Overview
Human judgment stands at the center of criminal justice. Forensic science is no exception; it is the human examiner who is the main instrument of analysis in most forensic disciplines. It is the forensic expert who compares visual patterns and determines if they are “sufficiently similar” to provide evidence that they originate from the same source (e.g., whether two fingerprints were made by the same finger, whether two bullets were fired from the same gun, whether two signatures were made by the same person). Such determinations are governed by a variety of cognitive processes. Without objective scientific criteria and quantification instruments, these judgments are subjective.
The cognitive nature of subjectivity is that it can be influenced and biased by extraneous contextual information. Forensic scientists work within a variety of such influences: from knowing the...
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Acknowledgement
This work has been supported in part by a grant provided to I. Dror by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) through the Department of Defense (DoD/TSWG) grant #N41756-10-C-3382.
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Dror, I.E., Stoel, R.D. (2014). Cognitive Forensics: Human Cognition, Contextual Information, and Bias. In: Bruinsma, G., Weisburd, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2_147
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