In the criminal law context, one central tradeoff incident to the "beyond all reasonable doubt" threshold involves a core tradeoff between Type I (wrongful conviction) and II (wrongful acquittal) errors. Helping frame conventional wisdom surrounding this tradeoff includes Blackstone's admonition that “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
Much of the experimental research on this topic, according to a recent paper by Stanton Hudja (IIT-business) et al., Errors in the Pursuit of Justice: An Experimental Study of Type I and Type II Tradeoffs, focuses on placing participants within the legal "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard. Doing so, however, and as the papers notes, "limits the ability to observe how people make justice-related decisions when left to their own judgment." This study, by contrast, explores how people make such Type I and II tradeoffs outside of the "beyond all reasonable doubt" frame.
To do so, the authors analyze how participants allocated a fixed number of points to "toward reducing the likelihood of either error, revealing their implicit priorities over fairness and punishment. By removing legal thresholds or normative framing, our design isolates participants’ underlying preferences over judicial outcomes.” Respondents in this study include university students (in-person) as well as an online general population sample.
Standard external validity limitations notwithstanding, the paper's main findings include that "most individuals prioritize reducing Type I error over Type II error, without legal or moral instruction." In addition, the results also reflect "meaningful heterogeneity: some participants focus on minimizing Type II error, while others seek a balance between the two." An excerpted abstract follows.
"... Across all treatments, participants consistently prioritize reducing Type I error, without the “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard. Resource effectiveness significantly influences allocation behavior, and we observe systematic demographic differences: men allocate more resources to reducing Type I error than women. These findings shed light on how individuals approach moral trade-offs in legal contexts and offer implications for institutional design and public support for criminal justice policies."