Friday, May 9 at 13:00 in Centro Carlos Santamaria Room 4. The talk will be hybrid. If you want to participate, please contact m.aste.tb2@gmail.com

Legal philosophers have historically debated whether the interpretation of written statutes should pay closer attention to a law’s literal meaning or to the purpose that gave rise to its enactment. In this talk, I review various strands of empirical evidence that offer an emerging picture of the cognitive science of legal interpretation. These studies demonstrate that, across cultures, people vary widely in their tendency to favor a rule’s letter over its spirit when asked to apply written rules, and experience cognitive conflict when textualist and purposivist interpretations are incongruent. Evidence from speeded response paradigms and incentivized economic games suggests that the prevailing tendency toward textualism arises as judges resolve this cognitive conflict: specifically, by overriding the intuitive tendency to consult their personal moral values in order to arrive at a coordinated interpretation that matches that of other legal officials and society at large.