Beyond Common Sense

Psychological science challenges and sometimes contradicts common sense ideas about stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, and other behavioral domains that intersect with legal processes such as eyewitness identification, repressed memories, polygraph testing, and affirmative action. Beyond Common Sense confronts the public’s often erroneous beliefs about human behavior in legal contexts like the courtroom. Featuring original chapters written by leading experts in psychological science, each chapter identifies areas of scientific agreement and disagreement and discusses how psychological science advances an understanding of human behavior beyond what is accessible by common sense and intuitive beliefs. The book concludes with commentaries written by leading social science and law scholars that discuss key legal and scientific themes and illustrate how psychological science is, or can be, used in the courts and in other policy contexts.

Eugene Borgida is Professor of Psychology and Law at the University of Minnesota and Morse-Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology. He is also co-author of the forthcoming book, The Political Psychology of Democratic Citizenship (with John L. Sullivan and Christopher Federico).

Susan T. Fiske is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology at Princeton University. Her publications include Social Cognition: From Brains to Culture (with Shelley Taylor, 2008) and Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology (2004).