Exploring the Judicial Mind with the workshop to take place March 30-31, 2007 at the University of Virginia

摘要这一请求是为了召集一群来自多个学科的学者，在司法行为与认知、社会和人格心理学的交叉点上进行为期两天的密集和广泛的讨论。出席这次会议的学者的任务是确定与司法决策相关的现有心理学知识领域，对相关研究进行批判性评估，并确定未来研究的关键领域，最有可能对审判法官、上诉法官和行政法官的思想和行为产生重要见解。研讨会的重要目标是为下一个十年的判断心理学研究设定议程。多年来，心理学家们投入了无数小时的研究来了解人类如何做出判断和决定。法律学者和政治学家花费了不可估量的智力精力，试图理解为什么专业法官会这样裁决案件。然而，尽管每个研究领域都很广阔，但它们的交叉区域却很小。心理学概念时不时地出现在对司法行为的研究中，但很难列举出大量出版的研究，这些研究广泛依赖心理学的当前思想和证据来产生关于审判的主要理论命题。这并不难理解：很少有人在两个完全不同的领域拥有专业知识。但这是不幸的。对于心理学家来说，司法决策应该是一个引人入胜和肥沃的研究领域。司法决策往往具有很高的影响力，由经过广泛培训和社会化的人以一种特殊的决策形式进行。同样，任何试图公平地评估相互竞争的严肃法律论点的人，肯定都被他们参与的推理过程的复杂性和神秘性所震撼。当然，我们对人类思维的总体运作了解得越多，我们就越能更好地理解司法决策中具体的人类活动。在我们对司法决策心理学的理解方面，最重要的障碍是很少有人对这两个领域都非常了解。也许克服这一障碍的最好方法是建立一个合作的、跨学科的学者社区，他们可以利用彼此的专业知识/工作来获取难以独立行动的知识。拟议中的工作坊旨在为发展这样一个社区迈出重要的第一步。更广泛的影响是希望这个社区最终会相当大。为此，向其他研究人员传播想法是拟议讲习班的中心目标。在短期内，PIS的目标是将研讨会的会议记录作为一本论文集出版，以论证认真对待心理学在研究、判断和确定最重要的研究问题方面的效用，一旦人们这样做了，这些问题就会变得明显。从长远来看，这个研讨会有望导致其他志同道合的学者的会议，并帮助这些学者发表新颖的实证研究，这些研究将有助于我们对裁判和心理学的理解，并激发其他研究人员的兴趣。

AbstractThis request is to bring together a group of scholars from several disciplines for two days of intensive and wide-ranging discussions at the intersection of judicial behavior and cognitive, social, and personality psychology. The mission given to scholars attending this meeting is to identify existing areas of psychological knowledge relevant to judicial decision making, critically evaluate the relevant research, and identify the key areas of future research most likely to yield important insights into the thinking and behavior of trial, appellate, and administrative judges. The immodest goal of the workshop is to set the agenda for the next decade's research into the psychology of judging.Intellectual Merits Over the years, psychologists have devoted uncountable hours of study to understanding how human beings make judgments and decisions. Legal scholars and political scientists have expended immeasurable intellectual energy trying to understand why professional judges decide cases as they do. Yet as vast as each field of study is, the area of their intersection is tiny. Psychological concepts crop up in studies of judicial behavior from time to time, but it would be difficult to name a score of published studies that have relied extensively on current ideas and evidence in psychology to generate major theoretical propositions about judging. This is not hard to understand: few people possess expertise in two disparate fields. But it is unfortunate. Judicial decision making, often highly consequential and performed by people who have undergone extensive training and socialization in a peculiar form of decision making, should be a fascinating and fertile area of research for psychologists. Likewise, anyone who has ever tried to fairly evaluate competing serious legal arguments must have been struck by the complexity and mysteriousness of the reasoning process in which they engaged. Surely, the more we understand about the workings of the human mind generally, the better we will be able to understand the specific human activity of judicial decision making. The most important obstacle to rapid advancement in our understanding of the psychology of judicial decision making is that few people know both fields very well. Perhaps the best way to overcome this obstacle is to create a collaborative, interdisciplinary community of scholars who can draw on each other's expertise/work to acquire knowledge that would be difficult to achieve acting independently. The proposed workshop is intended to be the first major step toward developing such a community.Broader Impact It is hoped that this community will eventually be quite large. To that end, the dissemination of ideas to other researchers is a central goal of the proposed workshop. In the short-term, the PIs aim to publish the proceedings of the workshop as a collection of essays arguing for the utility of taking psychology seriously in studying judging and identifying the most important research questions that become apparent once one does so. In the long-term, this workshop is expected to lead to other meetings of like-minded scholars and to help those scholars publish novel empirical studies that will both contribute to our understanding of judging and psychology and stimulate the interest of other researchers.