A psychometric approach to decision-making thresholds across legal and societal domains.

ABSTRACT: What constitutes enough evidence to make a decision? While this is an important question across multiple domains, it takes on special importance in the US legal system, where jurors and judges are instructed to apply specific burdens of proof to render life-changing decisions. Civil trials use a preponderance of evidence (PoE) threshold to establish liability, while criminal trials require proof beyond a reasonable doubt (BaRD) to convict. It is still unclear, however, how laypeople interpret and apply these decision thresholds and how these standards compare to people's intuitive belief (IB) of what constitutes enough evidence. Further, the extent to which their correct interpretation is context-dependent is currently unknown: are they unique to the legal context, or do they generalize to

SUBMITTER: Hartsough L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11742129 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature