Risk Management and Juries: How Jurors React to Cost-Benefit Analyses

在决定一家公司是否有过失并因此对原告承担损害赔偿责任时，陪审团经常被要求对个人和公司的决定进行事后猜测。这种法律制度的目标是赔偿原告因他人的不法行为或疏忽行为而造成的损害。许多心理学和其他研究人员调查了民事陪审制度的运作，并经常声称其目的没有实现。然而，这一研究通常只关注有限数量的自变量或态度变量。相比之下，本提案的第一个目标是将各种自变量、调节变量和中介变量以及陪审员的态度和看法纳入民事陪审团决策的综合模型。此外，过失法（以及较轻程度的产品责任法）已将成本效益分析纳入被告是否应承担责任的确定中。尽管成本效益分析的概念已被纳入法律，陪审员如何进行成本效益分析或陪审员如何回应进行这种分析的被告并没有受到太多关注。本提案的第二个目标是调查与被告在成本效益分析中的表现实际上激怒了陪审员并导致有利于原告的结果这一说法相关的变量。本项目以产品责任案件为背景，在这些案件中是否进行了成本效益分析，以构建民事陪审团决策的综合模型。这类案件包括与许多变量有关的因素，这些因素以前曾作为与陪审团决策有关的因素进行过调查，但通常是单独进行调查的。这些案件的要素包括产品所涉及的风险，被告面对这种风险的行为，陪审员对案件的态度和看法，以及陪审员的愤怒。本项目将分析从提议的研究数据作为路径模型，其中包括所提到的变量，和其他。研究中的自变量将调查模型中的哪些元素与陪审员对成本效益分析的愤怒有关，以及如何减轻这种愤怒。

When making a decision whether a company was negligent and therefore liable for harm to the plaintiff, juries are frequently asked to second-guess people's and companies' decisions. The goal of such a legal system is to compensate the plaintiff for harm caused by another's wrongdoing or negligent behavior. Many psychological and other researchers have investigated the workings of the civil jury system, and frequently claim that its purposes are not being fulfilled. However, this research has usually focused on a limited number of independent variables or attitudinal variables at one time. In contrast, the first goal of this proposal is to incorporate a variety of independent variables, moderating and mediating variables, and jurors' attitudes and perceptions into a comprehensive model of civil jury decision making. Also, the law of negligence (and to a lesser degree the law of product liability) has integrated cost-benefit analyses into the determination of whether a defendant should be held liable. Although the concept of a cost-benefit analysis is so incorporated into the law, how jurors perform cost-benefit analyses or how jurors respond to defendants who perform such analyses has not received much attention. The second goal of this proposal is to investigate variables associated with the claim that a defendant's performance of a cost-benefit analysis actually outrages jurors and leads to pro-plaintiff outcomes. This project uses products liability cases in which a cost-benefit analysis is or is not performed as a background for building a comprehensive model of civil jury decision making. Such cases include elements relevant to many variables that have been previously investigated as relevant to jury decision making, but which have been investigated usually in isolation. The elements of such cases include the risk involved with the product, the defendant's behavior in face of such a risk, jurors' attitudes and perceptions of the case, and jurors' outrage. This project will analyze the data from the proposed studies as a path model that includes the variables mentioned, and others. The independent variables in the studies will investigate what elements of the model are related to jurors' outrage toward cost-benefit analyses, and how that outrage might be mitigated.