People often appear to use irrelevant information in forming judgments about others. Using survey experiments, we show that seemingly irrelevant facts may actually be informative of actors’ choices, which third parties can use to update their beliefs. Specifically, we show that subjects’ perceived severity and recommended punishment for offenses are significantly increasing in the number of lawyers representing defendants. However, once subjects are informed that the defendant was randomly assigned a specific number of lawyers, the significant relationship between the perceived seriousness of the offense and the number of lawyers largely vanishes. Thus, third parties in our benchmark analysis may be using the defendant’s legal team size as a proxy to update their beliefs regarding the nature of the offense committed, as opposed to being affected by irrelevant factors in forming judgments. This is because randomization makes it impossible for third parties to draw inferences regarding the nature of the offense committed by the defendant based on the number of lawyers. However, for some offenses, we find that increasing the number of lawyers raises third parties’ recommended sanctions even when the number of lawyers is randomly determined, which is consistent with a psychological phenomenon called ‘luck envy’.

人们似乎经常使用不相关的信息来形成对他人的判断。通过调查实验，我们表明看似不相关的事实实际上可能是行为者选择的信息，第三方可以使用这些信息来更新他们的信念。具体来说，我们表明，在代表被告的律师人数中，受试者对犯罪行为的严重程度和建议的惩罚显着增加。然而，一旦受试者被告知被告被随机分配了特定数量的律师，犯罪的严重程度与律师数量之间的显着关系就基本上消失了。因此，在我们的基准分析中，第三方可能会使用被告的法律团队规模作为代理来更新他们对所犯罪行性质的看法，而不是在形成判断时受到无关因素的影响。这是因为随机化使得第三方无法根据律师人数推断被告所犯罪行的性质。然而，对于某些违法行为，我们发现即使在随机确定律师人数的情况下，增加律师人数也会提高第三方的建议制裁，这与一种被称为“幸运嫉妒”的心理现象相吻合。