Facilitating Falsification: Devil’s Advocacy in Dutch Police Investigations

DOI

Confirmation bias has been identified as a recurrent cause of wrongful convictions. To mitigate the risk of this bias, police investigators should devote effort to exploring and attempting to falsify alternative hypotheses about a crime. In the Netherlands, investigators in complex capital crime investigations are instructed to apply devil’s advocacy (DA) to increase discussion and testing of alternative investigative theories. This study provides a first quantitative examination of whether DA influences reasoning about evidence in crime investigations. Police investigators who regularly work with DA (n = 63), investigators who do not (n = 76), and laypersons (n = 88) read a fictional investigation report and judged the likelihood that the prime suspect was guilty both before and after asking follow-up questions and receiving additional information. None of the groups clearly demonstrated confirmation bias. Contrary to prediction, experience with DA was not associated with greater falsification efforts. DA-experienced investigators showed a preference for asking falsifying questions only when compared to laypersons and without translating in greater adjustment of guilt-likelihood judgments. Overall, however, falsification efforts were associated with a reduction in guilt-likelihood judgments. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.34894/HCYPZY
Metadata Access https://dataverse.nl/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_datacite&identifier=doi:10.34894/HCYPZY
Provenance
Creator Nieuwkamp, Veerle (ORCID: 0009-0000-8941-678X); Maegherman, Enide ORCID logo; Bogaard, Glynis ORCID logo
Publisher DataverseNL
Contributor faculty data manager FPN; Bogaard, Glynis
Publication Year 2026
Rights info:eu-repo/semantics/restrictedAccess
OpenAccess false
Contact faculty data manager FPN (Maastricht University); Bogaard, Glynis (Maastricht University)
Representation
Resource Type survey data; Dataset
Format application/x-spss-sav
Size 12201
Version 1.0
Discipline Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture; Agriculture, Forestry, Horticulture, Aquaculture and Veterinary Medicine; Life Sciences; Social Sciences; Social and Behavioural Sciences; Soil Sciences