Christopher Brett Jaeger, Ph.D., J.D.
Associate Professor of Law Baylor University
- Waco TX
Research examines ways in which legal rules, standards, and processes reflect intuitive beliefs (and misbeliefs) about the human mind.
Biography
Professor Jaeger’s interdisciplinary research examines ways in which legal rules, standards, and processes reflect intuitive beliefs (and misbeliefs) about the human mind. He is currently studying law’s frequently used “reasonableness” standard, applying experimental techniques from psychology to investigate how we decide what is "reasonable."
Professor Jaeger’s scholarship has appeared or is forthcoming in law reviews such as the Yale Law Journal, the University of Chicago Law Review, and the Florida Law Review, and in peer-reviewed journals such as Cognitive Science, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, and Memory & Cognition. In 2025, he received Baylor University’s prestigious Outstanding Faculty Scholarship Award among all university tenure-track faculty, and his article The Hand Formula’s Unequal Inputs was co-winner of the 2025 AALS Scholarly Papers Competition for best work by a faculty member in their first five years of law teaching. Professor Jaeger also serves on the editorial board of Psychology, Public Policy, & Law, an interdisciplinary law and psychology journal published through the American Psychological Association.
Professor Jaeger graduated Order of the Coif from Vanderbilt Law School, where he participated in the Vanderbilt Legal Academy Scholars Program, served as an Articles Editor for the Vanderbilt Law Review, and published two student notes on topics bridging law and psychology. After law school, Professor Jaeger clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit for Judge Duane Benton. He then returned to Nashville, where he enjoyed a varied law practice at Stites & Harbison, PLLC, until his academic interests drew him back to Vanderbilt for his Ph.D. in psychology.
Professor Jaeger and his wife, Jessica, are the proud parents of two children, an aspiring artist and an aspiring superhero. Professor Jaeger continues to play soccer, tennis, pickleball, and other sports (though not as well as he used to), and he also enjoys coaching his kids, board games, and fantasy football.
Areas of Expertise
Accomplishments
Commencement Speaker
Baylor Law School
2024
Outstanding Faculty Award for Tenure-Track Scholarship
2025
Baylor University
Winner
AALS Scholarly Papers Competition
2025
Education
University of Missouri,
B.A.
Psychology
2006
Vanderbilt Law School
J.D.
2009
Vanderbilt University
Ph.D.
Psychological Sciences
2020
Articles
Perceiving versus scrutinizing: Viewers do not default to awareness of small spatiotemporal inconsistencies in movie edits.
Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts2024
Although several research programs have explored how people track changes in objects over time, it is not clear how consistently people are aware of the precise state of dynamic scenes. The importance of object tracking is put to a particularly interesting test in cinema, where editors must combine different views of dynamically changing objects (such as actors) in a way that does not disrupt viewers’ perceptual experience. Film editors’ intuition and several recent studies suggest that viewers precisely track configuration changes over time and that temporal overlaps in the depiction of moving objects facilitates viewers’ perception of smooth visual event continuity. We tested these hypotheses by showing large numbers of participants short edited films that varied in temporal matching between views.
The roles of cognitive dissonance and normative reasoning in attributions of minds to robots
Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications2024
As a wide variety of intelligent technologies become part of everyday life, researchers have explored how people conceptualize agents that in some ways act and think like living things but are clearly machines. Much of this work draws upon the idea that people readily default to generalizing human-like properties to such agents, and only pare back on these generalizations with added thought. However, recent findings have also documented that people are sometimes initially hesitant to attribute minds to a machine but are more willing to do so with additional thought. In the current experiments, we hypothesized that these attribution-increasing reconsiderations could be spurred by situation-induced cognitive dissonance.
Katz's Imperfect Circle: An Empirical Study of Reasonable Expectations of Privacy
Florida Law Review2025
Under Katz v. United States, the Fourth Amendment restricts government actions that infringe upon expectations of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable. This foundational test has long been criticized as circular, both because courts can shape the very expectations they seek to identify through their decisions and because governments can manipulate those expectations to expand the reach of their own power. But how do members of society decide what expectations are reasonable, and how do judges ascertain those expectations? And are expectations of privacy malleable even without deliberate manipulation?
The Hand Formula's Unequal Inputs
Yale Law Journal2025
Tort cases often hinge on whether the defendant behaved “unreasonably.” Tort theorists have long debated what makes behavior unreasonable, with many seeking answers in economic theory or Kantian philosophy. But the question of whether a tort defendant’s conduct was reasonable or unreasonable is typically a question for the jury. And we know very little about whether lay jurors’ understanding of (un) reasonableness aligns with tort theorists’ perspectives.
Remembering conversation in group settings
Memory & Cognition2025
Individuals can take on various roles in conversation. Some roles are more active, with the participant responsible for guiding that conversation in pursuit of the group’s goals. Other roles are more passive, like when one is an overhearer. Classic accounts posit that overhearers do not form conversational common ground because they do not actively participate in the communication process. Indeed, empirical findings demonstrate that overhearers do not comprehend conversation as well as active participants. Little is known, however, about long-term memory for conversations in overhearers. Overhearers play an important role in legal settings and dispute resolution, and it is critical to understand how their memory differs in quality and content from active participants in conversation.
