Reading Daniel Kahneman’s book ‘Thinking, fast and slow’ I was struck by how often the Nobel Prize winner’s findings also resonate in a litigation context. Aside from any emotional or financial distortions, here are six things that can affect a litigant’s judgement.

1. ‘I’ve got a strong case’. Once they have been told this, litigants frequently cling to this notion instead of properly analysing what the real odds or financial ramifications are likely to be. Apparently, we become over reliant on how things are described to us, even when we are paying that person to be on our side. Predicting an outcome in terms of the favourability of a description is going to be insensitive to both the reliability of the evidence and the expected accuracy of any prediction.

2. The illusion of validity: We are often overconfident in our own predictions. That might explain why when mediators ask advisors what their client’s chances of winning are, the combined tally invariably exceeds 125%. Or why buyers and sellers may have the same information about a stock tip yet both believe that the current price is wrong and will be corrected in their favour.

3. Hindsight bias: Our overconfidence is fed by our illusory certainty of hindsight. Take the ‘I knew it all along’ effect. Our recollection of what we said or predicted at the time often gets subsequently distorted. If the event then occurs, we tend to exaggerate the probability that we had previously assigned to it. If it doesn’t, we erroneously recall that we always considered it to be unlikely.

4. Outcome bias. We tend to evaluate decisions by whether the outcome is good or bad, not by whether the process was sound.

5. Being blind to the obvious, and blind to our blindness. When we focus intensely on something, it can make us effectively blind. Here’s an example http://goo.gl/s6Nz but it can also apply to a litigant’s case.

6. Impure decision-making. We often make decisions based on our own beliefs and preferences, rather than logic. That is why, for example, an objective improvement can be even experienced as a loss, say where an employee receives a smaller rise than other people in the office. Similarly, our ability to make objective comparisons tends to be skewed by how easily we can recall similar instances, how recently they happened and the impact that they had.

Next time, I will explore why clients may misunderstand litigation risks and why we are much worse than we think at being able to understand someone else’s point of view.