| dc.description.abstract | Legal systems often require the translation of qualitative assessments into quantitative
judgments, yet the qualitative-to-quantitative conversion is a challenging, understudied process.
We conducted an experimental test of predictions from a new theory of juror damage award
decision making, examining how 154 lay people engaged in the translation process in
recommending money damages for pain and suffering in a personal injury tort case. The
experiment varied the presence, size, and meaningfulness of an anchor number to determine how
these factors influenced monetary award judgments, perceived difficulty, and subjective
meaningfulness of awards. As predicted, variability in awards was high, with awards
participants considered to be “medium” (rather than “low” or “high”) having the most dispersion.
The gist of awards as low, medium, or high fully mediated the relationship between perceived
pain/suffering and award amount. Moreover, controlling for participants’ perceptions of
plaintiffs and defendants, as well as their desire to punish and to take economic losses into
account, meaningful anchors predicted unique variance in award judgments: A meaningful large
anchor number drove awards up and a meaningful small anchor drove them down, whereas
meaningless large and small anchors did not differ significantly. Numeracy did not predict
award magnitudes or variability, but surprisingly, more numerate participants reported that it was
more difficult to pick an exact figure to compensate the plaintiff for pain and suffering. The
results support predictions of the theory about qualitative gist and meaningful anchors, and
suggest that we can assist jurors to arrive at damage awards by providing meaningful numbers. | en_GB |
