Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The reasonable person standard is key to both Criminal Law and Torts. What does and does not count as reasonable behavior and decision-making is frequently determined by lay jurors. Hence, laypeople's understanding of the term must be considered, especially whether they use it predominately in an evaluative fashion. In this corpus study, we investigate whether laypeople use 'reasonable' mainly as descriptive, evaluative, or merely value-associated term, based on supervised machine learning models. We find that 'reasonable' is predicted to be an evaluative term in a majority of cases. This supports prescriptive accounts, and poses potential problems for descriptive and hybrid accounts of the term. Other terms often used interchangeably in jury instructions (e.g., 'careful,' 'ordinary,' 'prudent,' etc), however, are predicted to be descriptive. This indicates a discrepancy between the intended use of the term and the understanding lay jurors might bring into the court room.