Allegiance Bias in Statement Reliability Evaluations is not Eliminated by Two-Sided Instructions

DOI

Are expert witnesses biased by the side (defense versus prosecution) that hires them? We examined this issue by having students act as expert witnesses in evaluating interviews in a child sexual abuse case (Experiment 1, N = 143) and tested the value of an instruction to counteract such allegiance effects. The intervention concerned an instruction to consider arguments both for and against the given hypothesis (i.e., two-sided instructions; Experiment 2, N = 139). In Experiment 3 (N = 123), we additionally provided participants with three different scenarios. Participants received a case file regarding a case of alleged sexual abuse. With the file, participants received an appointment letter emphasizing elements of the file that questioned (defense) or supported (prosecution) the veracity of the accusation. Participants displayed allegiance bias (Experiments 1-3), but two-sided instructions were not successful in eliminating allegiance bias (Experiments 2, 3). The findings underscore the importance of legal safeguards in expert witness work.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/L8XFPZ
Related Identifier IsCitedBy https://doi.org/10.1027/2151-2604/a000416
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/L8XFPZ
Provenance
Creator Sauerland, Melanie ORCID logo; Otgaar, Henry ORCID logo; Maegherman, Enide ORCID logo; Sagana, Anna ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor Sauerland, Melanie; faculty data manager FPN
Publication Year 2020
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact Sauerland, Melanie (Maastricht University); faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type experimental data; Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav; application/zip
Size 2980; 6281; 4762; 160609; 124892; 141516
Version 1.1
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences