裁判行为的认知心理学阐释

Judicial Decision Making from the Perspective of Cognitive Psychology

心理学中的格式塔理论和联结主义表征,从发生学上阐明了法律现实主义者没能讲清楚的直觉裁判问题,并为认识裁判行为或司法决策提供了一套较精细的工具。依据格式塔理论的"趋完性"特征,能够解释裁判之际的推理过程,以及法官从结果出发进行法律推理的现象。在疑难案件中,左右裁判行为的约束满足机制,是"趋完性"特征与联结主义模型相结合的结果。融贯性作为这一机制的核心要素,指导了对命题和推理的激活和调整过程,并使裁判行为最终表现为在两组命题集合之间选择更融贯的一组。因此,融贯性不仅是裁判行为和司法说理的一项内在要求,也是判断司法决定之优劣的一个标准。

The Gestalt theory and the connectionist representation on psychological theory shed light on the causation of the so-called hunch, a word repeatedly used by legal realists but never clarified. The Gestalt theory and connectionist representation provide a set of sophisticated tools to look into the judicial decision making behavior. The Law of Pragnanz contained in the Gestalt theory not only explains how the inferences in the decision-making process come into being, but also explains the phenomenon that reasoning is based on results. The constraint satisfaction mechanism is a result of combining the Gestalt theory with the connectionist representation. As the key point of this mechanism, coherence directs the activation and adjustment of the propositions and inferences in the decision-making process, which makes the decision-making behavior appear to choose the more coherent set of propositions from the two sets involved. Thus coherence becomes more than a descriptive character of the judicial opinion and the way judge thinks, it also could be a standard to decide what the appropriate decision-making behavior is and whether the legal reasoning is good.