applications: strategies for reducing bias in the collection and processing of forensic evidence

Question 1

What does educating others about bias look like?

Answer 1

painting a realistic picture of the subjective nature and vulnerabilities to bias that forensic evidence has

Question 2

What does training forensic examiners look like?

Answer 2

• acknowledging and minimises bias
• training in basic psychology from cognitive experts - perception, judgement and decision making

Question 3

What is an example of a protocol?

Answer 3

sequential unmasking

Question 4

What is sequential unmasking?

Answer 4

a method of controlling examiner bias by ensuring that irrelevant information that could bias the examiners decisions is filtered out of the process of analysing evidence
- a focus on bottom up processes (purely data driven) = more objective

Question 5

What is blind testing protocol?

Answer 5

verifiers not being aware of initial conclusions made by examiners

Question 6

What are the best conditions for blind protocol?

Answer 6

the examiner not choosing the verifier and the verifier not knowing the examiner - reduces conformity bias

Question 7

What is ‘six-pack’?

Answer 7

• reduces need determination bias
• rather than one sample there are a line up of samples
• reduce false positives

Question 8

What bias does training reduce?

Answer 8

overconfidence bias - aware of own limitations

Question 9

What method can be used to reduce the amount of false positives?

Answer 9

falsification - searching for the negative