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I. INTRODUCTION
Why has the law and economics tradition been so influential, and mainstream social and cognitive psychology relatively ignored, in modern legal scholarship?1 One reason surely is that our legal institutions rest on the same rationalist assumptions about human inference and decisionmaking that underlie classic economics. In recent years, however, these shared rationalist foundations have been shaken by the work of psychologists and behavioral economists who have identified systematic biases that compromise the ability of ordinary men and women to make rational judgments, predictions, and resource allocations.2
These behavioral scientists have not proposed a new sovereign principal to pit against the exercise of logical deduction and induction in judgment and the pursuit of rational self-interest in decisionmaking. Rather, their work has revealed a number of specific limitations in the way individuals process information and make choices among alternatives under conditions of uncertainty-deficiencies that the contributors to this symposium contend may compromise the workings of our legal system.3 Some of these deficiencies, including the tendency for individuals' judgments to be clouded by their own needs, aspirations, and preexisting beliefs, are quite familiar to legal practitioners and laypeople alike, and as such they are likely to be further exposed through cross-examination in the context of the adversarial system. Tendencies for individuals to rationalize and justify their actions and the consequences of those actions, particularly to reduce dissonance by blaming the victim,4 are similarly familiar to non-psychologists, although it is worth noting that some of the finer points and famously non-obvious implications of dissonance theory are not fully appreciated by most policymakers.5
Other sources of human error discussed in some of the symposium Articles, such as reliance upon judgmental heuristics,6 are apt to be known only to psychologists, behavioral economists, and those who closely follow their work. But even in the case of the most familiar cognitive and motivational biases, research suggests that laypeople often fail to appreciate their personal applicability.7 Indeed, as we shall explain at greater length later in this introductory Article, a growing body of research evidence suggests an important asymmetry in sensitivity to motivational and cognitive limitations. That is, while individuals are often quite sensitive to limitations in the judgments made and the actions taken by their peers, and especially those of...