Scrutinising gut feelings: emotional reflexive practices in Italian courts

Abstract

Narratives are powerful emotional devices. They can trigger our curiosity and make us suspicious, compassionate, empathic or even horrified. In this article, I focus on how Italian judges and prosecutors navigate their gut feelings evoked by written and oral narratives told by witnesses, defendants and victims in criminal cases. Fieldwork included observations of hearings and deliberations, shadowing and interviews with judges and prosecutors, and collection of written judgments. The article shows that gut feelings are experienced as intuitive knowledge – when judges and prosecutors feel they know ‘in their heart’ or ‘inside them’ the ‘true story’ of the crime, but they also contrast this type of knowledge with the ‘objective story’ based on the evidence available in a case. The analysis indicates two main emotional practices used to manage gut feelings. First, legal encoding – the translation of lay narratives into legal categories – constitutes an emotion management strategy that legal professionals can use, individually or collectively, to distance their gut feelings, restricting interest to aspects of the story validated by the evidence. Second, gut feelings can be endorsed, rather than constricted, when they generate suspicion that something ‘hidden’ has to be found out, or curiosity of knowing more about the story than what is strictly relevant under the legal frame. Gut feelings and curiosity mostly emerged in relation to the motive behind murder cases. By showing how legal professionals use their gut feelings, the article contributes to reinforcing an understanding of emotions and emotional reflexivity as necessary for rational decisions.