Many legal decisions rely on evaluating how a reasonable person'' would have acted, but what defines this standard? Here, we offer an experimental jurisprudence perspective by investigating what subjective features come to mind when reasoning about a reasonable person. In Experiment 1, we examined how people conceptually organize demographic, dispositional, and action features along dimensions of relevance, controllability, and normality. In Experiment 2, we used these dimensions to predict what features shape judgments about reasonableness and outcomes. We found that participantsundid” harmful outcomes by focusing on relevant, abnormal actions; that they constructed a reasonable person from the defendant by preserving normal attributes while changing abnormal, controllable ones; and that they endorsed subjective standards based on features that were relevant and normal, but relatively uncontrollable, consistent with theories of blame. Together, these findings map a template of a reasonable person and provide a descriptive foundation to inform legal theory.
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