Almond, Louise, Alison, Laurence and Villejoubert, Gaelle (2010) The role of representativeness and cognitive elaboration in judging the probability of a suspect's guilt. In: 31st Annual Conference of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making; 19 - 22 Nov 2010, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.. (Unpublished)

Abstract

This study examined how individuals form subjective probability judgments of guilt. Naïve participants and police officers were asked to produce a description of an offender based on background information about a child sex offence. Following this, two suspects were described and participants were asked to estimate the probability that they were guilty. Similarity judgments were also recorded. Results showed that guilt probability judgments were extremely varied. Participants who deemed the suspect to be similar to their own description also thought he was more likely to be guilty, especially when their description resulted from an elaborate processing of the background information.

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