Understanding the Cognitive Factors and Legal Processes of Expert Opinions

职务名称：理解认知因素与专家意见的法律的过程在审判过程中，专家经常被要求提供他们的意见，以帮助法院理解复杂的问题。这些专家在提供评价时应保持客观，这在很大程度上是因为法官和陪审团可能会受到专家意见的影响。本项目将研究专家的决策和法律的程序如何可能导致专家在法医鉴定过程中的偏见。此外，本项目将研究和比较专家是否受到保留其服务以提供专家意见的一方的影响。该项目包括认知失调，框架和确认偏差的心理学理论，作为可能导致专家意见偏差的潜在因素。该项目将利用实际的法医临床医生进行模拟法医评估，并采用实验方法来审查专家意见。实验研究设计中的操作将考察专家的信息审查策略，以评估认知失调、框架和确认偏差如何影响专家在评估过程中的决策及其最终印象。该项目还将研究这些认知因素的影响，当专家被蒙在鼓里的转介源保留他们的服务。通过确定专家偏见在法医评估过程中如何、何时以及为什么会发展，这项研究可以确定如何提高专家之间的客观性，并带来更公平的案件结果。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

Title: Understanding Cognitive Factors and Legal Processes of Expert OpinionsAbstractDuring trials, experts are often called to provide their opinion in order to help courts understand complicated issues. These experts are expected to remain objective when providing their evaluations, in large part because judges and juries can be influenced by expert opinions. This project will examine how expert decision making and legal procedures may lead to bias during forensic evaluations by experts. Further, this project will study and compare whether experts are influenced by the party that retains their services to provide expert opinions. The project includes the psychological theories of cognitive dissonance, framing, and confirmation bias as potential contributing factors that may bias expert opinions. Using actual forensic clinicians tasked with conducting mock forensic evaluations, this project will use an experimental approach to examine expert opinions. Manipulations in the experimental research design will examine experts "information review strategies to assess how cognitive dissonance, framing, and confirmation bias may affect experts" decision making during an evaluation and their ultimate impressions. The project also will examine the impact of these cognitive factors when experts are kept blind to the referral source retaining their services. By identifying how, when, and why expert bias develops during a forensic evaluation, this research can identify ways to increase objectivity among experts and bring about fairer case outcomes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.