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Valid guilty pleas must be made voluntarily, yet most defendants report that they did not feel part of the decision-making process or responsible for the decision. Defendants and judges both play a role in determining whether guilty pleas are voluntary. The actor-observer bias suggests that defendants and judges perceive the decision-making process differently given the nature of their roles. The present studies applied this framework to assess the complexity of voluntary plea decision-making.We expected observers would rate pleas as more voluntary than would actors. We also expected participants to rate pleas made by guilty defendants as more voluntary than those made by innocent defendants and to view pleas made with voice as more voluntary than those made without voice. Finally, we expected the effect of guilt and voice on voluntariness to differ for actors and observers.Participants were Amazon's Mechanical Turk workers (Study 1: N = 202, Study 2: N = 626) who had a history of high-quality performance on past tasks, were roughly evenly split between men (Study 1: 52%, Study 2: 53%) and women (Study 1: 48%, Study 2: 47%), and were primarily White/non-Hispanic (Study 1: 84%, Study 2: 75%). They watched video-recorded materials about a criminal case in which a defendant decided how to plead. The materials varied the participant's role (actor, observer), the defendant's guilt (innocent, guilty), and whether the defendant had a voice in the decision-making process (no voice, voice). Participants then rated the voluntariness of the decision-making process.In both studies, actors rated pleas as more voluntary than did observers. Participants rated guilty pleas as more voluntary when the defendant was guilty compared with innocent. Participants also rated pleas as more voluntary when the defendant had a voice in the decision-making process compared with when the defendant did not have a voice, but the difference was bigger for observers than for actors.Defendants and judges both determine whether a guilty plea is made voluntarily. These decision-makers are likely to perceive the plea decision-making process differently given their differing perspectives. There was also a large effect of voice on whether decisions were perceived to be voluntary. Individuals who play a role in the plea decision-making process should ensure that defendants have a proper opportunity to express their opinions and preferences about the decision. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

This paper expands previous conceptualizations of appropriate police behavior beyond procedural justice. The focus of the current study is on the notion of bounded authority-that is, acting within the limits of one's rightful authority. According to work on legal socialization, U.S. citizens come to acquire three dimensions of values that determine how authorities ought to behave: (a) neutral, consistent, and transparent decision-making; (b) interpersonal treatment that conveys respect, dignity, and concern; and (c) respecting the limits of one's rightful power. Using survey data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, we show that concerns over bounded authority, respectful treatment, and neutral decision-making combine to form a strong predictor of police and legal legitimacy. We also find that legal legitimacy is associated with greater compliance behavior, controlling for personal morality and perceived likelihood of sanctions. We discuss the implications of a boundary perspective with respect to ongoing debates over the appropriate scope of police power and the utility of concentrated police activities. We also highlight the need for further research specifically focused on the psychological mechanisms underlying the formation of boundaries and why they shape the legitimacy of the police and law. (PsycINFO Database Record

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. (PsycINFO Database Record