Faith in thy threshold

The current study focussed on the decision making processes of jurors. The study investigated how jurors make a decision, if they integrated information within their decision making process, and if cue utilisation thresholds promoted confirmation bias. To do this, 108 participants listened to one of nine cases. These participants were asked to give a likelihood of guilt rating after each piece of evidence, to state what was the last piece of information they needed to make a decision and give a final verdict at the end of a trial. The results highlighted that threshold decision making was being utilised, that information integration may allow thresholds to be reached and that thresholds may promote confirmation bias to reduce cognitive dissonance. In conclusion, this suggests that jurors integrate information until they reach a leading verdict, then the evaluation of information is distorted to support the leading threshold. Implications relate to von Dire and legal instructions

What You Find Depends on How You Measure It: Reactivity of Response Scales Measuring Predecisional Information Distortion in Medical Diagnosis

“Predecisional information distortion” occurs when decision makers evaluate new information in a way that is biased towards their leading option. The phenomenon is well established, as is the method typically used to measure it, termed “stepwise evolution of preference” (SEP). An inadequacy of this method has recently come to the fore: it measures distortion as the total advantage afforded a leading option over its competitor, and therefore it cannot differentiate between distortion to strengthen a leading option (“proleader” distortion) and distortion to weaken a trailing option (“antitrailer” distortion). To address this, recent research introduced new response scales to SEP. We explore whether and how these new response scales might influence the very proleader and antitrailer processes that they were designed to capture (“reactivity”). We used the SEP method with concurrent verbal reporting: fifty family physicians verbalized their thoughts as they evaluated patient symptoms and signs (“cues”) in relation to two competing diagnostic hypotheses. Twenty-five physicians evaluated each cue using the response scale traditional to SEP (a single response scale, returning a single measure of distortion); the other twenty-five did so using the response scales introduced in recent studies (two separate response scales, returning two separate measures of distortion: proleader and antitrailer). We measured proleader and antitrailer processes in verbalizations, and compared verbalizations in the single-scale and separate-scales groups. Response scales did not appear to affect proleader processes: the two groups of physicians were equally likely to bolster their leading diagnosis verbally. Response scales did, however, appear to affect antitrailer processes: the two groups denigrated their trailing diagnosis verbally to differing degrees. Our findings suggest that the response scales used to measure information distortion might influence its constituent processes, limiting their generalizability across and beyond experimental studies