Safety in Numbers: A Policy‐Capturing Study of the Alibi Assessment Process

Abstract

SummaryA policy‐capturing analysis of alibi assessments was conducted. University students (N = 65), law enforcement students (N = 21), and police officers (N = 11) were provided with 32 statements from individuals supporting a suspect's alibi (i.e., alibi corroborators) and asked to assess the believability of the alibi, the suspect's guilt, and whether they would arrest the suspect. Each statement was composed of five binary features (i.e., relationship between corroborator and accused, age of corroborator, amount of available corroborators, alibi corroborator's confidence in their account, and memorability of the target event). Results showed that there was much parity in the type of information used to assess alibis across the samples. Specifically, we found that 90% of participants' decision policies included the amount of corroborators. Participants also relied upon, albeit to a lesser extent, the suspect–corroborator relationship and the age of the corroborator when assessing the alibi. The potential implications of these findings for understanding how people assess alibi corroborators are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.