Elites can be differentiated from non-elites by their status-enhancing attributes: their accomplishments, expertise, and group memberships. Elitism is the belief that elites deserve epistemic deference because they better understand the workings of the world. Psychological elitism posits the existence of a class of elites who possess specialized knowledge of subconscious (motivational and cognitive) drivers of human judgment that is beyond the ken of non-elites. This article challenges whether psychological elites deserve deference. The central problem is the elusiveness of ground-truth standards for determining the true drivers of judgments. To warrant deference, psychological elites must demonstrate that their reasoning operates free of the same subconscious distortions ascribed to non-elites. Absent such demonstrations, it is fair game—under the very theories that psychological elites endorse—to question the competence of psychological elites to second-guess the true reasons underlying the views of non-elites.
Young adults with a history of juvenile justice involvement are more likely than their peers to be arrested for a violent gun crime, but unlike felony...
Artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithmic prediction tools have made huge advances in recent years. Some argue that we are on the...
This study evaluated legal prohibitions on firearm possession in a population of 128,090 adults in Virginia with a serious mental illness and record...
We teach entrepreneurship law clinics in which our students do transactional work on a wide range of matters, including business formation, contracts...
Psychology and law, by their nature, are deeply entwined. Both are about human behavior – understanding it, modifying it, regulating it. Psychology’s...
Annotation and classification of legal text are central components of empirical legal research. Traditionally, these tasks are often delegated to...
Noncarceral conviction is a common outcome of criminal court cases: for every individual incarcerated, there are approximately three who were recently...
Elites can be differentiated from non-elites by their status-enhancing attributes: their accomplishments, expertise, and group memberships. Elitism is...
Although research suggests that countries' colonial experiences are associated with a range of contemporary outcomes, the link between colonial...
Lack of criminal responsibility due to “legal insanity” is probably one of the most misunderstood concepts in the criminal legal system. Contrary to...
The attentive public widely believes a false proposition, namely, that the race Implicit Association Test (“IAT”) measures unconscious bias within...
Citation rankings have emerged as a popular approach to ranking the scholarly impact of law faculties. This paper develops a statistical approach for...
Societies worldwide are polarized over social justice, with identity-based status hierarchies manifesting inequalities at both individual and...
In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court acknowledged the difficulties in applying its constitutional originalism to the...
The history of public policy is littered with failures to solve large-scale social problems using interventions derived from behavioral science...
Memory issues stemming from criminal trials that involve the reliability of eyewitnesses are well-known. However, the relevance of memory to law...