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Journal of the National Academy of Legal Sciences of Ukraine

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Psychological determinants of erroneous criminalization: the intuitive dimension

Viacheslav O. Tuliakov

Received 17.07.2026, Revised 17.08.2026, Accepted 30.09.2026

Abstract

Criminalization doctrine describes the legislator's decision as a sequence of rational steps: an assessment of social harm, a check against ultima ratio, a weighing of proportionality yet the decision is frequently made at a pre-verbal, affective level long before it receives formal justification. This gap becomes especially consequential under martial law, when chronic stress and collective trauma intensify intuitive over analytical judgment, and when organized informational operations can deliberately manufacture the affective climate that legislators later ratify as spontaneous public sentiment. The article identifies the psychological mechanisms generating the four established types of erroneous criminalization (unjustified, excessive, incomplete, incorrect) and shows how cognitive biases operate simultaneously as native distortions of legislative judgment and as levers of cognitive-informational operations. The study combines doctrinal-dogmatic legal analysis with an interdisciplinary synthesis of dual-process theory, the affect heuristic, motivated reasoning, character-accentuation theory, and moral-panic sociology, illustrated by Ukrainian wartime security legislation adopted in 2022–2025. Four psychological modalities are distinguished (visceral, anxious-obsessive, strategically cunning, performatively absurd) each mapped onto a corresponding error type, and thirteen cognitive biases, from confirmation bias and the availability heuristic to loss aversion and survivorship bias, are shown to constitute the operational mechanics of this typology, converging with the author's Risk–Justice Paradox and Collective Intuitive Criminal Policy frameworks. The taxonomy equips legislators and policy analysts with a diagnostic vocabulary for recognizing intuitively driven criminalization proposals and a conceptual basis for institutional debiasing mechanisms in legislative drafting under hybrid informational warfare.

Keywords:

intuitive criminal policy; erroneous criminalization; cognitive bias; affect heuristic; moral panic; criminal non-law; Risk-Justice Paradox

https://doi.org/10.31359/1993-0909.2026.33.3.282

Retrieved from Journal NALSU №3, 2026 year

Pages 282-298

References Suggested citation

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Suggested citation

Viacheslav O. Tuliakov (2026). Psychological determinants of erroneous criminalization: the intuitive dimension. Journal of the National Academy of Legal Sciences of Ukraine, 33(3), 282-298. https://doi.org/10.31359/1993-0909.2026.33.3.282