Over the prior 20 years, the us has noticeable a dramatic raise within the quantity and importance of punitive damages verdicts rendered via juries in civil trials. essentially the most notable instance is the July 2000 award of $144.8 billion within the Florida type motion lawsuit introduced opposed to cigarette brands. Or think of fresh verdicts opposed to the car producer BMW in Alabama. In exact situations, argued within the comparable courtroom prior to a similar pass judgement on, one jury presented $4 million in punitive damages, whereas the opposite offered no punitive damages in any respect. In situations related to injuries, civil rights, and the surroundings, multimillion-dollar punitive awards were an issue of severe controversy.

But how do juries truly make judgements approximately punitive damages? to determine, the authors-experts in psychology, economics, and the law-present the result of managed experiments with greater than six hundred mock juries concerning the responses of greater than 8,000 jury-eligible voters. even if juries tended to agree of their ethical judgments in regards to the defendant's behavior, they rendered erratic and unpredictable buck awards. The experiments additionally confirmed that rather than moderating juror verdicts, the method of jury deliberation produced a notable "severity shift" towards ever-higher awards. Jurors additionally tended to disregard directions from the judges; have been stimulated through no matter what quantity the plaintiff occurred to request; confirmed "hindsight bias," believing that what occurred must have been foreseen; and penalized agencies that had dependent their judgements on cautious cost-benefit analyses. whereas judges made some of the related mistakes, they played larger in a few components, suggesting that judges (or different experts) will be larger built than juries to make your mind up punitive damages.

Using a wealth of latest experimental info, and providing a bunch of provocative findings, this ebook records a variety of systematic biases in jury habit. will probably be fundamental for somebody not just in punitive damages, but additionally jury habit, psychology, and the way humans take into consideration punishment.