Farhan Sarwar

This study examines the influence of the victim's immigration status, perpetrator's immigration status, and participant's immigration status on victim and perpetrator blame attributions. In addition, comparisons between men and women were made. Participants read a rape vignette in the form of a newspaper article and subsequently attributed victim and perpetrator blame. A 2 (victim's immigration status) × 2 (perpetrator's immigration status) × 2 (participant's immigration status) × 2 (gender of participant) between-subjects design was used. Measures of blame attributions toward the victim and perpetrator were used as dependent variables. The main results showed that participants with an immigrant background and native males attributed significantly more victim and less perpetrator blame. An interaction involving victim and perpetrator immigration status emerged for female participants and were subsequently discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.

Research on probabilistic reasoning has discovered several systematic errors, among which base rate neglect and the fallacy of the transposed conditional have featured prominently. This article introduces the term miss rate neglect to capture the systematic failure to properly account for false positives, i.e. the probability of evidence (E) given the hypothesis (H) is false, P(E|~H). Miss rate neglect occurs when decision makers (i) completely disregard the miss rate; (ii) underestimate the importance of differences in the miss rate, or (iii) overlook circumstances that affect the miss rate. We explain the relevance of miss rate neglect for legal decision making, review extant literature, present new experimental work that empirically validates options (ii) and (iii), and propose experimental variations that future research may pursue.

The standard of proof in criminal trials should require that the evidence presented by the prosecution is robust. This requirement of robustness says that it must be unlikely that additional information would change the probability that the defendant is guilty. Robustness is difficult for a judge to estimate, as it requires the judge to assess the possible effect of information that the he or she does not have. This article is concerned with expert witnesses and proposes a method for reviewing the robustness of expert testimony. According to the proposed method, the robustness of expert testimony is estimated with regard to competence, motivation, external strength, internal strength and relevance. The danger of trusting non-robust expert testimony is illustrated with an analysis of the Thomas Quick Case, a Swedish legal scandal where a patient at a mental institution was wrongfully convicted for eight murders.

Though legal contexts are subject to biased reasoning and decision making, to identify and test debiasing techniques has largely remained an open task. We report on experimentally deploying the technique " giving reasons pro et contra " with professional (N=239) and lay judges (N=372) at Swedish municipal courts. Using a mock legal scenario, participants assessed the relevance of an eyewitness's previous conviction for his credibility. On average, both groups displayed low degrees of bias. We observed a small positive debiasing effect only for professional judges. Strong evidence was obtained for a relation between profession and relevance-assessment: lay judges seemed to assign a greater importance to the prior conviction than professional judges did. We discuss challenges for future research, calling other research groups to contribute additional samples.