Distributed Belief Revision as Applied Within a Descriptive Model of Jury Deliberations

Belief revision is a well-research topic within AI. We argue that the new model of distributed belief revision as discussed here is suitable for general modelling of judicial decision making, along with extant approach as known from jury research. The new approach to belief revision is of general interest, whenever attitudes to information are to be simulated within a multi-agent environment with agents holding local beliefs yet by interacting with, and innuencing, other agents who are deliberating collectively. In the approach proposed, it's the entire group of agents, not an external supervisor, who integrate the diierent opinions. This is achieved through an election mecahnism. The principle of \priority to the incoming information" as known from AI models of belief revision are problematic, when applied to facttnding by a jury. The present approach incorporates a computable model for local belief revision, such that a principle of recoverability is adopted. By this principle, any previously held belief must belong to the current cognitive state if consistent with it. For the purposes of jury simulation such a model calls for reenement. Yet, we claim, it constitutes a valid basis for an open system where other AI functionalities (or outer stimuli) could attempt to handle other aspects of the deliberation which are more speciic to legal narratives, to argumentation in court, and then to the debate among the jurors. (1993), is now a classic of jury research, and the psychology of judicial decision making by lay facttnders: descriptive models of juror decision making. Already in 1983, Hastie, Penrod and Pennington had published Inside the Jury. This domain has eluded thus far the mainstream of AI & Law research. It appears to be the case that the very rst paper published in an AI forum in the domain was Gaines et al. (1996). It described a neural model simulating juror decision making according to one of the several approaches current in psychologists' formal modelling of juror decision making. Disciplines contributing to the approaches presented in Inside the Juror include \social psychology, be-havioral decision theory, cognitive psychology, and behavioral modeling" (from the blurb on the back cover), yet this list is not complete. For example, in Ch. 11, Ehud Kalai sketched a game-theoretic framework. The aaliation of the authors in that volume is with schools of Law, departments of Statistics, or Psychology, or Management, or social or political science , but none comes from computer science. …