We have the pleasure to invite you to another research seminar. Bartosz Janik is going to give a talk: "Rules and interpretation: behavioral account”. The seminar will take place on the 25th of April exceptionally at 3:30 p.m. in the room 25 on Grodzka Street and via MS Teams.

Abstract

Despite many theoretical insights, legal philosophy does not offer one concise legal interpretation theory. Because of this, legal interpretation remains largely a black box to this day. Recent findings suggest that those who apply law will rely more on the textual meaning of a rule than on its purpose (for a detailed discussion about the empirical findings and textualism vs purposivism debate, see. Almeida et al., 2023), especially if they are asked to coordinate with others (Hannikainen et al., 2022). While the mechanisms behind this effect are still debated, possible explanations are the interpretative agreement about textual meaning as well as its salience and publicity (Hannikainen et al., 2022; Bystranowski et al., 2024).

Studying legal interpretation with vignettes does have some inherent drawbacks; on the one hand, participants are typically asked to judge the behavior of others. The difference between legal judgment and legal compliance may be reflected in differing methodologies of interpretation, as the task of judging the behavior of others is inherently more public and might thereby lean towards textualism. Studying actual norm compliance is important for another reason: When applying a rule, be it as a judge or citizen, the real-world consequences of both the act of (non-)compliance as well as the judgment and subsequent punishment will interact with the salience of specific interpretations. It may be much more salient to adhere to a rule’s purpose if the textual meaning of the rule would lead to outcomes harming others.

To find a simple design in which people can meaningfully decide to comply with an over- and underinclusive rule, we decided to use a modified dictator game. Each time, they can choose among nine resource distributions numbered from A, with some options being more selfish and others more altruistic. The payoffs of each other can vary randomly, though it is most likely that the option in the middle (option E) provides equal payoffs for both the decider and the recipient. We introduce a rule whose purpose is to ensure equal payoffs overall, so our rule asks participants to choose option E. Due to our chance element, the rules text and purpose will diverge in some cases: There may be another option besides E that also provides equal payoffs (overinclusion), E may not lead to equal payoffs, but no other option does either (underinclusion) or E does not have equal payoffs, but another option does (over- and underinclusion).

Our main finding is that rule adherence changes with the divergence between a rule’s textual meaning and purpose. In the normal case (text and purpose converges) the probability of rule adherence is higher than in the overinclusion cases (ns difference), the underinclusion cases (sig difference), and the over and under-inclusion cases (sig difference). Moreover, this tendency is well moderated by the social value orientation score (Murphy et al., 2011) and by the simple rule-following task. Those results might shed new light on the debate on rule adherence in situations when the text and purpose of the rule diverge.

 

Link to the MS Teams meeting