Juror's judgments about fault and compensation, like other social judgments, are shaped by who we are: our life experiences and attitudes, our habits of mind, our intuitions about how the world works and how it ought to work.

Cognitive heuristics, or mental rules of thumb such as representativeness (reasoning by perceived resemblance), the fundamental attribution error (the tendency to attribute others' behavior to the kinds of people we think they are rather than to contingent, situational influences) are common among jurors. For more on this see List of Cognitive Biases.