Despite its many technicalities and formalities, the legal process ultimately hinges on human judgment and decision making. Whether it is the judge assessing the admissibility of evidence, the lawyer deciding how to structure and present the case, the jury evaluating a defendant's credibility, or an expert witness interpreting clinical data, human judgment pervades all of these activities and is the final common path through which legal determinations are reached.
It is exactly this topic-human judgment and decision making-that has interested more than a generation of investigators, whose efforts have yielded important insights and knowledge. The aim of judgment research is to detail decision processes; uncover the capabilities, limits, and flaws of human reasoning; and develop corrective or supplementary procedures that produce better decisions. This research is perhaps equally characterized by its potential relevance to legal proceedings, and the extent to which it is unknown to participants in the legal process, even those within its field of origin, clinical psychology.
This issue isintended to address this "dissemination gap" by offering a sampling of articles on decision making in the legal arena. Arkes provides a broad introduction to research on human judgment and decision processes pertinent to law. Dawes addresses learning from experience, in particular the belief that clinical experience leads to more accurate judgments about people. Faust examines clinicians' capacity to manage or analyze the large amounts of information common to legal evaluations. In the context of malpractice cases, Wexler and Schopp consider jurors' susceptibility to hindsight bias, or the false belief that outcomes could have easily been foreseen. Wyda and Black focus on the biases created by expert testimony in the sentencing phase of capital cases. Finally, in a reprint of a classic article with a new postscript, Meehl compares the evidentiary bases for assumptions about human behavior and social control common to legal professionals versus social scientists.
Continuing the practice of publishing brief research reports of interest, Hodgins and Gaston's article examines recidivism and relapse among mentally disordered offenders.