How do narratives and emotional content affect information processing in legal decision making

Many important decisions in judicial and organizational settings are based on stories describing the roles of one or more individuals in emotionally charged events. This can be a witness statement in court, an interview made by social services or the story of an asylum seeker. Decision makers (e.g. judges or civil servants) base decisions on the story, and other available information, such as the injuries a victim sustained, a family’s housing situation or the political situation in a country.

Both emotional information, and information in narrative form are known to affect decision-making, but whether and to what extent they distort due process cannot be judged based on the current research. First, we do not know how emotionality and narrative bias interact. Second, we do not know how they affect further information search and evaluations.

Existing process models do not take types of evidence into account. Third, to our knowledge, no process tracing studies of legal decision making have been done on experienced civil servants.

We propose a series of studies. The first set of studies will be used to establish a process model that can account for the roles that emotionality, narratives and factual information play in a legally informed decision process and how they affect further information search. These model will be developed using lay people and will then be tested in applied settings – on civil servants at the Swedish Migration Agency.