The role of confirmation bias in suspect interviews: A systematic evaluation

Abstract

Purpose. The three studies presented in this paper systematically examined the effect of expectations of guilt on interviewer questioning style, confession, denial rates, and suspects' verbal behaviour during interview.Method. Undergraduate students were recruited to participate in the three studies. In Study 1, 61 participants formulated questions that they wanted to ask a suspect to determine whether or not they cheated on a task. Prior to formulating their questions, participants were led to believe that the suspect was likely to be guilty or innocent. In Study 2, 45 'innocent' and 'guilty' participants were accused of cheating on a task and were interviewed with either guilt-presumptive questions or neutral questions. In the final study, 58 participants listened to a selection of audiotaped interviews from Study 2. They then rated various aspects of the suspects' verbal behaviour.Results. As hypothesized expectations of guilt resulted in the formulation of more guilt-presumptive questions even when participants were free to generate their own questions (Study 1). A significant association was found between suspect guilt/innocence and whether they confessed or denied, although there was no association between questioning style and confession or denial rates (Study 2). However, as expected, ratings of independent observers who listened to tape recordings of the suspect interviews indicated an influence of questioning style on the suspects' verbal behaviour whereby a self-fulfilling prophecy effect occurred (Study 3).Conclusions. These results indicate that expectations of guilt can indeed have an effect on questioning style and that this in-turn can lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy effect.

Implicit and explicit training in the mitigation of cognitive bias through the use of a serious game

“…Several studies have examined ways to mitigate the negative effects of CB in similar investigation tasks (Hill, Memon, & McGeorge, 2008;Krems & Zierer, 1994;Oswald & Grosjean, 2004;Rassin, 2010). For example, O'Brien's (2009) study of CB in criminal investigations demonstrated that participants who considered why their hypothesis might be wrong showed less bias, whereas those who generated several additional hypotheses did not, suggesting that too many alternatives or too much high task complexity can hinder one's systematic processing ability.…”

Behavioral Criminal Law and Economics

“…Most recently, Hill, Memon, & McGeorge (2008) find similar results in their study of interrogation -that independence of actual guilt, interrogators with a hypothesis of guilt frame questions the answers to which seem more corroborative of guilt. See also Kassin, Goldstein, & Savitsky (2003) ;Meissner, & Kassin (2004).…”

Connectionism Strategy for Industrial Accident-Oriented Emergency Decision-Making: A Simulation Study Based on PCS Model

“…Through a review of existing literatures, we find that there are two main research directions: One is cognitive bias when using connectionism strategy, it is found that this strategy can cause three kinds of effects, the first is confirmation bias in the procedure of searching for cues, it tends to continue to search for cues which support the dominant scheme and ignore the cues that do not support the dominant scheme, this effect often occurs in the field of judicial trials and leads to a wrong judgment [8]. The second is coherence shift during the process of cue evaluation, namely policymakers often overestimate the importance of cues which support the dominant scheme while underestimate the importance of cues that don't support the dominant scheme.…”