Are people capable of evaluating their leaders fairly and objectively? Researchers say no.



University of Southern California academics Dan Simon and Nicholas Scurich couldn't have known months ago that they would be unveiling the results of their "exploratory" study, "Lay Judgments of Judicial Decision-Making," smack dab in the middle of a furious debate over the nation's debt and deficit. But it turns out that their timing is impeccable. For here, in one place at one time, we are (again) reminded why government so often seems so broken to so many of us.

It's human nature, folks. Our founding documents and governing institutions may aspire to Locke, but hundreds of years later we're still chock full of Hobbes. We respect officials when they do what we want them to do. We disrespect them when they don't. We are far less objective and justifiable than we think are with the rationales we endorse and employ. And everyone is looking out for themselves. No wonder there is so much cynicism toward law and politics. It's not just coming from the top down, as angry citizens like to claim -- it's coming from the bottom up, too.

Here's what the USC study sought to examine:

This exploratory study examined lay people's evaluations of judicial decision-making, specifically of the judicial decision-making process and the judiciary's legitimacy. Seven hundred participants were presented with three judicial decisions, which were portrayed as following on the heels of solid and appropriate legal procedure. Each decision was accompanied by one of four types of reasoning. Participants were asked to evaluate the acceptability of the decisions, focusing on the manner in which they were made and the legitimacy of the decision-maker, regardless of their outcomes.

And here's what the study concluded:

First, we found that lay people's judgments of judicial-decision making are highly contingent on the outcome of the courts' decisions. Consistent with the theory of motivated reasoning (Kunda, 1990), judgments of the acceptability of the decision-making were overwhelmed by the congruence between the participants' preferred outcome and the outcomes of the judges' decisions (see also myside bias; Baron, 1995). In all three cases, the decisions were rated highly acceptable when the participants agreed with the judges' outcomes, but were deemed relatively unacceptable when they disagreed with them.

Lesson One: What have you done for me lately?