New Interactive Video on Behavioral Legal Ethics — available free for law professors!

Molly Wilson and I are happy to announce our new online video program by the Practising Law Institute (PLI), a leading provider of continuing legal education. Entitled Motivated Reasoning and Legal Ethics, the video takes an interactive approach to the subject. Highlights include simulated scenarios by professional actors addressing the psychological dimensions of fraught ethical situations, such as law firm billing practices and disclosure requirements by prosecutors. Also included are multimedia discussions of some of the most important scientific studies in behavioral science (i.e., Stanley Milgram’s obedience studies and Hasdorf and Cantril’s famous selective perception study about the 1951 Dartmouth-Princeton football game). Viewers are guided through an interactive environment where they are prompted to respond to the material presented.

Law teachers may find the video program useful to introduce core aspects of behavioral legal ethics in courses such Professional Responsibility and Criminal Procedure.

Here is the PLI description:

Why You Should Attend

This online program will use an interactive, video format to demonstrate how motivated reasoning can lead attorneys to act unethically or remain silent in the face of unethical behavior. Furthermore, it will show how even after these ethical lapses, actors often continue to believe that they have done nothing wrong. The course will explain, in detail, what motivated reasoning is, describe and demonstrate the most common social-cognitive biases that comprise motivated reasoning, and provide strategies to help attorneys overcome these biases, so they behave ethically. The Model Rules of Professional Conduct will be mentioned and referred to at times in discussion, scenarios, and examples.

What You Will Learn 

After completing the course, participants will be able to:

• Recognize that they are subject to making poor decisions due to motivated reasoning.
• Recognize that they are subject to behaving unethically without intending to do so.
• Identify the most common cognitive biases and social influences that contribute to motivated reasoning.
• Identify common factors that can lead to poor decisions, unethical behaviors, or inaction.
• Implement strategies to address and overcome the factors that could otherwise lead to poor decisions, unethical behavior, or inaction.
• Create an environment where an attorney is more likely to follow the Model Rules of Professional Conduct.

Who Should Attend

This program will be useful to all attorneys in their practice of the law.

NOTE: The list price for the video program is $395. However, law professors and law students can receive FULL SCHOLARSHIPS by providing proof of academic affiliation (scholarships are also available for others, including judges, law clerks and government and non-profit lawyers). The scholarship application is available here.

(update: 9/24/19:  The scholarship application can now easily be filled out online, making it much easier to gain access to the video).

 

Scholarship Update

Professor W. Bradley Wendel

For a fascinating discussion of the role of behavioral ethics in the context of judicial decision-making, see W. Bradley Wendel, Campaign Contributions and Risk-Avoidance Rules in Judicial Ethics, 67 DePaul L. Rev. 255 (2018).  Professor Wendel’s work contrasts the rules of judicial recusal from those of attorney conflicts, making the argument that the former should more closely track the latter. Behavioral ethics research sits at the center of the paper. From the introduction (footnotes omitted):

“Well-understood, predictable psychological mechanisms create ‘blind spots’ in which the effect of a conflict of interest is not apparent to someone subject to it. The effect of campaign contributions on judges’ perceptions of bias is often unconscious. To make matters worse, judges also remain unaware of their unawareness resulting in a persistent and difficult-to-dispel illusion of objectivity. Judges, like other professionals, believe their ethical commitments are sufficient to withstand the bias effects of external factors, such as financial conflicts of interest.”

The Psychology of Wrongful Convictions

New videos on the psychology of wrongful convictions, a topic we have covered before, have been released by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Innocence Project.  The announcement states:

“Law enforcement officials are human and are susceptible to the same psychological phenomena that can adversely affect decision-making,” said Paul M. Cell, president of the IACP. “We are excited to be partnering with innocence organizations to make these videos available because education and training are critical to ensuring that these phenomena don’t adversely affect investigations.”

Three of the videos, on confirmation bias, tunnel vision and implicit bias, may be of particular interest to readers of this blog.

(update: 12/11/18: For a prior post on the psychology of wrongful convictions, see here).

 

Scholarship Update on Stanley Milgram

50 Years of ‘Obedience to Authority’: From Blind Conformity to Engaged Followership, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, Vol. 13, pp. 59-78, 2017

Abstract

Despite being conducted half a century ago, Stanley Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority remain the most well-known, most controversial, and most important in social psychology. Yet in recent years, increased scrutiny has served to question the integrity of Milgram’s research reports, the validity of his explanation of the phenomena he reported, and the broader relevance of his research to processes of collective harm-doing. We review these debates and argue that the main problem with received understandings of Milgram’s work arises from seeing it as an exploration of obedience. Instead, we argue that it is better understood as providing insight into processes of engaged followership, in which people are prepared to harm others because they identify with their leaders’ cause and believe their actions to be virtuous. We review evidence that supports this analysis and shows that it explains the behavior not only of Milgram’s participants but also of his research assistants and of the textbook writers and teachers who continue to reproduce misleading accounts of his work.

Psychology of Torts

Jennifer Robbennolt, whose work on behavioral legal ethics inspired this blog, has a new book out, entitled The Psychology of Torts Law, co-authored by Valerie Hans (the introduction is available here).  Looks like a fascinating and important read.

Here is the description as provided by the publisher, NYU Press:

Tort law regulates most human activities: from driving a car to using consumer products to providing or receiving medical care. Injuries caused by dog bites, slips and falls, fender benders, bridge collapses, adverse reactions to a medication, bar fights, oil spills, and more all implicate the law of torts. The rules and procedures by which tort cases are resolved engage deeply-held intuitions about justice, causation, intentionality, and the obligations that we owe to one another. Tort rules and procedures also generate significant controversy—most visibly in political debates over tort reform.

The Psychology of Tort Law explores tort law through the lens of psychological science. Drawing on a wealth of psychological research and their own experiences teaching and researching tort law, Jennifer K. Robbennolt and Valerie P. Hans examine the psychological assumptions that underlie doctrinal rules. They explore how tort law influences the behavior and decision-making of potential plaintiffs and defendants, examining how doctors and patients, drivers, manufacturers and purchasers of products, property owners, and others make decisions against the backdrop of tort law. They show how the judges and jurors who decide tort claims are influenced by psychological phenomena in deciding cases. And they reveal how plaintiffs, defendants, and their attorneys resolve tort disputes in the shadow of tort law. 

Robbennolt and Hans here shed fascinating light on the tort system, and on the psychological dynamics which undergird its functioning.

(Update:  9/1/06, 9:40pm:  for those who teach in law schools, this would be a good purchase for your libraries — hint hint).