Motivational Bias in Criminal Investigators' Judgments of Witness Reliability1
Abstract
An experiment was conducted where experienced criminal investigators (N = 49) evaluated the testimony of a witness who either confirmed or disconfirmed the focal hypothesis in a homicide case. Participants' motivation to perpetuate the hypothesis was manipulated by varying the need for cognitive closure via time pressure. The hypothesis‐inconsistent witness was perceived as less reliable and credible, although its background and witnessing conditions were identical to those of the hypothesis‐consistent witness. While this asymmetrical skepticism was not moderated by time pressure, participants under high (vs. low) time pressure were less inclined to adjust their confidence in the hypothesis in line with the witness testimony. Discussion focuses on implications for criminal investigations and theoretical contributions to investigative psychology.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Such work has created more interest in studying how tunnel vision and other cognitive biases affect decision-making by police and prosecutors.
“Such work has also created more interest in studying how tunnel vision and other cognitive biases play a role in decision-making by police and prosecutors in criminal cases (Ask & Granhag 2007, Findley & Scott 2006).”
From Wrongful Convictions (2020) · cites this paper as Ask & Granhag 2007
Cites
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.185.4157.1124 · Cited by 28,810 · see citing works
The case for motivated reasoning.
Kunda, Z. (1990) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/0033-2909.108.3.480 · Cited by 9,022 · see citing works
Motivated closing of the mind: “Seizing” and “freezing”
Kruglanski, A. W., & Webster, D. M. (1996) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.103.2.263 · Cited by 2,379 · see citing works
Explaining the evidence: Tests of the Story Model for juror decision making.
Pennington, N., & Hastie, R. (1992) · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.62.2.189 · Cited by 761 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Garrett, B. L. (2020) · Annual Review of Criminology · doi:10.1146/annurev-criminol-011518-024739 · Cited by 35 · see citing works
Rosbach, E., Ammeling, J., Krügel, S., Kießig, A., Fritz, A., Ganz, J., Puget, C., Donovan, T., Klang, A., Köller, M. C., et al. (2025) · Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/3706598.3713319 · Cited by 18 · see citing works
- Authors
- Ask, K., & Granhag, P. A.
- Affiliations
- University of Gothenburg (SE)
- Corresponding author
- Ask, Karl
- Venue
- Journal of Applied Social Psychology
- Publisher
- Wiley
- Published
- 2007-03
- Volume
- 37
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 561-591
- ISSN
- 0021-9029 (ISSN-L)
- 1559-1816
- OpenAlex
- W1984332685
- Cited by
- 118
- References
- 4
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 8 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 4 · 2018: 7 · 2017: 7 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 7 · 2014: 5 · 2013: 8 · 2012: 8
- FWCI
- 10.09
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- Journal of Applied Social Psychology (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Deception detection and forensic psychology
- Social Sciences › Law › Legal processes and jurisprudence
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Keywords
- motivational bias, criminal investigators, hypothesis confirmation, need for cognitive closure, time pressure, investigative psychology, credibility assessment, murder investigation, confirmation bias
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
