Many legal rules, processes and procedures revolve around the concept of reasonableness. Reasonableness is the degree to which one has met certain formal or informal standards. Neither too little nor too extreme. A reasonable discovery effort is neither excessively burdensome nor evasive.
Our assessment of reasonableness depends on legal, practical, and psychological factors and our assessment of them. But reasonableness itself is not a simple concept. I want to consider here some of the psychological biases that figure into our reasonableness judgments. All of these biases are related distortions of the situation, they typically make our own behavior seem more reasonable and other people’s behavior less reasonable.
