Modeling and predicting emerging inference-based decisions in complex and ambiguous legal settings

Many decisions people make are based on multitudes of inferences. People have been shown to generate sense quite effortlessly––and compulsively––even in highly opaque situations. Recently, it has been suggested that the making of an inference-based decision may be accompanied by an increase in the coherence of assessments of the individual arguments related to the alternatives at hand. This suggests a constraint satisfaction reasoning process. In two complex and ambiguous law-related emerging decisions, assessments of inferences increasingly spread apart, even if no additional information was provided. Two approaches for studying emerging coherence are developed. First, the structures that emerge as participants progress from stage to stage in the judgment process are captured as principal components through factor analysis. Second, discriminant analysis is employed to test the predictive strength of the emerging cognitive structures vis-à-vis each sequential decision.