While research from several disciplines show that rational decision-making includes cognitive as well as emotional processes, and that emotion management is part of legal practice generally, empirical studies in real life situations showing how emotions impact the decision-making process still remain scarce. The JUSTEMOTIONS project fills this gap by studying and comparing the emotive-cognitive components of legal decision-making in criminal cases in different legal systems.
For people to comply with the law they must trust the judicial system to uphold rational and objective justice; trust that the courts make unbiased and impartial decisions. Objective decision-making is important both for the individuals affected by the decision, and for the public reproduction of trust in our courts. Therefore, objectivity can be seen as a foundation for the rule of law.
However, research has shown that the conventional legal understanding of objectivity as “pure reason”, without body and emotion, is problematic and builds on a false dichotomy between rationality and emotion. Rational decision-making requires facilitating emotions, for instance interest in the task and motivating emotions, such as professional pride in correct procedures and distaste for waste of time, as well as the ability to ‘feel’ the consequences of alternative actions. For legal professionals this means that objective decision-making relies on emotional information and that own emotional experiences influence for example how a person attributes blame.
Through a comparative and multi-method qualitative design, including court observations, interviews, and shadowing of legal professionals, the JUSTEMOTIONS project study the decision-making process from prosecution, lower court, to the court of appeal in three countries: Sweden, USA and Italy. These countries represent different legal systems (common and civil criminal law) and vary in emotional expressiveness (e.g. the Swedish subtle emotional regime versus the more expressive Italian). By contrasting decisions of three crime types – fraud, domestic abuse, and homicide – in different legal instances and in different countries, we can identify and describe common features of the decision-making process based on actual practice.
This JUSTEMOTIONS project disentangles how emotions come into play in a rational process that we have previously understood to be exclusively cognitive. We secure important theoretical clues into the subtle emotions, such as curiosity, doubt and certainty, which undergird knowledge seeking and evaluation, and disclose how the cultural context influences emotions in settings that all share the ideal of un-emotional objectivity. The project furthermore develops a powerful and stringent methodology that lead to concise and rich descriptions of decision-making in real life practice. The broad social relevance of the JUSTEMOTIONS project lies in its clarification of the tensions between common sense justice and legal justice, a tension that in some cases has brought to question the legitimacy of the legal system.
