@techreport{fd4ed3c02dac4cddb0fd821f98da0f69,
title = "Eye-Tracking as a Method for Legal Research",
abstract = "Legal research is a repeat offender - in the best sense of the term - when it comes to making use of empirical and experimental methods borrowed from other disciplines. We anticipate that the field's response to developments in eye-tracking research will be no different. Our aim is to aid legal researchers in the uptake of eye-tracking as a method to address questions related to cognitive processes involved in matters of law abidance, legal intervention, and the generation of new legal rules. We discuss methodological challenges of empirically studying thinking and reasoning as the mechanisms underlying behavior, and introduce eye-tracking as our method of choice for obtaining high-resolution traces of visual attention. We delineate advantages and challenges of this methodological approach, and outline which concepts legal researchers can hope to measure with a toy example. We conclude by outlining some of the various research avenues in legal research for which we predict a benefit from adopting eye-tracking to their methodological toolbox.",
keywords = "methods, eye-tracking, cognition, process tracing",
author = "Christoph Engel and Rima-Maria Rahal",
year = "2022",
month = nov,
day = "3",
doi = "10.2139/ssrn.4266044",
language = "English",
series = "MPI Collective Goods Discussion Paper",
publisher = "Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods",
number = "7",
address = "Germany",
type = "WorkingPaper",
institution = "Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods",
}