Abstract
Fundamental challenges in human decision-making pose a serious threat to fair evidence evaluation, verdicts in court proceedings, and the administration of justice. Drawing on cognitive psychology, we examined whether a consider-the-opposite approach can assist police officers with positive guidance on how to implement crucial legal thresholds such as the presumption of innocence. In an experiment with sworn police officers ( N = 100), we compared a consider-the-opposite condition and a control condition (with no further instructions) and measured the formulated alternative hypotheses. The results show a promising debiasing effect of the consider-the-opposite approach which may strengthen fundamental principles of criminal law.
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More From: The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles
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