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24 - How Much Harm Does It Take? An Experimental Study on Legal Expertise, the Severity Effect, and Intentionality Ascriptions

from Part III - Applications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2025

By
Karolina M. Prochownik ,
Romy D. Feiertag ,
Joachim Horvath  and
Alex Wiegmann
Edited by
Kevin Tobia
Kevin Tobia
Affiliation:
Georgetown University, Washington DC
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Summary

Kneer and Bourgeois-Gironde (2017) reported that legal experts’ intentionality ascriptions are susceptible to the “severity effect” (i.e., influenced by differently harmful side effects), which violates the outcome-independent legal concept of intentionality prevalent in many criminal law systems. This challenges the “legal expertise defense” (= legal experts are more competent users of legal concepts and their legal judgments are more reliable than those of laypeople). Prochownik, Krebs, Wiegmann, and Horvath (2020) hypothesized that the “severity effect” might be due to confounding features of the previously used vignettes (i.e., the somewhat bad cases not being perceived as harmful by legal experts). They created new stimuli with clear cases of harm that differed in the degree of harm across two conditions, and they did not observe any “severity effect” in legal experts or laypeople. Yet, the difference in harm ratings across conditions was not very large. The current study addresses this limitation: Even after increasing the difference in the perceived degree of harm, we still do not observe the “severity effect” in legal experts or laypeople.

Keywords

legal expertiseexpertise defenseseverity effectintentionalityexperimental jurisprudence
Type
Chapter
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The Cambridge Handbook of Experimental Jurisprudence , pp. 399 - 415
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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