisions that police should make about how to collect eyewitness identification evidence to ensure that they elicit the most accurate identification decisions from eyewitnesses. Eyewitness decisions include whether to select someone out of a lineup and whom to pick, as well as confidence in the accuracy of that choice. Although witnessing conditions – including (among others) whether the perpetrator and witnesses belong to the same racial/ethnic groups, weapon presence, and poor viewing conditions – can influence the accuracy of identification decisions, the chapter will focus primarily on how decisions made by the police about which identification procedures to use affect the accuracy of identification decisions. The chapter discusses many of these decisions in the context of the best practices that are recommended based on the available literature. Of special interest is when there is an interaction between the witness conditioning the decisions made by law enforcement. The chapter concludes with recommendations for future research on these topics.

This chapter addresses decision-making about the restoration of defendants who are adjudicated as incompetent to stand trial (IST) in an era in which there has been deemed a competency crisis that the number of impacted defendants has grown significantly. It describes the rationale for the importance of this topic and associated decisions, and provides the context for such decisions: hospital, jail, and outpatient. After reviewing the existing scientific literature on the frequency of restoration decisions and the duration and outcomes of relevant interventions, it describes a proposal for an approach to evaluating restorability that is more consistent with the available scientific evidence and a better fit for clinical and forensic practice. The chapter concludes with a more detailed discussion of both clinical and legal decisions in this area, elaborating on why this approach appears to offer a better fit for practice. Implications for future research, clinical and legal decision-making, and bias reduction are described.

The law presumes that all persons are capable of guiding their own day-to-day lives, but the presence of various types and degrees of mental disability or mental incapacity can call this capability into question. When competency is convincingly demonstrated to be impaired, to the extent that decision-making requires input, persistent guidance, or outright control by some external entity, the civil courts might elect at that juncture to impose some form of “substituted judgment.” Substituted judgment undertakes to address three broad and potentially overlapping decision-making domains, described here with brief accompanying examples: prior judgment (regarding wills and other advance directives), present judgment (regarding informed consent and the corresponding right to refuse treatment), and future judgment (regarding guardianship and conservatorship). This chapter will explore each of these domains in detail, identifying the contributions mental health professionals can make to reliable and valid forensic assessment in this regard.

Once a defendant is deemed incompetent to stand trial (IST), the evaluator must indicate whether restoration can occur within the foreseeable future. This restoration must occur in a “reasonable” – but undefined – period. If restorable and the defendant is in the community, an outpatient restoration program might be utilized but only if the defendant does not constitute a physical threat to the community. If the defendant is incarcerated, the restoration process will likely occur in a secure hospital setting or a jail setting. Unfortunately, not every jurisdiction has an outpatient restoration program or a jail restoration program. The nature of the crime often creates what I call a “justice” bias toward competency or the restoration process. The more heinous the crime the more likely the defendant is to be competent or IST but restorable.

Studies and victimization surveys suggest that many, if not most, crimes are not reported to legal authorities. This is problematic because: (1) legal authorities are unable to address crimes they are unaware of, and victim or bystander reporting is the primary route by which authorities are made aware of crimes; and (2) people’s willingness to report crimes is an indicator of the public’s willingness to cooperate with legal authorities, which has long been noted as necessary for an effective criminal justice system in democratic societies. Academic attention to the role of bystanders was catalyzed largely by the story surrounding the assault and murder of Kitty Genovese in New York City in the 1960s, which elicited the question of why bystanders fail to report crimes. This chapter is about situational and bystander characteristics that relate to bystander decisions to report crime and provide information to legal authorities. It identifies gaps in the literature and proposes directions for future research.

In the landmark case Daubert v. Merrell Dow Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (1993), the Supreme Court of the United States articulated the admissibility standard for expert evidence. In jurisdictions that have adopted the Daubert standard, trial court judges must make difficult decisions regarding the admissibility of proffered expert evidence. Although all federal courts and nearly all state courts use the Daubert standard, we know little about how judges fulfill their gatekeeping role when making admissibility decisions. This chapter reviews the empirical and theoretical considerations regarding how judges in Daubert jurisdictions determine which proffered expert evidence should be admitted. After reviewing the standards governing the admissibility of expert testimony, which includes a discussion of the Federal Rules of Evidence, Daubert, and related cases, the chapter provides a discussion of each Daubert criterion, including the available evidence relating to judges’ understanding of those criteria. It then discusses the heuristics and biases that affect judicial decision-making. The chapter concludes with a discussion of implications for practice and research.

Investigative interviews with suspects are complex interpersonal interactions that are focused on eliciting statement evidence to use within subsequent investigative and judicial processes. When conducting an investigative interview, criminal investigators face a series of decision points – involving potentially competing alternatives – which collectively determine how the interview will unfold. These decisions are also made under real-world constraints of limited time and knowledge. Interviewer decision-making, therefore, is both psychologically complex and practically consequential. In the present chapter we examine the role of interviewer decision-making across five dimensions of investigative interviewing: Why (is an interview conducted?), Who (will participate?), When and Where (will the interview occur?), and What (techniques will be used?). We use this structure to outline the current state of the literature on suspect interviewing best practices and how each decision point raises factual and ethical considerations for interviewers, interviewees, and the criminal justice system more broadly. We conclude by discussing potential future directions for research that can continue to inform effective decision-making in this area.