Case Order Effects in Legal Decision-Making

Order effects, where decision makers resolve dilemmas differently depending on the order in which cases are presented, are well established in the psychology of moral decision-making. Yet case order effects have rarely been studied in a legal context. Given the integral importance of consistency and precedent to the law, we sought to test for the existence of order effects in legal decisions. Participants across five studies (total n = 1023) were given pairs of life-or-death legal cases to decide, consisting of one decision generally viewed positively in isolation, and one decision negatively viewed, with the order of presentation being varied (positive before negative vs. negative before positive). Studies included civil and criminal cases and individual and group decision making. Results demonstrated that the case order effects previously seen in the moral context also held in the legal context. Order effects were asymmetric, with responses to one case remaining stable while responses to the other being labile depending on the order presented. A particularly novel finding was of responses to labile cases becoming less, rather than more, similar to responses to preceding cases. Order effects can be readily triggered in the context of legal decision making suggesting legal precedent may be partially dependent on the order in which cases are determined. The asymmetric and previously undiscovered direction of order effects is not consistent with existing salience or consistency-type theories which predict effects to be symmetrical and/or more similar to previous cases.