JUDGING RELIGION AND JUDGES' RELIGIONS

Judging the judges: Evaluating the performance of international gymnastics judges

Judging a gymnastics routine is a noisy process, and the performance of judges varies widely. The International Federation of Gymnastics (FIG), in collaboration with Longines and the Université de Neuchâtel, is designing and implementing an improved statistical engine to analyze the performance of gymnastics judges during and after major competitions like the Olympic Games and the World Champio...

Religion, Politics and Gender Equality Public Religions Revisited

Judging the judges: keeping objectivity in peer review.

As I write this, the 2002 Winter Olympic Games are underway. The events surrounding the judging of the ice skating competitions will forever remind us of the need for objectivity when assessing human performance and of how difficult it can be to be objective. Sometimes objective measurement is easy— there is no question about events like bobsledding. This is not the case, however, when artistic...

JUDGING THE CREDIBILITY OF HISTORIC CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE COMPLAINANTS How Judges Describe Their Decisions

Criminal prosecutions of child sexual abuse alleged to have occurred in the distant past raise myriad challenges. One significant challenge involves assessing the credibility of complainants. In the present study, 51 bench trials involving 87 complainants were coded into categories related to complainants’ memory for the offense, as well as credibility of the complainant, reliability of the evi...

Judging the morality of utilitarian actions: How poor utilitarian accessibility makes judges irrational

Is it acceptable and moral to sacrifice a few people's lives to save many others? Research on moral dilemmas in psychology, experimental philosophy, and neuropsychology has shown that respondents judge utilitarian personal moral actions (footbridge dilemma) as less appropriate than equivalent utilitarian impersonal moral actions (trolley dilemma). Accordingly, theorists (e.g., Greene et al., 20...