 Tunnel Vision and Confirmation Bias Among Police Investigators and Laypeople in Hypothetical Criminal ContextsEitan Elaad SAGE Open, 2022, vol. 12, issue 2, 21582440221095022 Abstract: Tunnel vision is the tendency of actors in the criminal justice system to use short-cuts to filter evidence selectively to build a case for a suspect’s conviction. Confirmation bias tends to favor information that confirms an individual’s preconceptions independently of the information’s accuracy: the present study manipulated tunnel vision and confirmation bias. The purpose was to examine the combined effects of these biases on Israeli police investigators and laypeople in hypothetical criminal investigation situations. Results indicated that police investigators were more strongly affected than laypersons by tunnel vision. Police investigators were more confident about the suspect’s guilt than were laypeople in the presence of incriminating and exonerating information, alike. Still, investigators did not ignore exonerating information and lowered their confidence in the suspect’s guilt when exonerating information was presented. We discussed the results according to police legitimacy and self-assessed lie-detection ability, which is rated higher by police investigators than by laypeople. Keywords: police investigators; tunnel vision; confirmation bias; lie-detection ability assessment; deception (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:12:y:2022:i:2:p:21582440221095022 DOI: 10.1177/21582440221095022 Access Statistics for this article More articles in SAGE Open |
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