Myside bias in civil litigation
Original study (2023): Can you trust your lawyer’s call? Legal advisers exhibit myside bias resistant to debiasing interventions
In a vast majority of disputes, settlement is superior to litigation, which involves uncertainty, legal fees, and opportunity cost. Unnecessary litigation also causes judicial backlog, wastes resources, and increases societal conflict. Major contributors to the lack of settlement are intransigent litigants who harbor overoptimistic predictions of litigation outcomes, even though they are looking at identical facts and applicable law. A study (N = 166) found significant myside bias in the participants’ predictions of a judicial award (claimants’ advisers expected awards that were 69% higher than defendants’ advisers) and in their evaluation of arguments (both sides thought the arguments supporting their side were 30% more convincing than the arguments supporting their counterparty). Debiasing interventions—alerting to the myside bias, considering the perspective of the counterparty and dialectical bootstrapping—reduced the bias but did not eliminate it. Exploratory investigation indicated that a large proportion of advisers exhibited naïve realism and bias blind spot, and that cognitive reflection provided a limited measure of resistance to myside bias.
Bias in award predictions (part 1). The representatives of claimants and defendants provide very different predictions of the expected judicial award.
Bias blind spot (part 2). A discussion of the evidence of bias blind spot – the propensity of people to perceive bias in others, but remain blissfully unaware of the same bias in themselves.
(Partial) failure of self-debiasing (part 3). The attempts to debias oneself using the readily available techniques (like perspective taking, considering being biased, and weighing arguments for both sides) do not eradicate the bias.
Fundamentals of decision analysis
Intro: Risk and uncertainty (part 1). A short introduction in expected value, risk, and risk attitudes.
Decisions and outcomes (part 2). Does a good outcome mean the decision was good?
Technique of decision analysis (part 3). Decision analysis involves modelling of reality in terms of chances (uncertainty events) and choices (decision events).
Quantification issues and sensitivity analysis (part 4). Some limitations of the decision analytic approach, and how to mitigate these with sensitivity analysis.