{"id":106900,"date":"2020-02-24T11:18:48","date_gmt":"2020-02-24T16:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/?p=106900"},"modified":"2020-02-24T14:09:50","modified_gmt":"2020-02-24T19:09:50","slug":"new-study-offers-clues-to-origin-of-laws","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ucf.edu\/news\/new-study-offers-clues-to-origin-of-laws\/","title":{"rendered":"New Study Offers Clues to Origin of Laws"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speculation about where laws come from ranges from crediting judges and legal scholars to God.<\/p>\n

However new research co-authored by a University of Central Florida researcher and appearing in the journal Nature Human Behaviour<\/a><\/em> today offers evidence that criminal laws come from an intuitive and shared, universal sense of justice that humans possess.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe sometimes think of the law as this completely rational enterprise that is the result of wise experts sitting around a table and working from logical principles,\u201d says Carlton Patrick, an assistant professor in the University of Central Florida\u2019s Department of Legal Studies<\/a> and study co-author. \u201cAnd instead, what this study suggests is that these intuitions that people tend to share about justice may be the things that are becoming institutionalized.\u201d<\/p>\n

Patrick and Daniel Sznycer, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Montreal and the study\u2019s lead author, made the finding by comparing modern and ancient people\u2019s sense of whether a punishment fits a crime.<\/p>\n

And while previous studies have examined people\u2019s intuitions about justice, this is the first one that compared them across thousands of years.<\/p>\n