if the victim was Black and brought to the hospital by the mother’s boyfriend than if they were white and brought in by the grandmother. It was the latest of Dror’s many experiments suggesting forensic scientists are subconsciously influenced by cognitive biases—biases that can put innocent people in jail.
Dror now travels the world testifying in trials, taking part in commissions, and offering training to police departments, forensic laboratories, judges, militaries, corporations, government agencies, and hospitals. National agencies, forensic labs, and police forces have adopted his approach to shielding experts from information that could bias them.
Two diamond studs in his left ear hint at a nonconformist streak. As the child of academic parents who took frequent sabbaticals, Dror attended five elementary schools on three continents. “I’d be the new kid who didn’t know the language very well,” he says. “I didn’t have time to assimilate or conform. It was very difficult, but it gave me a lot of independence of thought.”
Fingerprints don’t lie. … But it’s also true that fingerprints don’t speak. It’s the human examiner who makes the judgment, and humans are fallible.He had reason for concern. The United Kingdom had been shaken by the scandal of Shirley McKie, a Scottish police constable who was charged with perjury after investigators claimed to find her thumbprint at a murder scene in 1997. McKie was cleared when two American experts testified that the thumbprint could not have been hers.
Charlton was so upset by these reactions that he considered abandoning his career. “Don’t worry, this is normal,” he remembers Dror telling him. “It’s part of the human condition. Now let’s do more research and see how we can improve things.” If something as seemingly infallible as fingerprints could be biased, what could be next? Dror set his sights on DNA. When the authors of the National Research Council study criticized forensic sciences, they made an exception for DNA analysis, a method developed in the lab that was statistically verifiable and scientifically sound.
Many examiners feel “impervious to bias,” says Saul Kassin, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “as if they’re not human like the rest of us.” In 2017, Kassin and Drorfrom 21 countries about their perceptions of bias. They found that whereas nearly three-quarters of the examiners saw bias as a general problem, just over 52% saw it as a concern in their own specialty, and only 26% felt that bias might affect them personally.
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Of course they are, that's why they should be doing blind tests
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