Dan Simon
Biographic Data
| ID | 4127085 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Dan Simon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Dan |
| FAMILY NAME | Simon |
| SIGNATURE | SIMON D |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southern California |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9821-3607 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 8 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 29 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 8 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Can We Trust Humans with Legal Reasoning?
Before indulging in the perplexing prospect of legal reasoning by machines, we must recognize that machine learning is built upon, closely tied with, and compared against human performance on this task. Yet the predominant strand of American judicial reasoning violates norms of principled legal reasoning. From a psychological perspective, these violations can be understood as the natural offshoots of the cognitive processes that make complex deci…
Toward a General Framework of Biased Reasoning: Coherence-Based Reasoning
A considerable amount of experimental research has been devoted to uncovering biased forms of reasoning. Notwithstanding the richness and overall empirical soundness of the bias research, the field can be described as disjointed, incomplete, and undertheorized. In this article, we seek to address this disconnect by offering “coherence-based reasoning” as a parsimonious theoretical framework that explains a sizable number of important deviations f…
The Adversarial Bias
Adversarial legal procedure is one of the defining features of the American legal system. Adversarialism has long been criticized for breeding a combative style of lawyering that precipitates a host of injurious effects that outweigh its virtues. Seeking to explore the psychological foundations of this combat model, this article suggests that playing an adversarial role skews legal actors’ views of their case toward greater congruence with that r…
The adversarial mindset
Many social outcomes are reached by means of competitions between opposing actors. While the positive effects of competition are beyond dispute, this paper contends that competitive situations also trigger a particular psychological mindset that can distort contestants’ judgment and lead to suboptimal courses of action. The paper presents a theoretical framework that consists of a myside bias, by which people adopt a self-serving view of the comp…
Thin empirics
In the Target Article Relative Plausibility and Its Critics, Ron Allen and Michael Pardo set out to make the empirical claim that Relative Plausibility provides the best account of juridical proof. While I tend to agree with this conclusion, the article suffers from notable weaknesses. Allen and Pardo do not define a unit of analysis, they offer no testable hypotheses, and they present no data–all of which render the empirical claim befuddling. T…
The coherence effect: Blending cold and hot cognitions
Previous research has shown that making complex judgments and decisions entails a mental reconstruction of the task in a way that increases the state of coherence between the emerging conclusion and its underlying attributes: The attributes that support the conclusion grow stronger, whereas the attributes that support the losing option weaken. This coherence effect is understood to occur bidirectionally, in that conclusions follow from the decisi…
The transience of constructed preferences
A large body of research suggests that preferences are constructed rather than merely accessed in the course of making decisions. The current research examines the stability of constructed preferences over time. Preferences for various factors relevant to a job choice were measured prior to presentation of the job‐choice task, at the point of decision, and again following a delay. It was found that relative to baseline pre‐decision levels, prefer…
The Redux of Cognitive Consistency Theories: Evidence Judgments by Constraint Satisfaction
The authors suggest that decisions made from multiple pieces of evidence are performed hy mechanisms of parallel constraint satisfaction, which are related to cognitive consistency theories. Such reasoning processes are bidirectional--decisions follow from evidence, and evaluations of the evidence shift toward coherence with the emerging decision. Using a factually complex legal case, the authors observed patterns of coherence shifts that persist…
The Redux of Cognitive Consistency Theories: Evidence Judgments by Constraint Satisfaction
The authors suggest that decisions made from multiple pieces of evidence are performed hy mechanisms of parallel constraint satisfaction, which are related to cognitive consistency theories. Such reasoning processes are bidirectional--decisions follow from evidence, and evaluations of the evidence shift toward coherence with the emerging decision. Using a factually complex legal case, the authors observed patterns of coherence shifts that persist…
The transience of constructed preferences
A large body of research suggests that preferences are constructed rather than merely accessed in the course of making decisions. The current research examines the stability of constructed preferences over time. Preferences for various factors relevant to a job choice were measured prior to presentation of the job‐choice task, at the point of decision, and again following a delay. It was found that relative to baseline pre‐decision levels, prefer…
Thin empirics
In the Target Article Relative Plausibility and Its Critics, Ron Allen and Michael Pardo set out to make the empirical claim that Relative Plausibility provides the best account of juridical proof. While I tend to agree with this conclusion, the article suffers from notable weaknesses. Allen and Pardo do not define a unit of analysis, they offer no testable hypotheses, and they present no data–all of which render the empirical claim befuddling. T…
The coherence effect: Blending cold and hot cognitions
Previous research has shown that making complex judgments and decisions entails a mental reconstruction of the task in a way that increases the state of coherence between the emerging conclusion and its underlying attributes: The attributes that support the conclusion grow stronger, whereas the attributes that support the losing option weaken. This coherence effect is understood to occur bidirectionally, in that conclusions follow from the decisi…
The Redux of Cognitive Consistency Theories: Evidence Judgments by Constraint Satisfaction
The authors suggest that decisions made from multiple pieces of evidence are performed hy mechanisms of parallel constraint satisfaction, which are related to cognitive consistency theories. Such reasoning processes are bidirectional--decisions follow from evidence, and evaluations of the evidence shift toward coherence with the emerging decision. Using a factually complex legal case, the authors observed patterns of coherence shifts that persist…
The transience of constructed preferences
A large body of research suggests that preferences are constructed rather than merely accessed in the course of making decisions. The current research examines the stability of constructed preferences over time. Preferences for various factors relevant to a job choice were measured prior to presentation of the job‐choice task, at the point of decision, and again following a delay. It was found that relative to baseline pre‐decision levels, prefer…
The coherence effect: Blending cold and hot cognitions
Previous research has shown that making complex judgments and decisions entails a mental reconstruction of the task in a way that increases the state of coherence between the emerging conclusion and its underlying attributes: The attributes that support the conclusion grow stronger, whereas the attributes that support the losing option weaken. This coherence effect is understood to occur bidirectionally, in that conclusions follow from the decisi…
Thin empirics
In the Target Article Relative Plausibility and Its Critics, Ron Allen and Michael Pardo set out to make the empirical claim that Relative Plausibility provides the best account of juridical proof. While I tend to agree with this conclusion, the article suffers from notable weaknesses. Allen and Pardo do not define a unit of analysis, they offer no testable hypotheses, and they present no data–all of which render the empirical claim befuddling. T…
The adversarial mindset
Many social outcomes are reached by means of competitions between opposing actors. While the positive effects of competition are beyond dispute, this paper contends that competitive situations also trigger a particular psychological mindset that can distort contestants’ judgment and lead to suboptimal courses of action. The paper presents a theoretical framework that consists of a myside bias, by which people adopt a self-serving view of the comp…
Toward a General Framework of Biased Reasoning: Coherence-Based Reasoning
A considerable amount of experimental research has been devoted to uncovering biased forms of reasoning. Notwithstanding the richness and overall empirical soundness of the bias research, the field can be described as disjointed, incomplete, and undertheorized. In this article, we seek to address this disconnect by offering “coherence-based reasoning” as a parsimonious theoretical framework that explains a sizable number of important deviations f…
The Adversarial Bias
Adversarial legal procedure is one of the defining features of the American legal system. Adversarialism has long been criticized for breeding a combative style of lawyering that precipitates a host of injurious effects that outweigh its virtues. Seeking to explore the psychological foundations of this combat model, this article suggests that playing an adversarial role skews legal actors’ views of their case toward greater congruence with that r…
Can We Trust Humans with Legal Reasoning?
Before indulging in the perplexing prospect of legal reasoning by machines, we must recognize that machine learning is built upon, closely tied with, and compared against human performance on this task. Yet the predominant strand of American judicial reasoning violates norms of principled legal reasoning. From a psychological perspective, these violations can be understood as the natural offshoots of the cognitive processes that make complex deci…
Psychology (5 works) · Computer Science (4 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (4 works) · Political science (4 works) · Social Psychology (4 works) · Artificial Intelligence (3 works) · Cognition (3 works) · Cognitive psychology (3 works) · Adversarial system (2 works) · Constraint (computer-aided design (2 works)