Explicit and implicit markers of fairness preeminence in criminal judges
Journal
Scientific Reports
ISSN
2045-2322
Date Issued
2021
Author(s)
Hernando Santamaría-García
Jorge Martínez Cotrina
Nicolas Florez Torres
Carlos Buitrago
Diego Mauricio Aponte-Canencio
Juan Carlos Caicedo
Carlos Gantiva
Sandra Baez
Type
Resource Types::text::journal::journal article
URL Institutional Repository
Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Achieving justice could be considered a complex social decision-making scenario. Despite the relevance of social decisions for legal contexts, these processes have still not been explored for individuals who work as criminal judges dispensing justice. To bridge the gap, we used a complex social decision-making task (Ultimatum game) and tracked a heart rate variability measurement: the square root of the mean squared differences of successive NN intervals (RMSSD) at their baseline (as an implicit measurement that tracks emotion regulation behavior) for criminal judges (n = 24) and a control group (n = 27). Our results revealed that, compared to controls, judges were slower and rejected a bigger proportion of unfair offers. Moreover, the rate of rejections and the reaction times were predicted by higher RMSSD scores for the judges. This study provides evidence about the impact of legal background and expertise in complex social decision-making. Our results contribute to understanding how expertise can shape criminal judges’ social behaviors and pave the way for promising new research into the cognitive and physiological factors associated with social decision-making.</jats:p>
Subjects
heart-rate-variability
;
social decision-making
;
neural basis
;
game-theory
;
judgment
;
perspective
;
performance
;
stress
;
article
;
clinical article
;
controlled study
;
decision making task
;
emotion regulation
;
heart rate variability
;
human
;
human experiment
;
offender
;
reaction time
;
social behavior