| Background motivating factors and forensic evidence | Motivating factors most often exist when police and others such as fingerprint experts investigate crimes ,
that have high emotional context such as murder and violent attacks. T
produces a strong desire (motivation) to find the offender. Other motivating factors include the need to
bring an investigation to an end, called cognitive closure and the desire for consensus or agreement amongst the investigating team.
Emotional motivation in fingerprint analysis - job satififaction , need for closure and want to catch criminal |
| What is 3 cognitive biases | Contextual bias: Occurs when irrelevant information about an event, or the way in which some information is presented, influences reasoning. E.g. Stereotyping.
Confirmation bias: Occurs when people interpret information, or look for new evidence, in a way that confirms their pre-existing beliefs or assumptions.
Role Effects: This can exist where experts identify themselves within adversarial judicial systems as part of either the prosecution or defence team. This may introduce a subconscious bias that can influence decisions, especially when some ambiguity exists. |
| Key research Hall and PLayer method | method: A field experiment was used as the environment was designed to be as naturalistic as possible.
It was an independent measures design.
The IV was low-emotional context or high-emotional context |
| Hall and Player sample | 70 volunteer fingerprint experts working for Metropolitan Police Fingerprint Bureau |
| Application strat | ACE-V
analaysis phase
comparison
evalaluation
verification |
| Eval fo ACE V | If verification is done blind then more effective as no bias can be shown decreasing validity |
| Results for Hall and Player | 81.4% read the crime scene report, in THE HIGH CONTEXT group 52% felt they were affected by the report. |
| Conclusions of HALL AND PLAYER | . Even if experts think that a serious crime has influenced their analysis the outcome (i.e. the decision
made) is not affected.
2. Experienced fingerprint experts used in the research were less affected by cognitive bias than the nonexperts in Dror et al (2005).
3. Fingerprint examiners may also consider details of an individual crime that are provided with the
fingerprints as surplus to requirements. Some experts (19%) stated on their feedback forms that they did
not even read the crime scene examiners report presented with the fingerprints |
| Other suggestions for forensic experts | TRAINING IN BASIC PSYCHOLOGY - COGNITIVE BIAS
BLIND TESTING - NO CONTExt |
