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fall in three categories.
role can be played by a supervisor.
The downside of this approach is that the decision observer is placed in the position of a devil’s advocate inside the team and may quickly run out of political capital.
outside facilitator,
need some training and tools. One such tool is a checklist of the
biases they are attempting to detect.
checklists have a long history of improving decisions in high-stakes contexts and are particularly well suited to prevent...
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Noise, on the other hand, is unpredictable error that we cannot easily see or explain.
the goal is to prevent an unspecified range of potential errors before they occur.
call this approach to noise reduction decision
hyg...
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means that you adopt techniques that reduce noise without ever knowing which underlying errors you are helping to avoid.
Noise is an invisible enemy, and preventing the assault of an invisible enemy can yield only an invisible victory.
is nonetheless worth the battle.
forensic fingerprinting,
subject to the psychological biases of examiners.
create more noise, and thus ...
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soon discovered that fingerprints could do more than serve as identification marks for repeat offenders.
collecting latent prints
comparing them with exemplar prints
most decisive application of fi...
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the most widely used form of foren...
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comparing a latent print collected from a crime scene with an exemplar print is a much more delicate exercise than matching two clean prints.
prints requires expert judgment. It is the job of human fingerprint examiners.
The comparison leads to an evaluation, which can produce an identification (the prints originated from the same person), an exclusion (the prints do not originate from the same person), or an
inconclusive decision. An identification decision triggers the fourth step: verification by another examiner.
In the very rare cases when errors did happen, they were blamed on incompetence or fraud.
do not produce a number but make a categorical judgment,
He conducted what amounts to a series of noise audits in a field that had assumed it did not have a noise problem.
wherever there is judgment, there must be noise.
To test this hypothesis, Dror focused first on occasion noise: the variability between the judgments of the same experts looking at the same evidence twice.
they are not consistent with ...
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If, under these circumstances, the examiners’ judgments change from one test to the next, we are in the presence of occasion noise.
a test of the experts’ “biasability,” because the contextual information supplied activated a psychological bias (a confirmation bias) in a given direction.
with biasing information, their judgments changed.
findings have since been replicated
troubling that “expert fingerprint examiners made decisions on the basis of the context, rather than on the basis of the actual information contained in the print.”
Biasing information actually changes what the examiner perceives, in addition to how that perception is interpreted.
examiners observe significantly fewer details (called minutiae)
the forensic confirmation bias.
Even DNA analysis—
susceptible to confirmation bias,
ACE-V procedure, is the independent verification by another expert before an identification can be confirmed.
The verification step therefore does not provide the benefit normally expected from the aggregation of independent judgments, because verifications are not, in fact, independent.
Tellingly, even a highly respected independent expert,
concurred with the FBI in confirming the identification.
Dror and his colleagues uncovered more evidence of occasion noise.
the study confirmed that fingerprint experts are sometimes susceptible to occasion noise.
When the same examiners are looking at the same prints, even when the context is not designed to bias them but is instead meant to be as constant as possible, there is inconsistency in their decisions.
literature suggest that we need more research on the accuracy of fingerprint examiner decisions and how these decisions are reached.
