Explaining “Pain and Suffering” Awards: The Role of Injury Characteristics and Fault Attributions

The present research explored factors thought to affect compensatory awards for non-economic ham (pain and suffering) in personal injury cases. Experiment 1 showed that the nature and severity of the plaintiffs injury had a strong effect on perceptions of the extent of harm suffered and on award amounts. The parties' relatively active or passive roles in causing the injury affected assessments of their degree of fault, but perceived fault had little influence on awards. Experiment 2 replicated with more varied cases the strong impact of injury severity on harm perception and on awards for pain and suffering. In both studies, the disability and the mental suffering associated with injuries were stronger predictors of awards than were pain and disfigurement.     

Context effects in forensic science: a review and application of the science of science to crime laboratory practice in the United States.

This article discusses the phenomenon of "context effects" by reviewing the findings and practices of a range of scientific fields, including astronomy, physics, biology, medicine, and especially the relevant research and theory from psychology. Context information, such as expectations about what one is supposed to see or conclude, has been found to have a small but relentless impact on human perception, judgment, and decision-making. The article then considers the vulnerability of forensic science practice to context effects, and concludes by suggesting that forensic science adopt practices familiar in other fields of scientific work, in particular blind or double-blind testing and also the use of evidence line-ups.     

Psychology's influence on constitutional interpretation

When organized psychology files amicus briefs with the Supreme Court and other courts, it does so for a variety of reasons and seeks to advance a number of policy objectives. The thesis of this article is that pursuit of some of those objectives is improper and that their pursuit threatens to defeat other objectives. Psychology's expertise is not in constitutional analysis; it is in the study of human behavior. As a practical matter, to pretend to do the former is to weaken our effectiveness in describing the latter. In public interest cases, when acting as a true friend of the court, APA's obligation is to share with the court what empirical research and theory tell us about human behavior, and not to argue for any particular outcome of the case before the court.     

Improving APA science translation amicus briefs

This commentary uses APA's brief inPrice Waterhouse v. Hopkins to examine a number of issues concerning such briefs submitted to appellate courts: What are the purposes of APA's science translation briefs? What role conflicts emerge between legal advocates and empirical scientists? In what ways are these exacerbated or lessened by the respective duties of advocates and scientists? In what ways may the conflicts be compelled by differences between legal and empirical questions? How adequate are Brandeis briefs as a tool for communicating empirical research findings to appellate courts? Are any of the usual adversarial protections maintained? What is the question the court might look to the brief, and to the field, to answer? What is the role for meta-analyses? For what interests might APA as an amicus advocate? In addition to organizational self-interest and the public interest, does it ever make sense to advocate, in a purported science translation brief, on behalf of an ultimate issue in the case or for one of the parties to the litigation? To these difficult problems, I suggest a potentially simple solution.