Human understanding of causation may be grounded in our experience of physical forces in the world. We investigated whether right-handers, who exert greater force with their right than left hands, judge candidate causes on the right side as more causal. In two experiments, subjects simultaneously learned about a moderately effective and an ineffective cause on a trial-by-trial basis. Subjects r...

The practice of allowing a trial judge to condition his refusal of a defendant's motion for a new trial upon the plaintiff's acceptance of a reduction in damages, known as a remittitur, has had a long, if somewhat uneven, history in the federal court system.' In particular, this mechanism for imposing the judge's will upon the determination of damages in a civil trial has been criticized 2 in l...