[author]Lin Xifen
[content]
Lin Xifen ｜ People's Identification with and Reliance on Judicial Decisions - A Study Based on Cognitive Experiments
Abstract: Conducting studies on the judicial credibility from an interdisciplinary perspective of law, psychology, and communication science would reveal the cognitive attitudes of the public towards judiciary in the digital era and is conducive to the understanding of the relationship of the public and judiciary at a deeper level. With a cognitive-experimental method, 1,326 subjects under different informational conditions were prompted to judge the formal confusion of trademark in 50 different cases. The experimental data and statistical results indicate that the public exhibits relatively high recognition of and trust in judicial judgment, and the media’s opinions on legal issues affect the public’s judgment to some extent. However, the influence of judicial verdicts on the public’s judgment is generally stronger than that of the media. By combining questionnaire research and cognitive experiments, the research shows that subjects not only expressed strong demands for judicial authorities to better solve the issue of trademark infringement, but also displayed a strong appreciation of the judicial value of achieving greater fairness and justice. According to the regression analysis, these two factors can significantly explain the subjects’ trust in judicial judgment. It further means that judiciary can enhance the credibility as long as it better addresses the public’s urgent concerns and enables the public to have a deep experience of fairness and justice.
Key Words: judicial credibility, public recognition of the judiciary, public trust in the judiciary, judicial cognition, experimental legal study.
1.Introduction of the issue
Whether a judicial decision can gain the public's recognition and trust is an important criterion for testing the credibility of a country's judiciary. Xi Jinping pointed out that "the effectiveness of the reform of the judicial system is to be judged by the people, and in the final analysis, it depends on whether the credibility of the judiciary has been improved." Judicial credibility can generally be defined in two dimensions: objective and subjective. The objective dimension of judicial credibility that justice has the ability to win social acceptance and public trust, "this ability depends directly on the justice in the constraints, judgment, self-control and exclusion of whether the public's trust and confidence can withstand." In the subjective dimension, whether justice has credibility depends on the public's subjective perception of judicial competence or the work of the courts. In this sense, judicial credibility, as a universal group consciousness, is a psychological reflection of the people's inner satisfaction or dissatisfaction with justice. Research in recent years has shown that although the objective dimension of judicial capacity is an important basis for judicial credibility, judicial credibility should be measured and assessed more from the subjective dimension.
There have been some studies on judicial credibility in China's court system, such as the Sichuan Higher People's Court, the Beijing Second Intermediate People's Court, the Jiangxi Higher People's Court, the Hubei Higher People's Court have published relevant survey reports, in order to ensure the neutrality of the assessment, some courts have commissioned third-party organizations to examine the credibility of the court. In addition, many scholars have conducted independent studies on the judicial credibility of China's courts, utilizing methods such as questionnaire surveys, field visits, and expert talks, which have enriched the research foundation of judicial credibility in China. However, these studies mainly collect data by directly asking the subjects' attitudes, which is vulnerable to the following factors and difficult to reflect the real thoughts of the subjects: first, the subjects' answers may be affected by "response bias". In psychological tests, the answers given by the subjects often do not represent their true thoughts. If the subject is a direct stakeholder in the survey results (e.g., the court or its commissioning agency), the subject may guess that the subject wants to receive positive evaluations, which may result in experimental results that do not truly reflect the public's satisfaction with the administration of justice. Second, the subjects' responses may be influenced by "availability bias". Availability bias is one of the common cognitive biases, which mainly manifests itself in the overestimation of the real influence of information that can be easily extracted from (episodic) memory. Subjects are likely to over-amplify their easily accessible material about judicial credibility, and this will affect their judgment of judicial credibility. Third, fact-finding and law application in the administration of justice are very complex professional activities, especially law application which involves both complex liability determination and may also involve estimation of the amount of compensation or weighing of the magnitude of punishment. It is not always reliable to ask the untrained public to generalize the ability of the judiciary.
This study also aims to examine the credibility of the judiciary in China from the subjective dimension, especially the public's recognition and trust of court decisions, but unlike existing studies, this study does not directly ask the subjects about the degree of recognition or trust of court decisions, but adopts the experimental method of cognitive psychology to examine the credibility of the judiciary by analyzing the "individual's in-depth psychological reflection". " to examine judicial credibility. Specifically, this study screened 50 trademark infringement cases from China's adjudication documents website, which involved the judgment of whether there was formal confusion for 50 groups of trademarks; and then designed four "cognitive-behavioral" experiments, in which 1,326 ordinary people with no background in law judged whether there was formal confusion for 50 groups of trademarks under specific situations. Then four "cognitive-behavioral" experiments were designed to let 1,326 members of the general public without legal background judge the similarity of the 50 trademarks in specific situations; finally, the public's recognition and trust of judicial decisions were evaluated based on the actual judgments made by the subjects, and how the judicial decisions differed from those of other sources (e.g., the media) in terms of the way and mechanism of influencing the public's judgments. In this study, the public's identification with the judiciary mainly refers to the extent to which the subjects' judgment of trademark similarity in the context of no initiating information agrees with the court's actual judgment. It is conceivable that the higher the consistency between the people's judgment and the court's decision, the higher the likelihood that the people agree with the court's decision deep down. The public's trust in justice refers to the degree to which the subjects' judgment of trademark similarity is influenced by the court's initiating information in the context of having the court's judgment as the initiating information. It is conceivable that the more the public's judgment is influenced by the court's initiating information, the more likely the public is to trust the court's judgment deep down.
Since the subjects were not aware that the researcher was investigating the public's recognition and trust of court judgments, the experimental design of this study can effectively avoid the interference of factors such as response bias and availability bias, and better reflect the subjects' implicit perception of judicial credibility. In this study, the judgment of trademark similarity in trademark infringement cases was selected as the subject of experimental observation. The Supreme People's Court has clearly stipulated the judgment standard of "trademark similarity" in the relevant judicial interpretation, and the public can complete the relevant factual determination based on their daily experience and perception, which does not involve the interpretation of laws and regulations, interpretation of jurisprudence, and weighing of values, and therefore, the judgmental conclusions given by the public and the judge's judgment results are highly comparable. In summary, the experimental study of judicial credibility will be carried out according to the following ideas: (1) under the condition of no initiating information, observe the degree of consistency between the people's judgment on the issue of trademark confusion and the court's judgment, so as to examine the people's agreement with the judiciary's judgment (Experiment Ⅰ); (2) under the condition of court's judgment as the initiating information, observe whether the people's judgment is influenced by the court's initiating information, so as to examine whether the people's judgment is influenced by the court's initiating information. (2) Under the condition that there is a court judgment as the initiating message, observe whether the people's judgment will be influenced by the court's initiating message, and thus examine the people's trust in the judicial judgment (Experiment Ⅱ); (3) Under the condition that there is an authoritative opinion in the media (referred to as the "media's opinion") as the initiating message, observe whether the people's judgment will be influenced by the media's initiating message. By comparing the initiating effects of judicial decisions and media opinions, we will observe the difference in the mechanism of people's trust in judicial decisions and media opinions (Experiment III); (4) Combining questionnaires and behavioral experiments, we will examine the relationship between people's subjective perception of justice and their trust in justice (Experiment IV).
2. Experiment Ⅰ: People's Recognition of Judicial Decisions
In modern society, the judicial decision is the result of the judge's accurate determination of the facts and application of the law, which has the legitimacy in the sense of jurisprudence, and the public's recognition of the judicial decision reflects the level of legitimacy of the jurisprudence. Experiment Ⅰ aims to examine the public's acceptance of the court's judgment through the judgment of trademark confusion. Trademark confusion refers to the similarity in appearance between the disputed trademark (i.e., the suspected infringing trademark) and the cited trademark (i.e., the suspected infringed trademark), which leads the public to mistake the two trademarks for the same one. Experiment I first asked subjects to judge whether the trademarks in a given case were similar or not in the absence of initiating information, and then compared the subjects' judgment with the court's decision. In general, the more consistent the judgment of the public and the court on the same issue, the higher the likelihood that the public agrees with the judicial decision.
2.1 Experimental Design
The results of existing studies show that the public's recognition of the court's judgment is relatively high, for example, in the questionnaire survey conducted by the Higher People's Court of Jiangxi Province for 959 parties, for the question of "Are you satisfied with the current work of the court", 30.55% of the subjects answered that they were very satisfied, and 35.97% answered that they were relatively satisfied. Referring to the results of this kind of research, Experiment I assumes that there is a high degree of consistency between the public's judgment on trademark confusion and the court's decision.
The subjects of this experiment were recruited from the Internet by means of paid service, and after screening out invalid data and subjects with legal background, a total of 281 subjects with no legal background were obtained with valid data. Among them, 96.09% of the subjects were between the ages of 18-45 years old, and 91.10% had a bachelor's degree or higher. All subjects signed an informed consent form in writing. The case materials used in the experiment were all from the China Judgment and Decision Network (CJDN). We selected 50 groups of trademarks from trademark infringement cases that occurred in recent years, of which 30 groups of trademarks were recognized as similar trademarks by court decisions, and 20 groups of trademarks were recognized as non-closely similar trademarks by court decisions (Fig. 1A and Fig. 1B exemplify three groups of trademarks, respectively). In this experiment, the cases of trademarks obtained by the subjects were completely randomized in the order of appearance.
Figure 1A Trademarks found to be similar by court decision
Fig. 1B Trademarks found to be non-closable by court decision
Experiment I was conducted in the following steps: first, the subjects were allowed to read the guidelines and were informed of the rules for judging the similarity of trademarks. Subsequently, the subjects judged the two groups of trademarks according to the rules of judgment in the judicial interpretation of the Supreme People's Court and answered the following questions: (1) Are the contested trademarks and the cited trademarks similar trademarks? (2) What is the degree of similarity of the trademarks? In order to facilitate the analysis of the value, Experiment Ⅰ and other subsequent experiments for the approximate/non-approximate options are assigned as follows: (1) When the court determines that the contested trademark and the cited trademark are similar trademarks, the court's judgment value is 1, which can also be expressed as the value of the judgment is approximate; when the court determines that the contested trademark and the cited trademark are not approximate trademarks, the court's judgment value is 0, which can also be expressed as the value of the judgment is non-approximate. (2) When the subject identifies the disputed trademark and the cited trademark as similar trademarks, the judgment value of the subject is 1, which can also be expressed as the judgment value is similar; when the subject identifies the disputed trademark and the cited trademark as non-closely similar trademarks, the judgment value of the subject is 0, which can also be expressed as the judgment value is non-closely similar. (3) The degree of similarity is the judgment value of the subject, and there are 11 options (0, 1, ..., 10), of which 0 represents a degree of similarity of 0, 1 represents a degree of similarity of 10%, 2 represents a degree of similarity of 20%, and so on. In order to exclude possible effects of option position on subjects, half of the subjects in each category were given the options in the opposite order of arrangement. In contrast to the subsequent experiments, Experiment I did not provide subjects with either information about the court's decision or the media's authoritative opinion, and is thus also known as the no-initiation-information experiment.
2.2 Experimental results
Using Spearman's correlation analysis and Pearson's correlation analysis to test the correlation between the results of the subjects' choices about whether the trademarks were similar or not, and the degree of similarity, and the verdict values, the results showed that the subjects' judgments about whether the trademarks were similar or not (r=0.44, P<0.001) and the degree of similarity of the trademarks (r=0.47, P<0.001), were both significantly correlated with the court's verdict values. Using Pearson's correlation analysis to further test the correlation between the subjects' judgment results on whether the trademarks were similar or not and the judgment results on the degree of similarity, the results showed that regardless of whether it was for the trademark similarity case (r=0.99, P<0.01), the trademark non-proximity case (r=0.98, P<0.01), or all 50 cases (r=0.99, P<0.01), the subjects' judgment results on the There is a very strong correlation between the results of the judgment of trademark similarity and non-similarity and the judgment of the degree of similarity, which reflects that the subjects did not choose arbitrarily, and the data obtained from the experiment has a high degree of credibility. Since the subjects' choice of whether the trademark is similar or not is highly consistent with the choice of the degree of similarity, the following discussion of the consistency between the popular judgment and the judicial decision mainly takes the results of the subjects' judgment of whether the trademark is similar or not as an example.
For the 30 trademark cases with similar verdicts, the percentage of subjects with similar verdicts (hereinafter referred to as "consistency") was calculated and ranked in descending order of consistency; for the 20 trademark cases with non-closely similar verdicts, the consistency was calculated and ranked (as shown in Fig. 2) in the same way. Sorting (as shown in Figure 2), it can be observed that among the 30 trademark cases with similar judgment values, the lowest consistency is 2.14%, the highest consistency is 96.44%, the mean consistency value is 58.78%, and the standard deviation is 26.92%. For the 20 trademark cases with a judgment value of non-similar, the lowest consistency is 27.90%, the highest consistency is 87.54%, the mean consistency is 63.21%, and the standard deviation is 15.64%. Combining the 50 trademark cases, the mean value of consistency can be calculated as 60.55% and the standard deviation as 22.99%. Based on the above data, the 50 cases can be further differentiated into cases with high consistency (consistency greater than 60%), medium consistency (consistency between 40% and 60%), and low consistency (consistency below 40%). Among the 30 trademark cases with close verdict values, 17 (56.67%) cases have high consistency, 6 (20%) cases have medium consistency, and 7 (23.33%) cases have low consistency, with the sum of the first two being 76.67%, but there are close to a quarter of the cases with low consistency. Among the 20 trademark cases with judgment value of non-closely similar, 13 cases (65%) have high consistency, 6 cases (30%) have medium consistency, and only 1 case (5%) has low consistency, and the sum of the former two is 95%.
In summary, by letting 281 subjects make similarity judgments on 50 groups of trademarks, and comparing and statistically analyzing the subjects' judgments with the court judgments, it can be concluded that the experimental hypothesis about the high consistency between the people's judgments and the court judgments is basically valid. Firstly, whether in 30 cases in which the court judgment value is approximate, or in 20 cases in which the court judgment value is not approximate, or in all 50 trademark cases, the subjects' judgment and the court judgment have high consistency. Second, the high consistency between the test judgment and the court judgment is reflected both in the judgment results about whether the trademarks are similar or not, and also in the judgment results about the degree of similarity. Thirdly, among the cases in which the court judgment value is similar, there are still close to one-fourth of the cases whose statistical results reflect low consistency between the subjects' judgment and the court judgment. Although for this part of the cases, the subjects disagreed with the court, some subjects might still choose to agree with the court's judgment after learning the information about the court's judgment. In other words, the group of people with high trust in the court may attribute the inconsistency in judgment to their own reasons, such as believing that they have a lack of knowledge and have not understood or grasped the court's standard of judgment for the issue. Of course, there are also some subjects who may genuinely disagree with the court's judgment. Along this line, Experiment II attempted to investigate how the consistency between the judgment made by the subjects and the court's judgment would change when the subjects were aware of the information about the court's judgment, so as to examine the degree of the public's trust in judicial decisions.
Figure 2 Consistency between people's judgments and court decisions
3. Experiment II: People's Trust in Judicial Decisions
Research in cognitive psychology shows that human beings have two types of memory: episodic memory and implicit memory. Episodic memory refers to knowledge that people can consciously recall and that they clearly know they have. Implicit memory is knowledge that people cannot consciously recall, and it has two characteristics: first, this knowledge can be reflected through human behavior. For example, people can ride a bicycle skillfully, but they can't tell how their hands and feet are perfectly coordinated when riding a bicycle; and second, this kind of knowledge has an initiating effect, that is to say, although people don't realize the existence of this kind of knowledge, the knowledge in their memories is working. For example, a subject is asked to learn a vocabulary list, and one of the words is "banana". Even if the subject forgets the list after a while, when given the first three letters of "ban" and asked to add three more letters to form a word, the subject will still choose "banana" with much higher than random probability. Here, "ban" serves as the start-up information that activates "banana" in memory. Similarly, when judging the similarity of a trademark, the court's decision can be used as the activating information. If the public trusts the court, even if the subjects are told that they do not need to consider the court's judgment, the consistency between the subjects' judgment and the court's judgment will be significantly improved compared to the situation without activating information.
3.1 Experimental design
Research has shown that although people's trust in the court is not high, the influence of the court still exists objectively. Referring to the results of existing research, this experiment hypothesizes that using the court's verdict as the initiating information will have a significant impact on people's judgment. Experiment Ⅱ will use the results of Experiment Ⅰ as the baseline to test the difference between subjects' judgments with and without initiating information. At the same time, Experiment II also introduces the Court Influence Index to examine the room for improvement in the consistency between subjects' judgments and court decisions. For the sake of discussion, the consistency value of each case obtained by Experiment I can be called the baseline consistency, and the mean of the baseline consistency of all cases is called the average baseline consistency; in Experiment II, after introducing the court judgment as the initiating information, the consistency value of each case can be called the court initiating consistency, and the mean of the court initiating consistency of all cases is called the average court initiating consistency. The difference between the average court initiation consistency in Experiment II and the average baseline consistency in Experiment I reflects the initiation effect of court decisions. In reality, the average court initiation consistency cannot be 100%, and the court initiation effect cannot be (100% - average baseline consistency). In real life, even if the subjects know the results of the court's judgment, it is impossible for them to make the exact same judgment as the court's judgment in all cases. Therefore, it is more appropriate to take a proportion of (100% - average baseline consistency), i.e., (100% - average baseline consistency) * k (k < 1) as the formula for calculating the ideal start-up effect. In this experiment, for the judgment of trademark similarity, mainly rely on intuitive comparison, less interference by other factors, take k = 50% is more reasonable. To summarize, the formulas used to calculate the court impact index are as follows: court initiation effect = court average initiation consistency - average benchmark consistency; ideal initiation effect = (100% - average benchmark consistency) * 50%; court impact index = court initiation effect / ideal initiation effect.
After Experiment II used the same nerf criteria as Experiment I to recruit subjects and excluded invalid data, a total of 256 subjects with no law school background were obtained with valid data. Combined with the valid data of 285 subjects obtained by repeating this experimental part in Experiment IV, a total of 541 subjects' valid data were obtained. Among them, 92.98% of the subjects were between the ages of 18-45, 86.14% of the subjects had a bachelor's degree or higher, and all of the subjects signed an informed consent form. Experiment Ⅱ used the same 50 case materials as Experiment Ⅰ. After reading the instruction, the subjects in Experiment II were then told that the court had made a judgment on the cases in the materials, and were asked to read the court's judgment first, and then, assuming that they did not know the result, to judge whether the disputed trademark was similar to the cited trademark and the degree of similarity in accordance with the judgment rules of the Judicial Interpretation of the Supreme People's Court.
3.2 Experimental results
In order to facilitate the comparison with Experiment Ⅰ, taking the benchmark consistency of Experiment Ⅰ as the control, the court initiation consistency of 50 cases in Experiment Ⅱ is ranked using the same order (as shown in Fig. 3A and Fig. 3B), and it can be found that the court initiation consistency of the cases has been significantly improved compared with the benchmark consistency. In the 30 cases where the judgment values were approximate, the average court initiation consistency improved by 8.07% compared to the average benchmark consistency, which was significantly different (Paired Samples t-test, t = 6.15, p < 0.001). In the 20 cases with non-approximate judgment values, the court's average initiation consistency increased by 4.40% compared to the average benchmark consistency, which is a significant difference (Paired Samples t-test, t = 4.02, p < 0.001).The court's average initiation consistency for the 50 cases amounted to 67.15%, which compared to the average benchmark consistency of 60.55%, an increase of 6.60%, which is a significant difference (Paired Samples t-test, t = 7.11, p < 0.001).
With court-initiated information, 20 of the 30 cases with proximate judgment values had a high level of consistency, representing a 10% increase compared to when there was no initiating information; the number of cases with low consistency decreased from 7 to 5. 15 of the 20 cases with non-proximate judgment values had a high level of consistency, representing a 10% increase compared to when there was no initiating information; 1 case remained at a low level of consistency. Overall, 35 of the 50 cases achieved a high level of consistency, a 10% increase from the time when no information was initiated; the number of cases with low consistency decreased from 8 to 6, a 4% decrease from the time when no information was initiated.
Figure 3A 30 Cases with Approximate Judgment Values
Figure 3B 20 cases with non-approximate judgment values
The court's initiation effect can be further reflected by the court impact index.The average baseline consistency of the 30 cases with approximate judgment values is 58.78%, and the average court initiation consistency is 66.85%. Accordingly, Court Initiation Effect = 66.85% - 58.78% = 8.07%, Ideal Initiation Effect = (100% - 58.78%) * 50% = 20.61%, and Court Impact Index = 8.07%/20.61% = 0.39. The average baseline for the 20 cases with non-approximate judgment values Consistency is 63.21% and the average Court Initiation Consistency is 67.61%. Accordingly, Court Initiation Effect = 67.61% - 63.21% = 4.40%, Ideal Initiation Effect = (100% - 63.21%) * 50% = 18.40%, and Court Impact Index = 4.40%/18.40% = 0.24. Putting the 50 cases together, the average Baseline consistency is 60.55% and the average court initiation consistency is 67.15%, whereby the court initiation effect = 67.15% - 60.55% = 6.60%, the ideal initiation effect = (100% - 60.55%) * 50% = 19.72%, and the court impact index = 6.60%/ 19.72% = 0.34.
The initiation effect of court decision information also varies across cases. Under the effect of court-initiated information, the mean value of consistency increased by 8.07% in the 30 cases with proximate verdict values and by 4.40% in the 20 cases with non-proximate verdict values, with a significant difference in the value of the increase (Welch t-test, t = 2.16, p < 0.05). The difference in the initiation effect in these two types of cases was also reflected in the court impact index: the court impact index was higher for cases with approximate verdict values (0.39) than for cases with non-approximate verdict values (0.24).
In summary, the results of Experiment II show that under the condition of having court judgment results as initiating information, the consistency between subjects' judgments and court judgment values is significantly higher, and the proportion of cases with higher consistency is significantly higher, and the court impact index is also higher. This means that the initiating effect of court judgment information exists objectively, and the hypothesis that people's judgments will be influenced by judicial judgments is valid, and it can also be assumed that people have a high degree of trust in judicial judgments. The initiation effect of court judgment information is significantly different in different types of cases. The influence of court judgment information on people's judgments is significantly higher in trademark cases where the court judgment value is similar, while the influence of court judgment information on people's judgments is relatively lower in trademark cases where the court judgment value is non-similar. This is something that the hypothesis of this experiment did not take into account and has not been found by established studies.
4. Experiment III: Comparison of People's Trust in Judiciary and Media
Discussing judicial credibility requires discussing not only the people's attitude toward the judiciary, but also the people's attitude toward the media. Many researchers have pointed out that the current credibility of the judiciary is not strong enough to become the only reliable channel for people to seek redress for their rights in their subjective consciousness, and that other authorities such as the government and the media still play an important role in people's minds, who tend to use multiple channels such as the judiciary, the media, and petitions in a staggered manner to seek justice. However, some researchers believe that although the public will learn about and comment on legal issues through a wide range of media, and hope that the media can act as a "social conscience" to expose injustice, the public does not dare to trust the media completely. The goal of Experiment III is to examine the degree of influence of media opinions on people's judgments, and the similarities and differences between this influence and the influence of court decisions.
4.1 Experimental Design
The experimental method of Experiment III is similar to that of Experiment II. After the subjects read the instruction, they are first informed of the media opinion, and then they are allowed to judge whether the disputed trademark and the cited trademark are similar trademarks according to the judging rules in the Judicial Interpretation of the Supreme People's Court and the degree of similarity of the two groups of trademarks, assuming that they don't know the information.
For each case, the consistency between the subjects' judgment and the value of the court's judgment is called the media initiation consistency, while the mean value of the consistency across cases is called the media average initiation consistency. In addition to conventional statistical tests, Experiment III used a media influence index to reflect the degree of public trust in media opinions. In addition, Experiment III further compares the Court Influence Index and the Media Influence Index for cases with approximate court judgment values and cases with non-approximate court judgment values, respectively, in order to examine the difference in the degree of influence of court judgments and media opinions on the public in these two cases. Due to the lack of established quantitative research, Experiment III tentatively hypothesizes that (1) media initiating information has a significant effect on people's judgment, and (2) the initiating effect of media opinions is lower than the initiating effect of court judgments.
Experiment III used the same nerf criteria as the previous experiments to recruit subjects and exclude invalid data, and obtained valid data from a total of 504 subjects with no academic background (similar to the total number of subjects in Experiment II). Among them, 94.25% of the subjects were between 18-45 years old, 90.28% of the subjects had a bachelor's degree or higher, and all of them signed an informed consent form. Experiment III used the same 50 case materials as the previous experiment. In real life, the media may have two attitudes for or against the results of the court's judgment, so Experiment III needs to examine the effects of these two attitudes at the same time. To this end, Experiment III designed two sets of experimental materials, A and B. Each set of experimental materials contained all 50 cases, and in each case, there existed two versions of the media's opinion, the same as and opposite to the judgment value. In the same set of materials, 30 cases with approximate verdict values and 20 cases with non-approximate verdict values were each equipped with a half-dozen different versions of the media opinions.The media opinions of the same cases in Set A materials were of opposite attitudes to those of the same cases in Set B. The media opinions of the same cases in Set A materials were of opposite attitudes to those in Set B materials. Subjects were randomly assigned to use either Group A material or Group B material to eliminate possible interference of subject and case factors on the experimental results.
4.2 Experimental results
For comparison, the baseline consistency in Experiment I was first ranked in order from lowest to highest, and then the court-initiated consistency in Experiment II and the media-initiated consistency in Experiment III were ranked according to the same case order. Since there were two types of media initiation messages in each case that were the same as or opposite to the judgment value, correspondingly, there were two different media initiation effects that pointed in the same direction as the judgment value and those that pointed in the opposite direction.
First, the media initiating information caused subjects' judgments of trademark form confusion to change in the initiating direction, which supports hypothesis (1) of Experiment III. For the 30 trademark cases with similar judgment values (Figure 4A), when the media initiation information was that the disputed trademark and the cited trademark constituted similar trademarks (hereinafter referred to as "media initiation information was similar"), the average media initiation consistency of the 30 cases increased by 2.64% compared with the average baseline consistency, which was significantly different from the average baseline consistency (Paired Samples t - t - t - t). (Paired Samples t-test, t=3.90, p<0.001). When the media initiation information is that the disputed mark and the cited mark do not constitute a similar mark (hereinafter referred to as "the media initiation information is not similar"), the average media initiation consistency of the 30 cases is 5.41% lower than the average baseline consistency, which is significantly different (Paired Samples t-test, t = -4.74, P < 0.001, P < 0.001, P < 0.001). t = -4.74, p < 0.001). For the 20 trademark cases with non-proximate verdict values (Figure 4B), when the media initiation information was non-proximate, the average media initiation consistency for the 20 cases increased by 7.03% compared to the average baseline consistency, which was a significant difference (Paired Samples t-test, t=5.55, P<0.001). When the media initiation information was approximate, the average media initiation consistency for the 20 cases decreased by 2.86% compared to the average baseline consistency, and the difference between the two was significant (Paired Samples t-test, t=-2.95, p<0.01). It can be seen that media-initiated information can have a significant effect on subjects' judgments regardless of whether the judgment value is a close case or a non-close case.
Second, the magnitude of the media-initiated effect also differed significantly when media opinions were directed differently, which was not anticipated in the hypotheses of Experiment III and was a phenomenon not found in established studies. For the 30 trademark cases with similar verdicts, when the media opinion points to the opposite of the court's verdict, the decrease in the average media activation consistency (5.41%) is much larger than the increase when the media opinion points to the same as the court's verdict (2.64%), with a significant difference in the results of the statistical test (Paired Samples t-test, t=2.03, P<0.05). For the 20 trademark cases with non-approximate verdict values, the decrease in the average media initiation consistency when the media opinion points to the same as the court verdict (7.03%) is much larger than the increase when the media opinion points to the opposite of the court verdict (2.86%), and the difference in the results of the statistical test is significant (Paired Samples t-test, t = 2.34, p < 0.05). It can be seen that the effect on subjects when the media initiation message is non-proximate is significantly greater than when the media initiation message is proximate, regardless of whether the judgment value is a proximate or non-proximate case.
Once again, the trends in media-initiated effects were not consistent for different types of cases. First, for all 50 cases, when the media opinion points to the same thing as the court decision, the media initiation effect leads to an increase in the consistency mean from 60.55% to 64.95%, which is 4.40%, which is smaller than the 6.60% increase caused by the initiation effect of the court decision, which is a significant difference (Paired Samples t-test, t = -2.39, p < 0.05). It can be seen that, on the whole, people's trust in court decisions is higher than their trust in the media, and hypothesis (2) can be established. Second, the situation will be relatively complicated if the approximate and non-approximate cases are analyzed separately. For the 30 cases where the judgment values are approximate, the court-initiated information leads to an 8.07% increase in the mean value of the consistency between the subjects' judgments and the court's judgment values, and when the media-initiated information points to the same as the court's judgment, it leads to a 2.64% increase in the mean value of the consistency between the subjects' judgments and the court's judgment values, with a significant difference in consistency between the two scenarios (Paired Samples t-test, t = 5.55, p < 0.001); when the media-initiated message pointed in the opposite direction to the court's judgment value, the mean value of consistency between subjects' judgments and the court's judgment value decreased by 5.41%, which was slightly lower than the increase in the mean value of consistency due to the court-initiated message (8.07%). All of the above findings support hypothesis (2). However, for the 20 cases where the judgment values were non-approximate, the court-initiated information led to a 4.40% increase in the mean value of consistency between the subjects' judgments and the court judgment values, which was significantly lower than the increase in the mean value of consistency caused by the media-initiated information when it pointed to the same as the court judgment (7.03%), and the difference in the magnitude of the increase in the two cases was significant (Paired Samples t-test , t = 2.38, p < 0.05). This finding does not support hypothesis (2). The difference between the decrease in the mean value of consistency due to media-initiated messages when they point in the opposite direction of the judgment value (2.86%) compared to the increase in the mean value of consistency due to court-initiated messages (4.39%) is not significant (Paired Samples t-test, t = -0.81, P = 0.22). In summary, for cases where the judgment value was approximate, the initiation effect of the court judgment was much higher than the initiation effect where the media initiation message was approximate, while for cases where the judgment value was non-approximate, the initiation effect of the court judgment was significantly lower than the initiation effect where the media initiation message was non-approximate.
Figure 4A 30 cases with judgment values that are approximate
Figure 4B 20 cases with non-approximate judgment values
Finally, there is also a difference between the media initiation effect and the court initiation effect in terms of the impact index. When the media initiation information is consistent with the court's judgment value, for the 50 cases used in the experiment, the media initiation effect is 4.40%, the ideal initiation effect = (100% - 60.55%) * 50% = 19.72%, and the media impact index = 4.40%/19.72% = 0.22, a value that is compared to the court impact index (0.34) It is 35.29% smaller compared to the Court Impact Index (0.34). If the cases with approximate judgment values are compared separately with cases with non-approximate judgment values, for the cases with approximate judgment values, when the media initiation information is approximate, the media initiation consistency is 61.42%, and the baseline consistency derived from Experiment Ⅰ is 58.78%, according to which, the media initiation effect = 61.42% - 58.78% = 2.64%, and the ideal Initiation Effect = (100% - 58.78%) * 50% = 20.61%, and Media Impact Index = 2.64%/20.61% = 0.13, a value that is 66.67% smaller than the Court Impact Index (0.39) for the case where the judgment value is approximate. For cases with non-proximate verdict values, when the media initiation information is non-proximate, the media initiation consistency is 70.24%, and the baseline consistency derived from Experiment I is 63.21%, according to which the media initiation effect = 70.24% - 63.21% = 7.03%, the ideal initiation effect = (100% - 63.21%)*50% = 18.40%, and Media Impact Index = 7.03%/18.40% = 0.38, a value that is 58.33% greater than the Court Impact Index (0.24) for cases with non-proximate judgment values.
The results of Experiment III suggest that the hypothesis that people's judgments are influenced by media opinions is valid, but whether the hypothesis that people rely more on judicial decisions than media opinions is valid needs to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. For one thing, subjects' judgments changed in the direction of initiation toward the media-initiated message after the media-initiated message was imposed; looking at the 50 cases as a whole, the media-initiated message pointing to the same value as the judgment had a weaker media-initiated effect than the court-initiated effect. Both of these are consistent with the hypotheses used in the experimental design. Second, for all cases, the initiation effect when the media initiation message is non-proximate is significantly stronger than the initiation effect when the media initiation message is proximate. Third, when the media initiation information and the court judgment value point to the same, the court initiation effect is stronger than the media initiation effect for the cases where the judgment value is approximate, and the court initiation effect is weaker than the media initiation effect for the cases where the judgment value is non-approximate.
5. Experiment Ⅳ: The relationship between public perception and judicial trustworthiness
Experiment Ⅱ utilized implicit memory to measure the public's trust in judicial decisions, and this external reflection may come from the public's basic inner perception of justice. Experiment Ⅳ aimed to understand the subjects' perceptions and attitudes toward the basic issues of justice through questionnaires, and further combined with behavioral experiments to observe the relationship between people's perceptions (episodic memory) and judicial trustworthiness (implicit memory). Experiment IV is similar to the design of Experiment II, in which the subjects need to complete the judgment on the issue of trademark proximity initiated by the information of the court's decision, and then answer the three sets of questions in the questionnaire. Finally, the experimenter will establish a regression equation by analyzing the questionnaire data and behavioral experiment data to examine the correlation between these two sets of data.
5.1 Experimental design
In recent years, the total number of trademark infringement cases in China's judicial practice of intellectual property rights has been rising year by year, and some trademark infringement cases with significant social impact have occurred from time to time. Generally speaking, the stronger the public's demand for combating trademark infringement is, the more they agree with the effectiveness of the court, and the more they believe that justice is to realize fairness and justice, the more they will trust the court's judgment results. Based on the above considerations, Experiment Ⅳ put forward two hypotheses: (1) the subjects have a clearer perception of the status quo of trademark infringement, the effectiveness of the court's operation, and the relationship between justice and fairness, etc.; (2) the above subjective perception of the subjects will affect their trust in the court's judgment.
Experiment IV used the same nerfing criteria as the previous experiment to recruit subjects and exclude invalid data, and obtained valid data from a total of 285 subjects with no academic background. Among them, 94.39% of the subjects were between the ages of 18-45, and 83.86% of the subjects had a bachelor's degree or higher. The experimental materials of Experiment Ⅳ are basically the same as Experiment Ⅱ, except that three sets of questions, x, y, and z, are attached, which include four questions about the current situation of trademark infringement (pictures), four questions about the effect of judicial operation (pictures), and three questions about the relationship between justice and fairness (pictures). The procedure of Experiment Ⅳ was basically the same as Experiment Ⅱ, except that the questionnaire part was added to the experimental materials.
5.2 Experimental results
Experiment IV counted the number of cases in which the judgment value was the same as the verdict value in all judgments of each subject. The ratio of this result to the total number of cases can reflect the degree of trust of different subjects to the court, from which the behavioral data of the subjects are obtained. The distribution of the option values of the above 11 questions in the total questionnaire of 285 subjects can reflect the subjective perception of the subjects towards justice. Using Pearson's correlation analysis, the correlation between judicial perception and judicial trust can be further tested.
First of all, subjects' perceptions of both question group x (about the status quo of trademark infringement) and question group z (about the relationship between justice and fairness) are relatively distinct and strong, with the mean value of the options given to 5 of these 7 questions close to or over 7, and the mean value of the options given to the other 2 questions over 6 (as shown in the table below). Among them, the viewpoint with the highest level of agreement among the subjects was the one about the relationship between justice and fairness (picture), followed by the one about the current situation of trademark infringement and the necessity of punishment (picture). This finding supports the hypothesis (1) of Experiment IV. Subject perceptions (other than pictures) are significantly positively correlated (P < 0.05) or highly significantly positively correlated (P < 0.01) with subject behaviors (sameness of subject judgments and court decisions), which indicates that the stronger the subject's relevant perceptions are, the higher the sameness of subject judgments and court decisions are. This finding supports the hypothesis (2) of this experiment, which reflects that subjects' subjective cognition affects their trust in judicial judgments.
Analysis of people's judicial perception and its correlation with judicial trust (*P < 0.05, **P < 0.01)
Secondly, the subjects' knowledge of question group y (about the effectiveness of judicial operation) seems to be low and not really highly rated, with the mean value of the options given being between 4 and 5. Moreover, the correlation between the subjects' questionnaire data (option values on the effects of judicial operation) and behavioral data (sameness of the subjects' judgments with the court's decisions) was low. This seems to imply that such judicial perceptions of the subjects have little effect on their judicial trustworthiness.
Finally, a linear regression equation was established with the sameness of subjects' judgments and court decisions (W) as the dependent variable and the mean values of the options of the 11 subjective perception questions as the independent variable, and it was found that there was a significant linear relationship between the independent variables and the dependent variable. On this basis, one of the least significant factors (having the largest p-value among all factors with p > 0.05) was eliminated in turn, and finally the linear equation (1) with only two independent variables (pictures and pictures) was obtained: w = 53.48 + 1.08 x pictures + 1.31 x pictures, where the coefficient of the pictures term (about the relationship between justice and fairness) was slightly higher.
There is a significant linear relationship between the independent variable picture, picture and the dependent variable W (F = 8.64, P < 0.001), and the goodness of fit picture is 0.24. Accordingly, it can be found that the stronger the people's perception of the phenomenon of trademark infringement, the more they can feel the fairness and justice from the judgment of similar trademarks, the more their trust in the judicial judgment. The regression equation for W was established using the four y-group factors, and the fit of the equation was poor, with no significant effect for any of the four factors, and the results were not statistically significant (F=0.56, P=0.69). This again reflects that there is little statistical correlation between subjects' perceptions of judicial efficacy and their trust in justice.
In summary, the study of Experiment Ⅳ shows that the subjects' perceptions of both the current state of trademark infringement and the relationship between justice and fairness are relatively distinct and strong, and that there is a significant positive correlation between the degree of perception of the current state of trademark infringement and the relationship between justice and fairness and their trust in the judicial decision, i.e., the higher the degree of perception, the higher the degree of trust in justice. This conclusion is more in line with the general public's life experience. After all, people's trust in judicial decisions depends to a large extent on their intuition of the reality of the problem, and this intuition contains both positive feelings of justice to make people feel fair and just, but also contains the people's negative feelings due to the disruption of the judicial order.
6. Summarization and Discussion
Studying judicial credibility from the perspective of interdisciplinary disciplines such as jurisprudence, psychology, and media science, and revealing the cognitive attitude of the public towards justice in the information society, helps to understand the relationship between the public and justice at a deeper level, and promotes the construction of judicial credibility in China. To this end, this study takes trademark cases as experimental objects, designs and implements four experiments and draws the following preliminary conclusions.
Experiment Ⅰ shows that for the 50 trademark form confusion cases, the average value of consistency between the people's judgment and the court's verdict is 60.55%. This shows that when encountering similar problems, the public and the courts have a larger "convention" in their judgment, and the public is more likely to agree with the court's judgment. The average value of this agreement is much higher than the rate of "very satisfied" in the questionnaire survey of the Jiangxi Provincial Higher People's Court (30.55%). One possible explanation for this is that the results of the Jiangxi Provincial Higher People's Court were published in 2014, earlier than the experimental time of this study, and the difference may reflect the progress of China's judiciary in terms of credibility in recent years. The results of Experiment I also show that for cases where the value of the court's judgment is approximate, there are close to one-fourth of the cases with low consistency (less than 40%). Generally speaking, the divergence between the judge's decision and the public's judgment may be caused by the following factors: (1) the judge has been educated in law and possesses professional legal knowledge and legal thinking; (2) the judge tends to have many years of judicial experience and possesses the experience of dealing with similar cases; (3) the judge knows or takes into account more than half of the non-statutory factors related to the case (e.g., the social, economic, and historical backgrounds of the two parties involved in the case and the potential influence the judgment may have on a certain industry). potential impact) are better understood or considered. For the purposes of this experiment, the first two factors may not be the primary reason. Judges' legal education rarely addresses the issue of how to judge the similarity of a figure or word shape, and trademark law is relatively principled about the similarity of figures or word shapes. Moreover, judging the similarity between graphics or glyphs is a problem that people often encounter in their daily lives, and judges may not have more experience compared to the public. From this, it can be inferred that the reason why the public has a big difference with the court in individual cases is probably because the judge has information about the social, economic, and historical backgrounds of the two parties involved in the case, which is illegal, while the subjects are not able to obtain such information. It has been pointed out that judges will not only consider whether the trademarks are similar in form, but also take into account factors such as the distinctiveness of the trademarks, the popularity of the trademarks, the subjective intent of the defendant, the actual use of the trademarks, and the recognition of the trademarks by consumers. However, considering that "trademark law is, after all, a law for the protection of rights, and the protection of rights is the starting point and foothold", this study believes that whether the trademarks are similar or not should ultimately depend on the judgment of the perception of the buyers of goods. Whether the court judges a trademark that the public does not perceive as similar as similar, or judges a trademark that the public is easily confused with as non-similar, it will affect the rights of consumers and relevant goods producers. The systematic divergence between the public judgment and the judicial decision will also seriously weaken the public's recognition of the judicial decision. Therefore, how to weigh the relationship between professional value considerations and people's intuitive judgment should be the judicial (including trademark infringement cases) process needs to be careful. At least, the judiciary should abide by the obligation to explain the law and reason.
Experiments Ⅱ and Ⅲ attempted to explore people's trust in judicial decisions, and how people's trust in the judiciary differs from people's trust in the media. The results of the experiments show that after giving the information of the court's judgment, even though the subjects were allowed to "assume that they did not know" the result of the court's judgment, on the whole, the public's judgment on the similarity of trademarks would still be significantly closer to the direction of the judgment value. To a large extent, this reflects the public's trust in judicial decisions. From the experimental data, the media's influence on the public on legal issues is still objective, but the influence of judicial decisions on the public's judgment is generally higher than the influence of media opinions on the public's judgment. It is worth noting that the mechanisms by which judicial decisions and media opinions influence the public are complex. From the data of Experiment II and Experiment III, it can be seen that the initiation effect on people's judgment of the court's decision is greater when it finds that the confusing trademark constitutes similarity and requires the defendant to bear the responsibility of trademark infringement, and its initiation effect is much larger than the initiation effect when the media opinion considers the confusing trademark as similarity. At the same time, the activation effect is much larger when the media opinion recognizes the confusing mark as non-proximate than when it recognizes the confusing mark as proximate. One possible explanation for this phenomenon is that, in the public's mind, the court should take on the role of combating infringement, so it is easier to gain the public's trust when the court finds that the defendant constitutes a trademark infringement; while the role of the media should be to encourage innovation, so it is easier to gain the public's trust when the media finds that the defendant is innovating trademarks rather than infringing trademarks. Of course, whether this hypothesis is valid or not depends on further experimental observation and argumentative analysis.
Experiment IV explored the relationship between people's perception of justice and their trust in justice. From the survey data, it can be seen that the subjects have a strong judicial demand for solving the problem of trademark infringement and a strong conceptual agreement that justice should realize fairness and justice. The regression analysis shows that the subjects' trust in court decisions can be better explained by the strength of these two independent variables. This finding well illustrates that justice can enhance its credibility as long as it can solve the people's urgent problems and make them feel fairness and justice. The public's feeling of fairness and justice in specific cases can effectively bridge the gap between the social evaluation of justice and their own evaluation. However, the questionnaire survey also found that the subjects lacked a clear understanding of court effectiveness. The study report of the Hubei Provincial Higher People's Court also mentioned similar problems, namely, the court's "many work initiatives but not much understanding by the public", "a lot of work but not much feeling by the public", and "improved quality of work but not much trust by the public". The quality of work has improved, but the public's trust is not high. It can be argued that enhancing publicity about the effectiveness of the courts and increasing the public's understanding of the courts is also an important aspect of improving the credibility of the courts.
The behavioral experiment used in this study quantitatively describes the impact that judicial decisions and media opinions have on people's judgments, and relatively objectively examines people's trust in judicial decisions. In order to quantitatively describe people's trust in courts and media, this study also introduces the concepts and calculation methods of court influence index and media influence index, which may be considered in the future for comparing the magnitude of court (or media) influence indexes in different regions or different generations. Of course, this study has some limitations. For one thing, among the 1,326 subjects who participated in this study, the vast majority (88.76%) of the subjects had a bachelor's degree or higher, and this educational structure characteristic of the subject population does not coincide with the educational structure characteristic of our population. Secondly, there are many factors affecting the assessment of judicial credibility, including both factual findings and application of law; involving both conventional cases and influential controversial cases such as the Peng Yu case, the Xu Ting case, and the Yao Jiaxin case. In response to these controversial cases, there is a divergence of understanding in both the academic and practical worlds. The experimental materials selected for this study belong to routine cases, and it is difficult to measure the potential impact of controversial cases on judicial credibility due to the exclusion of legal application and judicial policy considerations that are of a doubtful nature. Third, when calculating the court impact index and media impact index, the value of k needs to depend on the situation. The trademark similarity judgment issue in this study is relatively simple, and a value of 50% for k may be appropriate. If it involves issues in other areas of sectoral law (e.g., criminal law), the gap between the people's judgment and the judge's decision may be larger, and the value of k needs to be relatively small.