Valerie Reyna is the Lois and Mel Tukman Professor in the Department of Psychology.
Why did you decide to look at decision-making in the context of plea bargaining?
The vast majority of criminal cases are resolved with plea bargaining - more than 95%. Courts justify these convictions because defendants, as rational agents, can freely choose whether to plead guilty or go to trial. But the research is unbelievably inadequate. What are the plea offers like? What is the nature of the negotiations? Most of that is just not studied scientifically, and certainly not from the point of view of experimental psychology.
Valerie Reyna
Plea bargaining typically involves a classic choice problem that pits a sure option (reduced charges or sentences) against a risky option (going to trial). It's the kind of decision I've studied for years in the laboratory. So, I wanted to make the obvious connections and ask the basic question, how do people make these decisions? Do they make them according to rational choice theory, as is assumed? The answer is no, they don't.
How did you explore that question?
We know that whether a given outcome is framed as a gain or a loss affects decision-making in many contexts. We wanted to see if those effects apply in the plea-bargaining context as well, where prosecutors can frame an equivalent plea offer in terms of the years gained, perhaps relative to a sentence the defendant might receive at trial, versus the years lost by serving time in prison.
We recruited students and community members, including people with past criminal involvement. We found that overall, respondents chose to go to trial 52% of the time when options were phrased as gains but 87% of the time when the same options were phrased as losses. Framing effects cut across the different populations, both community and student and criminally involved and not criminally involved.
How do you explain these findings?
The research suggests that defendants make decisions on the basis of the gist of the options, in a very impressionistic way. The concept of gist is part of fuzzy trace theory, which my colleagues at Cornell and I have developed as a theory in many domains, including medical decision-making, risky decision-making among adolescents and so on. According to this theory, decision-making involves two processes. On one hand, individuals encode the literal facts that they receive. Then on the other hand, another part of their mind creates meaning in light of their background, experiences and other factors.
What are the implications of this study?
The findings really rock the foundations of rational choice theory, which underlies the whole plea-bargaining system. My work showed that people violate a fundamental axiom of rational choice. Small changes in wording of plea bargains produced pronounced inconsistencies in choices to plead.
What are the next steps for this work?
The next frontier is understanding the mechanisms of plea bargaining. This is a decision with risks and uncertainty. That's been studied a lot in the decision sciences, just not in this domain. The first step to fair policy is recognizing how people make these decisions and how we can ensure that those decisions are just, fair and informed. I'm an idealist, and I always want to think, how can we make the system better? We'll never have a perfect system of justice, but we have to strive to improve it.
Emily Groff is assistant director of communications in the College of Human Ecology.
