Philosophy Dictionary of ArgumentsHome
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| Contracts: Contracts are legally enforceable agreements between two or more parties that create mutual obligations. It is a promise to do or not do something. The terms of a contract must be agreed upon by both parties. See also Contract theory._____________Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments. | |||
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Experimental Psychology on Contracts - Dictionary of Arguments
Parisi I 111 Contracts/Experimental Psychology/Wilkinson-Ryan: Contractual exchanges implicate various, and sometimes conflicting, social and moral norms (...). In particular, contracts have been a subject of moral psychology, insofar as contracts tend to implicate both personal moral norms like promise-keeping as well as other-regarding preferences like generosity and reciprocity. >Norms, >Reciprocity. Exculpatory clauses: One of the first studies in this area was the Stolle and Slain ( 1997)(1) study of exculpatory clauses. They randomly assigned subjects to read one of two possible contracts, identical except for the presence or absence of a particularly egregious exculpatory clause. They found not only that subjects believed that the exculpatory was legally enforceable, but that they found the contracts equally fair. In other words, subjects in the exculpatory clause condition thought that the clause relieved the firm's obligation to compensate consumers for harms it had caused, but did not judge the contract as less fair than a contract that left open the possibility of consumer compensation. >Compensation. Public goods: Indeed, subjects in a public goods game experiment (Dawes, McTavish, and Shaklee, 1977)(2) who were otherwise willing to lie about their intentions to cooperate with one another could generally be trusted to keep their word if they had explicitly promised, using that lan- guage, even without sanctions for lying. One of the core findings in this area is that individuals take breach of contract seriously as a moral harm, one that is not always fully ameliorated by expectation damages. >Social Goods. Parisi I 112 Contract breach: Wilkinson-Ryan and Hoffman (2010)(3) hypothesized that people find breach most outrageous when they perceive one party to be taking advantage of the other - when the non-breaching party feels "suckered." To test this they replicated the main effects of Wilkinson-Ryan and Baron (2009)(4), but looked at feelings of betrayal and exploitation as mediators of the effect. We found that harm in contract, but not tort, is felt to be a betrayal, and that when subjects perceived betrayal they responded with anger and embarrassment, in turn driving up their damages assessments. Similarly, subjects found that a greedy breacher was acting more disrespectfully than one breaching to avoid a loss, and this perception of disrespect explained much of the discrepancy in damages awards. Parisi I 113 Form of contracts: Some contracts also feel more “breachable” than others, often as a function of the contract’s form or history. Feldman and Teichman (2011)(5) investigated the willingness to breach in the context of low-probability enforcement, by asking subjects to imagine themselves as contractors in a home renovation who could save money by using a low-quality product. Individuals/parties: Hoffman and Wilkinson-Ryan (2013)(6) found that the formal fact of being, by law, party to a contract makes parties less likely to back out of the deal, even Parisi I 115 when the cancellation opportunity falls within a no-penalty window. 1. Stolle, Dennis P. and Andrew J. Slain (1997). "Standard Form Contracts and Contract Schemas: A Preliminary Investigation of the Effects of Exculpatory Clauses on Consumers' Propensity to Sue." Behavioral Sciences and the Law 15:83-94. 2. Dawes, Robyn M., Jeanne McTavish, and Harriet Shaklee (1977). "Behavior, Communication, and Assumptions About Other People's Behavior in a Commons Dilemma Situation." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 35: 1-11. 3. Wilkinson-Ryan, Tess and David A. Hoffman (2010). “Breach is for Suckers.” Vanderbilt Law Review 63: 1003–1045. 4. Wilkinson-Ryan, Tess and Jonathan Baron (2009). "Moral Judgment and Moral Heuristics in Breach of Contract." Journal of Empirical Legal Studies 6: 405-423. 5. Feldman, Yuval and Doron Teichman (2011). "Are All Contractual Obligations Created Equal?" Georgetown Law Journal 100: 5—2291. 6. Hoffman, David A. and Tess Wilkinson-Ryan (2013). "The Psychology of Contract Precau- tions." University of Chicago Law Review 80: 395—445. Wilkinson-Ryan, Tess. „Experimental Psychology and the Law“. In: Parisi, Francesco (ed) (2017). The Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics. Vol 1: Methodology and Concepts. NY: Oxford University Press_____________Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition. |
Experimental Psychology Parisi I Francesco Parisi (Ed) The Oxford Handbook of Law and Economics: Volume 1: Methodology and Concepts New York 2017 |
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> Counter arguments against Experimental Psychology
> Counter arguments in relation to Contracts
Ed. Martin Schulz, access date 2024-04-28