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Nothing But the Truth? Experiments on Adversarial Competition, Expert Testimony, and Decision Making
Author(s) -
Boudreau Cheryl,
McCubbins Mathew D.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
journal of empirical legal studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.529
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1740-1461
pISSN - 1740-1453
DOI - 10.1111/j.1740-1461.2008.00140.x
Subject(s) - competition (biology) , adversarial system , nothing , lying , politics , active listening , truth telling , law and economics , economics , political science , psychology , epistemology , law , ecology , philosophy , biology , medicine , communication , radiology , psychoanalysis
Many scholars debate whether a competition between experts in legal, political, or economic contexts elicits truthful information and, in turn, enables people to make informed decisions. Thus, we analyze experimentally the conditions under which competition between experts induces the experts to make truthful statements and enables jurors listening to these statements to improve their decisions. Our results demonstrate that, contrary to game theoretic predictions and contrary to critics of our adversarial legal system, competition induces enough truth telling to allow jurors to improve their decisions. Then, when we impose additional institutions (such as penalties for lying or the threat of verification) on the competing experts, we observe even larger improvements in the experts' propensity to tell the truth and in jurors' decisions. We find similar improvements when the competing experts are permitted to exchange reasons for why their statements may be correct.