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Category: Project

Description: Although legal scholars and psychologists have long suggested that prosecutorial overcharging may elicit cognitive errors (i.e., in the form of anchoring) that bias plea offer evaluations and coerce defendants to plead guilty, no work has empirically investigated whether these claims are warranted. If warranted, what are the underlying mechanisms for this effect—failures due to biased information processing or failures due to numeric priming—and what can be done to mitigate the harmful impact of anchoring biases on defendant and attorney plea decisions? To answer these questions, I have designed three studies that will collectively (a) demonstrate to what extent defendants and attorneys are susceptible to the anchoring bias, (b) provide information about the possible mechanism behind why they may succumb to anchoring effects, and (c) test the efficacy of a motivation-based debiasing strategy.