Study of the Effects of Anchorage in Judicial Judgements in Child Custody Dispute Proceedings
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5944/ap.14.2.21239Keywords:
anchorage, heuristics, judicial sentences, cognitive activity, custody disputeAbstract
Judicial judgment and decision making should be sustained in formal or statistical reasoning, avoiding biased reasoning. Thus, judicial reasoning should not contain any bias. A profusely studied source of bias is anchorage implying a cognitive saving by accepting the initial hypothesis without confirming it and rejecting other information or alternative hypotheses though they may be relevant to the task at hand. As for knowing the prevalence and effects of anchored sentences in family cases’ judicial sentences, 811 Spanish custody dispute sentences were randomly selected from the CENDOJ data base. Anchorage was measured through initial claimant in child custody dispute (first instance court) or prior judicial decision-making (appeal court). The results stated that 70.2 % of the judicial sentences were anchored. A systematic content analysis of the sentences gave support to the hypothesis that anchorage provides judges and courts a skill to save cognitive activity (about 12 %). Moreover, anchored sentences contained significantly fewer reasoning favourable to custody; fewer idiosyncratic information i.e., own reasoning of the judge; and fewer contextual information i.e., less evidence-based. The implications for judicial judgment and decision are discussed, as well as the possibilities to control the anchorage prevalence in judicial sentences.
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