Cognitive Biases can Impact Experts' Judgments

What is it about?

We offer a broad descriptive model of how bias affects human judgment across contexts. We also conducted the first systematic review to identify, evaluate, and summarize the role of cognitive biases and debiasing techniques in one domain in particular: forensic psychology.

Featured Image

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Across the 22 papers included in the review (one of which had two separate studies, for a total of 23 studies reviewed), large differences between the papers made it difficult for us to compare them - and most studies (64%) did not define "bias. Most focused only on cognitive biases (69.6%), with fewer investigating ways to address them (30.4%). Of the 17 studies that tested for biases, 10 found significant effects (58.8%), four found partial effects (23.5%), and three found no effects (17.6%). Foci included general perceptions of biases; adversarial allegiance; bias blind spot; hindsight and confirmation biases; moral disengagement; primacy and recency effects; interview suggestibility; and cross-cultural, racial, and gender biases. Fewer studies focused on debiasing. The broad decision science field, as well as the specific forensic field, need more work on how to debias judgments.

Perspectives