Forensic and Legal Cognition

A special issue of Behavioral Sciences (ISSN 2076-328X). This special issue belongs to the section "Cognition".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 10 September 2025 | Viewed by 1950

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
School of Psychology and Counselling, The Open University, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, UK
Interests: social cognition; decision science; anxiety; memory; biases

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Guest Editor
Department of Psychology, Glasgow Caledonian University, Glasgow G4 0BA, UK
Interests: forensic cognition; legal psychology; decision science

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

The understanding of cognition in forensic and legal contexts has enormous implications on the fairness of justice systems. Decision makers (such as forensic analysts, jurors and judges), eyewitnesses and other individuals involved in justice are vulnerable to many different types of psychological biases and errors that can result in miscarriages of justice. In research, different legal actors are often treated separately, despite these actors utilizing similar cognitive processes. For example, police officers, jurors, judges and forensic analysts are likely to use similar decision-making processes. In this Special Issue, we invite you to submit your original work to Behavioral Sciences for our upcoming Special Issue dedicated to Forensic and Legal Cognition. The goal of this Special Issue is to explore interactions between psychological processes and forensic and legal contexts, thereby covering the cognition of a wide range of legal and forensic actors in one issue.

We encourage a commensurately broad range of topics within this interdisciplinary fields. Examples of relevant areas include, but are not limited to, the following: eyewitness memory and testimony; cognitive bias in forensic analysis; juror and/or jury decision making; judge decision making; and cognitive factors in legal and forensic reasoning.

Abstract Deadline: December 22, 2024.
Notification of Abstract Acceptance: January 22, 2025.

Dr. James Munro
Dr. Lee Curley
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Behavioral Sciences is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

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Keywords

  • forensic bias
  • decision making
  • legal psychology
  • cognition
  • jurors and juries
  • verdict systems
  • biases

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

22 pages, 1605 KiB  
Article
Biased and Biasing: The Hidden Bias Cascade and Bias Snowball Effects
by Itiel E. Dror
Behav. Sci. 2025, 15(4), 490; https://doi.org/10.3390/bs15040490 - 8 Apr 2025
Viewed by 1597
Abstract
Cognitive bias is widespread, hidden, and difficult to deal with. It impacts each and every aspect of the justice and legal systems, from the initial engagement of police officers attending the crime scene, through the forensic examination, and all the way to the [...] Read more.
Cognitive bias is widespread, hidden, and difficult to deal with. It impacts each and every aspect of the justice and legal systems, from the initial engagement of police officers attending the crime scene, through the forensic examination, and all the way to the final outcome of the jurors’ verdict and the judges’ sentencing. It impacts not only the subjective elements in the justice and legal systems but also the more objective scientific elements, such as forensic fingerprinting and DNA. The impact of bias on each of these elements has mainly been researched and considered in silo, neglecting the biasing interactions and how bias cascades and snowballs throughout the justice and legal systems. These should happen rarely, as the Swiss cheese model shows that such errors in the final outcome rarely occur because they require that the shortcomings in each element be coordinated and aligned with the other elements. However, in the justice and legal systems, the different elements are not independent; they are coordinated and mutually support and bias each other, creating and enabling hidden bias cascade and bias snowball effects. Hence, minimizing bias requires not only taking measures to reduce bias in each of the elements but also a wider perspective that addresses bias cascade and bias snowball effects. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Forensic and Legal Cognition)
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