Coordination and expertise foster legal textualism Rodríguez Hannikainen, Ivar Allan Moral judgment Legal decision making Coordination Cross-cultural research This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2020-119791RA-I00; RTI2018-098882-B-I00), the Polish National Science Centre (2020/36/C/HS5/00111; 2017/25/N/HS5/00944), the Swiss National Science Foundation (PZ00P1_179912), and the European Research Council (805498). Data, Materials, and Software Availability. Anonymized study data, analysis scripts, and stimuli (including translations) have been deposited in the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/yw8ek/) A cross-cultural survey experiment revealed a dominant tendency to rely on a rule’s letter over its spirit when deciding which behaviors violate the rule. This tendency varied markedly across (k = 15) countries, owing to variation in the impact of moral appraisals on judgments of rule violation. Compared with laypeople, legal experts were more inclined to disregard their moral evaluations of the acts altogether and consequently exhibited stronger textualist tendencies. Finally, we evaluated a plausible mechanism for the emergence of textualism: in a two-player coordination game, incentives to coordinate in the absence of communication reinforced participants’ adherence to rules’ literal meaning. Together, these studies (total n = 5,794) help clarify the origins and allure of textualism, especially in the law. Within heterogeneous communities in which members diverge in their moral appraisals involving a rule’s purpose, the rule’s literal meaning provides a clear focal point—an identifiable point of agreement enabling coordinated interpretation among citizens, lawmakers, and judges. 2022-11-23T10:34:40Z 2022-11-23T10:34:40Z 2022-10-25 journal article Hannikainen, Ivar R. et. al. Coordination and expertise foster legal textualism. PNAS 2022 Vol. 119 No. 44 e2206531119 [https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2206531119] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/78091 10.1073/pnas.2206531119 eng info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/ERC/H2020/805498 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ open access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internacional National Academy of Sciences