In this episode I spoke with Dr. Itiel Dror, a cognitive neuroscientist known in the forensic realm for his contributions to revealing the unconscious implicit biases in forensic decisions and providing tools to minimize them. He recently published several papers examining - for the first time - cognitive bias in forensic pathology.

The Maryland Attorney General has announced an independent audit of in-custody death determinations made by the OCME during the tenure of Dr. David Fowler. Dr. Fowler provided expert testimony for the defense in the trial of Derek Chauvin for death George Floyd. The audit team of forensic pathology experts and behavioral scientists will look to ascertain whether or not the determinations of manner of death were free from implicit biases.

"...it's important to distinguish between what I'm talking about with cognitive bias versus the way people usually talk about bias. So the usual term bias refers to intentional discrimination like racism and sexism and antisemitism, where it's intentional bias and discriminatory. I'm talking about the way the brain actually works, which affects all of us...It developed because of the architecture of the brain, but sometimes it can lead us to make mistakes, and this is where we want to minimize the way it goes off track, and the cognitive bias gives us a mistake, and it's unconscious implicit bias, so people are not aware of it." - Itel Dror

Links for this episode:
Biases in forensic experts. SCIENCE . 20 Apr 2018 Vol 360, Issue 6386 p. 243 https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.aat8443
The fallacies and sources of bias: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.0c00704
Papers of Bias in Forensic Pathology
1) First paper: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1556-4029.14697
2) Second paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589871X22000705

Linear Sequential Unmasking: an approach to minimize bias: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2589871X21000310?via%3Dihub
More information and articles about the Guest: http://www.cci-hq.com/forensic-identification.html

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