The DOI matches its Crossref record; its reference list is not available.
The Psychology of Trial Judging
Abstract
Trial court judges play a crucial role in the administration of justice for both criminal and civil matters. Although psychologists have studied juries for many decades, they have paid relatively little attention to judges. Recent writings, however, suggest that there is increasing interest in the psychology of judicial decision making. In this article, I review several selected areas of judicial behavior in which decisions appear to be influenced by psychological dispositions, but I caution that a mature psychology of judging field will need to consider the influence of the bureaucratic court setting in which judges are embedded, judges’ legal training, and the constraints of legal precedent.
Overview
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
In the citing paper
“It is well established that the justice and legal systems are plagued with bias.”
From Biased and biasing: the hidden bias cascade and bias snowball effects (2025) · cites this paper as Vidmar, 2011
In the citing paper
“Given the human role and subjectivity in policing, eyewitnesses’ accounts, jurors’ decision making, and judges’ sentencing, it is not surprising that bias impacts the different elements of the justice and legal systems”
From Biased and biasing: the hidden bias cascade and bias snowball effects (2025) · cites this paper as Vidmar, 2011
In the citing paper
“It impacts each and every aspect of the justice and legal systems, from the initial engagement of police officers attending the crime scene, through the forensic examination, and all the way to the final outcome of the jurors’ verdict and the judges’ sentencing.”
From Biased and biasing: the hidden bias cascade and bias snowball effects (2025) · cites this paper as Vidmar, 2011
In the citing paper
“For example, it has been shown that judges have biases that may have been shaped by their training and education as prosecutors (Berryessa et al., 2023; see also Vidmar, 2011).”
From Biased and biasing: the hidden bias cascade and bias snowball effects (2025) · cites this paper as Vidmar, 2011
In the citing paper
“Since the justice and legal systems deal with and relate to social issues, personal values, ideologies, and motivations—maybe even why some people go into this profession in the first place– will all create biases and impact objectivity (Guthrie et al., 2001; Vidmar, 2011; Winburn & Clemmons, 2021).”
From Biased and biasing: the hidden bias cascade and bias snowball effects (2025) · cites this paper as Vidmar, 2011
Citations
No citation lists for this paper
No citation lists for this paper yet — checked again daily.
References 28 · Cited by 45
Research works printed but not linked: 25
- 10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00739.x · DOI
- Damaska M., 1986, The faces of justice and state authority: A comparative approach to the legal process
- 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01716.x · DOI · Paper page
- 10.1023/A:1012899030937 · DOI
- 10.1300/J158v04n02_03 · DOI
- Guthrie C., 2001, Cornell Law Review, 86, 777
- 10.1007/s10979-006-9084-2 · DOI
- 10.1037/e438152008-191 · DOI
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195367584.001.0001 · DOI
- 10.1037/0021-9010.85.4.574 · DOI
- 10.1023/A:1021678912133 · DOI
- Landsman S., 2009, Lewis & Clark Law Review, 13, 439
- 10.1002/bsl.2370120203 · DOI
- Levi D.F., 2008, University of Missouri-Kansas City Law Review, 77, 381
- 10.1086/320276 · DOI
- Rachlinski J., 2009, Notre Dame Law Review, 84, 1195
- 10.2307/2131726 · DOI
- 10.1037/0003-066X.62.8.754 · DOI
- 10.1111/j.1745-6924.2008.00090.x · DOI
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195367584.003.0007 · DOI
- 10.2307/3052837 · DOI
- 10.2307/3052763 · DOI
- 10.1515/9781400828609 · DOI · Paper page
- 10.2307/1290315 · DOI
- 10.2307/4150614 · DOI
Metadata
- Authors
- Vidmar, N.
- Affiliations
- Duke University (US)
- Corresponding author
- Vidmar, Neil
- Venue
- Current Directions in Psychological Science
- Publisher
- SAGE Publications
- Published
- 2011-02
- Volume
- 20
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 58-62
- ISSN
- 0963-7214 (ISSN-L)
- 1467-8721
- OpenAlex
- W2163425745
- Cited by
- 45
- References
- 28
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 2 · 2024: 3 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 5 · 2021: 2 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 3 · 2018: 3 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 6 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 1 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 29.85
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Current Directions in Psychological Science (publishedVersion)
- Duke Law Scholarship Repository (Duke University) (submittedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Law › Jury Decision Making Processes
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Social Sciences › Law › Legal processes and jurisprudence
- Keywords
- trial judges, judicial decision-making, judicial behavior, psychological dispositions, legal education, judicial precedent
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Psychology of Trial Judging. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/0963721410397283
- The paper
- Vidmar, N. (2011). The Psychology of Trial Judging. Current Directions in Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721410397283
