Motivating factors and bias: Charlton et al interviewd 13 fingerprint analysts and found several motivations for their job including job satisfaction and solving high profile cases. Examiners are emotionally driven and motivated to achieve results.
Cognitive bias:
- Expectation bias - expectation of what will be found is actually found e.g. downgrades conflicting evidence
- Confirmation bias - look for confirming evidence rather than conflicting
- Anchoring effects - relying too heavily on an initial piece of info
- Contextual bias - other information aide rom that being considered influences decisions.
- Role effects - identify as part of the prosecution or defence teams, can cause subconscious bias.
Dror et al studied contextual bias. Used 27 uni volunteers. Manipulated emotional state by providing background info. 96 prints, half had ambiguous, other half had clear. Two states: low context (bike theft/buglarly), high context (murder/personal attack). Results show that in the clear condition matches were unaffected but in ambigious condition 58% matched in high, 49% matched in low. suggests decisions were swayed by emotional context information.
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