Do U.S. Supreme Court Justices Think Differently? The Role of Cognition in Decision Making.

While we know a great deal about the ideological positions and strategic considerations of the justices, little is known about their personalities and cognitive thought process. Simultaneously, much of the literature on judicial decision making neglects the rich content in written opinions, where policy is established, and little work has examined the public speeches and spoken words of the justices. In this paper I address these disconnects by using the content analysis program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) to analyze the U.S. Supreme Court justices written opinions from the 2003-2007 terms, recent personal speeches and public statements, and statements made at oral argument. LIWC is uniquely designed to measure the emotional, cognitive, and structural components of verbal and written speech. I use this data to answer one main question: to what extent are justices consistent in their cognitive thought process across different situations? I answer this question by examining several circumstances: do justices display the same level of cognitive sophistication across majority, concurring, and dissenting opinions? Do justices display the same level of cognition in public speeches, at oral argument, and in written opinions? Do justices display more cognitive consistency in salient versus non-salient cases? In value laden issue areas (e.g., civil rights and liberties) versus mundane issue areas (e.g., economics and federalism)? After summarizing the evidence for whether cognition shows promise as an individual difference variable, I finish by focusing on how different levels of cognitive engagement may affect Supreme Court decision making. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]