ABSTRACT
The United States has a rich legal history addressing how to apportion responsibility between multiple negligent actors, generating legal doctrine including contributory negligence and comparative negligence. Under these doctrine, the trier-of-fact – most often a jury – is responsible for apportioning responsibility for the harm. This Article examines how jurors approach complex negligent tort cases in which responsibility can be attributed to multiple negligent actors including a negligent plaintiff. In an empirical study participants read a negligent tort vignette about a car accident and then apportioned responsibility between the defendant, plaintiff, and other external factors. The findings indicated that participants’ apportionments of responsibility to The defendant varied widely. Some of the variability is explained by individual differences in attributional tendencies—the extent to which an individual attributes the behavior of another to that individual’s disposition or the situational factors surrounding that behavior. The findings also highlighted the influence of human cognition on the apportionment of responsibility. Participants preferred apportionment values that were multiples of ten (on a zero to one hundred percent scale). These findings could have profound implications for the distinction between the forty-nine percent and fifty percent rules associated with modified comparative negligence.
Ashley M Votruba, Dividing Responsibility: The Role Of The Psychology Of Attribution, 69 DePaul Law Review (2020).
First posted 2020-05-27 06:34:02
Leave a Reply