The influence of empirical science data on Anglo-American lawmaking and
judicial decision making has grown considerably during the last fifty years.1
Increasingly, scholars and legal professionals have emphasized the importance
of the social and behavioral sciences in policy and lawmaking, as well as how
criminal jurisprudence and law may be informed by scientific A?psychology.2
Although relatively underappreciated, recent scholarship has pointed to the
potential value in the drawing from social-cognitive psychology (i.e., the
science of how social factors influence human information processing, and
how, in turn, cognitive processing mediates relations between environmental
factors and human interpersonal behavior), particularly when studied from
a developmental perspective, to answer critical empirical questions that are
central to criminal jurisprudence and law.