Seemingly irrelevant information? The impact of legal team size on third party perceptions

Abstract

People often appear to use irrelevant information in forming judgments about others. Using survey experiments, we show that seemingly irrelevant facts may actually be informative of actors’ choices, which third parties can use to update their beliefs. Specifically, we show that subjects’ perceived severity and recommended punishment for offenses are significantly increasing in the number of lawyers representing defendants. However, once subjects are informed that the defendant was randomly assigned a specific number of lawyers, the significant relationship between the perceived seriousness of the offense and the number of lawyers largely vanishes. Thus, third parties in our benchmark analysis may be using the defendant’s legal team size as a proxy to update their beliefs regarding the nature of the offense committed, as opposed to being affected by irrelevant factors in forming judgments. This is because randomization makes it impossible for third parties to draw inferences regarding the nature of the offense committed by the defendant based on the number of lawyers. However, for some offenses, we find that increasing the number of lawyers raises third parties’ recommended sanctions even when the number of lawyers is randomly determined, which is consistent with a psychological phenomenon called ‘luck envy’.