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The Illustrated Guide to Law
How the law works… and how it doesn't.
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There’s also a bias to pick someone rather than not pick anybody in a lineup. The fact that you’re being asked to choose “which of these people” instead of “was it one of these people?” makes a difference even before you get to the bias people have of “well the police must think it was one of these people”.
You know, at first glance I misread the “YES”s as “NO”s in panel 2. Another implicit psychological bias, expecting YES to be blue and NO to be red, I suspect!
Oh god yes. This isn’t just a problem in policing and law, it’s a *huge* problem in the sciences, in medicine, in just about every field of human endeavor that involves patterns (which is all of them).
Honestly it’s kind of comforting that one of the biggest sources of error in the justice system is the same source as most error in everything else. It means we have a huge incentive to try to learn to control for it.