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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Cognit.
Sec. Reason and Decision-Making
Volume 4 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcogn.2025.1421488
This article is part of the Research Topic Applying cognitive and social psychology to the legal system: What we know today and what is next View all 9 articles
Assessing Judges' Use and Awareness of Cognitive Heuristic Decision-Making
Provisionally accepted- School of Social Sciences & Humanities, University of Western Macedonia, Florina, Greece
Heuristics, characterized as concise cognitive shortcuts rooted in intuitive reasoning, are both capable of facilitating swift judgments and cognitive efficiency, but also introducing cognitive biases during decisionmaking. The judicial domain, renowned for its demanding decision-making processes, is an interesting field for studying heuristics. In this study, we developed a novel Judicial Heuristics Assessment Questionnaire (J-HAQ) and administered it to a sample of 52 judges (20 males, Mage = 45.50, SD = 8.10), with active duty in various courts across Greece. We also evaluated their analytical System 2 thinking skills using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT). This research pursued three objectives: a) to explore the psychometric properties of the J-HAQ; b) to investigate the correlation between judges' perceived use of heuristics/metacognitive awareness and their objective performance on reflective thinking; c) to assess the correlation of self-reported usage of different heuristics and explore the influence of judges' demographics (educational level, gender, age, and years of experience) in the utilization of the reported heuristics in decision-making. Findings from a Principal Component Analysis on J-HAQ scores revealed four distinct factors (Availability, Confirmation Bias, Representativeness, and Anchoring) demonstrating sufficient reliability. We also report a significant correlation between CRT scores and reported use of the anchoring heuristic (ρ = .29, p = .04). Finally, we discovered two clusters defined by different awareness of the use of various heuristics, as well as significant association of educational level with this usage. Despite the limitations of a relatively small sample size, these findings reveal a dynamic for further interesting results from research in this domain.
Keywords: Heuristics, cognitive bias, Awareness, Reflective thinking, metacognitive knowledge, decision-making, judicial process, assessment
Received: 22 Apr 2024; Accepted: 04 Mar 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Malegiannaki, Chatzopoulos and Tsagkaridis. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Αmaryllis Chryssi Malegiannaki, School of Social Sciences & Humanities, University of Western Macedonia, Florina, Greece
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