| Summary: | Speaking about professional culture generally makes reference to the norms and values of individuals practising a same
profession. We make here the hypothesis that the magistrate and the psychologist possess a specific professional culture
driving them, when sanctioning, to use their own criteria. To verify it, we submitted to three populations (students in law, in
psychology, and naive people) a questionnaire of eight situations in which an individual committed an infringement to a legal
or normative rule. Each situation ended by the presentation of three information related to three criteria (a total of 18
criteria) and the task consisted to inflict a sanction to the delinquent. Our results show that, in order to this attribution, each
of our populations use others criteria that those anticipated by the law, criteria which also differ between the three
populations. These differences can constitute one of the explanations of the incomprehension that we sometimes feel with
regard to some verdicts returned by the courthouses.
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