Farhan Sarwar | Lund University (original) (raw)

Papers by Farhan Sarwar

Predicting correctness of eyewitness statements using the

We report on the results of deploying the debiasing technique " giving reasons pro et co... more We report on the results of deploying the debiasing technique " giving reasons pro et contra " among professional judges at Swedish municipal courts (n=239). Experimental participants assessed the relevance of an eyewitness's previous conviction to his credibility in the present case. Results are compared to data from lay judges (n=372). The technique produced a small positive debiasing effect in the sample of Swedish judges, while the effect was negative among lay judges.

Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2017

s in the order of presentations Session 1: 10 th October: 09.15 12.00 Ear-witness identification ... more s in the order of presentations Session 1: 10 th October: 09.15 12.00 Ear-witness identification accuracy in children vs. adults. Lisa Öhman* Department of Psychology, Göteborg University, Box 500, SE 405 30, Göteborg, Sweden, Tel: +46(0)31 786 19 34, E-mail: lisa.ohman@psy.gu.se Pär Anders Granhag Department of Psychology, Göteborg University, Sweden Anders Eriksson Department of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden Earwitness performance has been studied before but not nearly to the extent that eyewitness performance has. This is particularly true for child witnesses. To gain a better understanding of earwitness performance we have designed a study in which children aged 7-8 and 11-12 and adults will serve as informants. A total of 240 participants, will be equally distributed between the three age groups, and exposed to an unfamiliar voice (the planning of a crime). After two weeks, the witnesses will be asked to identify the target-voice in a line-up (7 voices). Half of the ...

Psychological Reports, 2020

The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between modern racism and rape vic... more The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between modern racism and rape victim and perpetrator blame, and rape perception. Participants from both a community population ( n = 211) and a student population ( n = 200) read a rape vignette and provided their judgements of blame towards a victim and perpetrator, their perception of the event as rape, and later answered the modern racism scale. Results showed a significant positive relationship between modern racism and rape victim blame ( r = .35, R2 [Formula: see text] 100 = 12.1%), while modern racism had a significant negative relationship with perpetrator blame ( r = −.27, R2 [Formula: see text] 100 = 7.5%) and rape perception ( r = −.29, R2 [Formula: see text] 100 = 8.7%). Implications for the criminal justice system as well as suggestions for future research were discussed.

Law, Probability and Risk, 2020

Judges should not be influenced by legally irrelevant circumstances in their legal decision makin... more Judges should not be influenced by legally irrelevant circumstances in their legal decision making and judges generally believe that they manage legally irrelevant circumstances well. The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate whether this self-image is correct. Swedish judges (N = 256) read a vignette depicting a case of libel, where a female student had claimed on her blog that she had been sexually harassed by a named male professor. The professor had sued the student for libel and the student retracted her claim during the hearing. Half of the judges received irrelevant information - that the professor himself had been convicted of libel a year earlier, while the other half did not receive this information. For the outcome variable, the judges were asked to state how much compensation the student should pay the professor. Those judges who received information about the professor himself having been convicted of libel stated that he should be given significantly le...

Journal of Forensic Psychology Research and Practice, 2019

When interpreting a natural language argument that generalizes over a contextually relevant categ... more When interpreting a natural language argument that generalizes over a contextually relevant category, audiences are likely to activate the category prototype and transfer its characteristics onto category instances. A generalized argument can thus appear more (respectively less) persuasive than one mentioning a specific category instance, provided the argument's claim is more (less) warranted for the prototype than for the instance (positive and negative prototype effect). To investigate this effect in legal contexts using mock-scenarios, professional and lay judges at Swedish courts evaluated the persuasiveness of arguments giving a generalized or a specific description of an eyewitness. The generalized version described the witness either as an alcoholintoxicated person or as a child, while the specific version varied both the amount of alcohol consumed (two vs. five glasses of wine) and the child's age (four vs. 12 years). To investigate the effect of legal expertise on argument selection, moreover, law and social science students evaluate the persuasiveness of both argument versions. Though we observed statistically significant prototype effects as well as expertise effects, results were mixed and sometimes ran counter to normative expectation.

Psychological Reports, 2017

Although legal contexts are subject to biased reasoning and decision making, to identify and test... more Although legal contexts are subject to biased reasoning and decision making, to identify and test debiasing techniques has largely remained an open task. We report on experimentally deploying the technique “giving reasons pro et contra” with professional ( N = 239) and lay judges ( N = 372) at Swedish municipal courts. Using a mock legal scenario, participants assessed the relevance of an eyewitness’s previous conviction for his credibility. On average, both groups displayed low degrees of bias. We observed a small positive debiasing effect only for professional judges. Strong evidence was obtained for a relation between profession and relevance-assessment: Lay judges seemed to assign a greater importance to the prior conviction than professional judges did. We discuss challenges for future research, calling other research groups to contribute additional samples.

Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2017

This study examines the influence of the victim’s immigration status, perpetrator’s immigration s... more This study examines the influence of the victim’s immigration status, perpetrator’s immigration status, and participant’s immigration status on victim and perpetrator blame attributions. In addition, comparisons between men and women were made. Participants read a rape vignette in the form of a newspaper article and subsequently attributed victim and perpetrator blame. A 2 (victim’s immigration status) × 2 (perpetrator’s immigration status) × 2 (participant’s immigration status) × 2 (gender of participant) between-subjects design was used. Measures of blame attributions toward the victim and perpetrator were used as dependent variables. The main results showed that participants with an immigrant background and native males attributed significantly more victim and less perpetrator blame. An interaction involving victim and perpetrator immigration status emerged for female participants and were subsequently discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.

Law, Probability and Risk, 2016

Research on probabilistic reasoning has discovered several systematic errors, among which base ra... more Research on probabilistic reasoning has discovered several systematic errors, among which base rate neglect and the fallacy of the transposed conditional have featured prominently. This article introduces the term miss rate neglect to capture the systematic failure to properly account for false positives, i.e. the probability of evidence (E) given the hypothesis (H) is false, P(E|~H). Miss rate neglect occurs when decision makers (i) completely disregard the miss rate; (ii) underestimate the importance of differences in the miss rate, or (iii) overlook circumstances that affect the miss rate. We explain the relevance of miss rate neglect for legal decision making, review extant literature, present new experimental work that empirically validates options (ii) and (iii), and propose experimental variations that future research may pursue.

Individual characteristic features in voice and speech are important in earwitness identification... more Individual characteristic features in voice and speech are important in earwitness identification. A target-absent lineup with six foils was used to analyze the influence of voice and speech features on recognition. The participants' response for two voice foils were particularly successful in the sense that they were most often rejected. These voice foils were characterized by the features' articulation rate and pitch in relation to the target voice. For the same two foils the participants as a collective also showed marked underconfidence and especially good ability to separate correct and incorrect identifications by means of their confidence judgments for their answers to the identification question. For the other four foils the participants showed very poor ability to separate correct from incorrect identification answers by means of their confidence judgments.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2015

An argument that makes use of a generalization activates the prototype for the category used in t... more An argument that makes use of a generalization activates the prototype for the category used in the generalization. We conducted two experiments that investigated how the activation of the prototype affects the persuasiveness of the argument. The results of the experiments suggest that the features of the prototype overshadow and partly overwrite the actual facts of the case. The case is, to some extent, judged as if it had the features of the prototype instead of the features it actually has. This prototype effect increases the persuasiveness of the argument in situations where the audience finds the judgment more warranted for the prototype than for the actual case (positive prototype effect), but decreases persuasiveness in situations where the audience finds the judgment less warranted for the prototype than for the actual case (negative prototype effect).

We investigate argumentation where an expression is substituted with a less precise expression. W... more We investigate argumentation where an expression is substituted with a less precise expression. We propose that the effect that this deprecization has on the audience be called deprecization effect. When the audience agrees more with the less precise version of the argument, there is a positive deprecization effect. We conducted an experiment where the participants were presented with a court room scenario. The results of the experiment confirm the following hypothesis: If the participants find it hard to agree with the precise version of the argument and accept the use of the imprecise term, they will agree more with the imprecise version of the argument. Furthermore, we show that a person who reacts in this way to deprecization commits the fallacy of equivocation. (Less)

hh.diva-portal.org

hh.se. Publications. ...

This study examines the influence of the victim's immigration status, perpetrator's immigration s... more This study examines the influence of the victim's immigration status, perpetrator's immigration status, and participant's immigration status on victim and perpetrator blame attributions. In addition, comparisons between men and women were made. Participants read a rape vignette in the form of a newspaper article and subsequently attributed victim and perpetrator blame. A 2 (victim's immigration status) × 2 (perpetrator's immigration status) × 2 (participant's immigration status) × 2 (gender of participant) between-subjects design was used. Measures of blame attributions toward the victim and perpetrator were used as dependent variables. The main results showed that participants with an immigrant background and native males attributed significantly more victim and less perpetrator blame. An interaction involving victim and perpetrator immigration status emerged for female participants and were subsequently discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.

Predicting correctness of eyewitness statements using the

We report on the results of deploying the debiasing technique " giving reasons pro et co... more We report on the results of deploying the debiasing technique " giving reasons pro et contra " among professional judges at Swedish municipal courts (n=239). Experimental participants assessed the relevance of an eyewitness's previous conviction to his credibility in the present case. Results are compared to data from lay judges (n=372). The technique produced a small positive debiasing effect in the sample of Swedish judges, while the effect was negative among lay judges.

Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2017

s in the order of presentations Session 1: 10 th October: 09.15 12.00 Ear-witness identification ... more s in the order of presentations Session 1: 10 th October: 09.15 12.00 Ear-witness identification accuracy in children vs. adults. Lisa Öhman* Department of Psychology, Göteborg University, Box 500, SE 405 30, Göteborg, Sweden, Tel: +46(0)31 786 19 34, E-mail: lisa.ohman@psy.gu.se Pär Anders Granhag Department of Psychology, Göteborg University, Sweden Anders Eriksson Department of Linguistics, Göteborg University, Sweden Earwitness performance has been studied before but not nearly to the extent that eyewitness performance has. This is particularly true for child witnesses. To gain a better understanding of earwitness performance we have designed a study in which children aged 7-8 and 11-12 and adults will serve as informants. A total of 240 participants, will be equally distributed between the three age groups, and exposed to an unfamiliar voice (the planning of a crime). After two weeks, the witnesses will be asked to identify the target-voice in a line-up (7 voices). Half of the ...

Psychological Reports, 2020

The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between modern racism and rape vic... more The objective of this study is to investigate the relationship between modern racism and rape victim and perpetrator blame, and rape perception. Participants from both a community population ( n = 211) and a student population ( n = 200) read a rape vignette and provided their judgements of blame towards a victim and perpetrator, their perception of the event as rape, and later answered the modern racism scale. Results showed a significant positive relationship between modern racism and rape victim blame ( r = .35, R2 [Formula: see text] 100 = 12.1%), while modern racism had a significant negative relationship with perpetrator blame ( r = −.27, R2 [Formula: see text] 100 = 7.5%) and rape perception ( r = −.29, R2 [Formula: see text] 100 = 8.7%). Implications for the criminal justice system as well as suggestions for future research were discussed.

Law, Probability and Risk, 2020

Judges should not be influenced by legally irrelevant circumstances in their legal decision makin... more Judges should not be influenced by legally irrelevant circumstances in their legal decision making and judges generally believe that they manage legally irrelevant circumstances well. The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate whether this self-image is correct. Swedish judges (N = 256) read a vignette depicting a case of libel, where a female student had claimed on her blog that she had been sexually harassed by a named male professor. The professor had sued the student for libel and the student retracted her claim during the hearing. Half of the judges received irrelevant information - that the professor himself had been convicted of libel a year earlier, while the other half did not receive this information. For the outcome variable, the judges were asked to state how much compensation the student should pay the professor. Those judges who received information about the professor himself having been convicted of libel stated that he should be given significantly le...

Journal of Forensic Psychology Research and Practice, 2019

When interpreting a natural language argument that generalizes over a contextually relevant categ... more When interpreting a natural language argument that generalizes over a contextually relevant category, audiences are likely to activate the category prototype and transfer its characteristics onto category instances. A generalized argument can thus appear more (respectively less) persuasive than one mentioning a specific category instance, provided the argument's claim is more (less) warranted for the prototype than for the instance (positive and negative prototype effect). To investigate this effect in legal contexts using mock-scenarios, professional and lay judges at Swedish courts evaluated the persuasiveness of arguments giving a generalized or a specific description of an eyewitness. The generalized version described the witness either as an alcoholintoxicated person or as a child, while the specific version varied both the amount of alcohol consumed (two vs. five glasses of wine) and the child's age (four vs. 12 years). To investigate the effect of legal expertise on argument selection, moreover, law and social science students evaluate the persuasiveness of both argument versions. Though we observed statistically significant prototype effects as well as expertise effects, results were mixed and sometimes ran counter to normative expectation.

Psychological Reports, 2017

Although legal contexts are subject to biased reasoning and decision making, to identify and test... more Although legal contexts are subject to biased reasoning and decision making, to identify and test debiasing techniques has largely remained an open task. We report on experimentally deploying the technique “giving reasons pro et contra” with professional ( N = 239) and lay judges ( N = 372) at Swedish municipal courts. Using a mock legal scenario, participants assessed the relevance of an eyewitness’s previous conviction for his credibility. On average, both groups displayed low degrees of bias. We observed a small positive debiasing effect only for professional judges. Strong evidence was obtained for a relation between profession and relevance-assessment: Lay judges seemed to assign a greater importance to the prior conviction than professional judges did. We discuss challenges for future research, calling other research groups to contribute additional samples.

Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2017

This study examines the influence of the victim’s immigration status, perpetrator’s immigration s... more This study examines the influence of the victim’s immigration status, perpetrator’s immigration status, and participant’s immigration status on victim and perpetrator blame attributions. In addition, comparisons between men and women were made. Participants read a rape vignette in the form of a newspaper article and subsequently attributed victim and perpetrator blame. A 2 (victim’s immigration status) × 2 (perpetrator’s immigration status) × 2 (participant’s immigration status) × 2 (gender of participant) between-subjects design was used. Measures of blame attributions toward the victim and perpetrator were used as dependent variables. The main results showed that participants with an immigrant background and native males attributed significantly more victim and less perpetrator blame. An interaction involving victim and perpetrator immigration status emerged for female participants and were subsequently discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.

Law, Probability and Risk, 2016

Research on probabilistic reasoning has discovered several systematic errors, among which base ra... more Research on probabilistic reasoning has discovered several systematic errors, among which base rate neglect and the fallacy of the transposed conditional have featured prominently. This article introduces the term miss rate neglect to capture the systematic failure to properly account for false positives, i.e. the probability of evidence (E) given the hypothesis (H) is false, P(E|~H). Miss rate neglect occurs when decision makers (i) completely disregard the miss rate; (ii) underestimate the importance of differences in the miss rate, or (iii) overlook circumstances that affect the miss rate. We explain the relevance of miss rate neglect for legal decision making, review extant literature, present new experimental work that empirically validates options (ii) and (iii), and propose experimental variations that future research may pursue.

Individual characteristic features in voice and speech are important in earwitness identification... more Individual characteristic features in voice and speech are important in earwitness identification. A target-absent lineup with six foils was used to analyze the influence of voice and speech features on recognition. The participants' response for two voice foils were particularly successful in the sense that they were most often rejected. These voice foils were characterized by the features' articulation rate and pitch in relation to the target voice. For the same two foils the participants as a collective also showed marked underconfidence and especially good ability to separate correct and incorrect identifications by means of their confidence judgments for their answers to the identification question. For the other four foils the participants showed very poor ability to separate correct from incorrect identification answers by means of their confidence judgments.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2015

An argument that makes use of a generalization activates the prototype for the category used in t... more An argument that makes use of a generalization activates the prototype for the category used in the generalization. We conducted two experiments that investigated how the activation of the prototype affects the persuasiveness of the argument. The results of the experiments suggest that the features of the prototype overshadow and partly overwrite the actual facts of the case. The case is, to some extent, judged as if it had the features of the prototype instead of the features it actually has. This prototype effect increases the persuasiveness of the argument in situations where the audience finds the judgment more warranted for the prototype than for the actual case (positive prototype effect), but decreases persuasiveness in situations where the audience finds the judgment less warranted for the prototype than for the actual case (negative prototype effect).

We investigate argumentation where an expression is substituted with a less precise expression. W... more We investigate argumentation where an expression is substituted with a less precise expression. We propose that the effect that this deprecization has on the audience be called deprecization effect. When the audience agrees more with the less precise version of the argument, there is a positive deprecization effect. We conducted an experiment where the participants were presented with a court room scenario. The results of the experiment confirm the following hypothesis: If the participants find it hard to agree with the precise version of the argument and accept the use of the imprecise term, they will agree more with the imprecise version of the argument. Furthermore, we show that a person who reacts in this way to deprecization commits the fallacy of equivocation. (Less)

hh.diva-portal.org

hh.se. Publications. ...

This study examines the influence of the victim's immigration status, perpetrator's immigration s... more This study examines the influence of the victim's immigration status, perpetrator's immigration status, and participant's immigration status on victim and perpetrator blame attributions. In addition, comparisons between men and women were made. Participants read a rape vignette in the form of a newspaper article and subsequently attributed victim and perpetrator blame. A 2 (victim's immigration status) × 2 (perpetrator's immigration status) × 2 (participant's immigration status) × 2 (gender of participant) between-subjects design was used. Measures of blame attributions toward the victim and perpetrator were used as dependent variables. The main results showed that participants with an immigrant background and native males attributed significantly more victim and less perpetrator blame. An interaction involving victim and perpetrator immigration status emerged for female participants and were subsequently discussed, as well as suggestions for future research.

Journal of Forensic Psychology Research and Practice, 2019

When interpreting a natural language argument that generalizes over a contextually relevant categ... more When interpreting a natural language argument that generalizes over a contextually relevant category, audiences are likely to activate the category prototype and transfer its characteristics onto category instances. A generalized argument can thus appear more (respectively less) persuasive than one mentioning a specific category instance, provided the argument’s claim is more (less) warranted for the prototype than for the instance (positive and negative prototype effect). To investigate this effect in legal contexts using mock-scenarios, professional and lay judges at Swedish courts evaluated the persuasiveness of arguments giving a generalized or a specific description of an eyewitness. The generalized version described the witness either as an alcohol-intoxicated person or as a child, while the specific version varied both the amount of alcohol consumed (two vs. five glasses of wine) and the child’s age (four vs. twelve years). To investigate the effect of legal expertise on argument selection, moreover, law and social science students evaluate the persuasiveness of both argument versions. Though we observed statistically significant prototype effects as well as expertise effects, results were mixed and sometimes ran counter to normative expectation.

Psychological Reports, Sep 13, 2018

Though legal contexts are subject to biased reasoning and decision making, to identify and test d... more Though legal contexts are subject to biased reasoning and decision making, to identify and test debiasing techniques has largely remained an open task. We report on experimentally deploying the technique " giving reasons pro et contra " with professional (N=239) and lay judges (N=372) at Swedish municipal courts. Using a mock legal scenario, participants assessed the relevance of an eyewitness's previous conviction for his credibility. On average, both groups displayed low degrees of bias. We observed a small positive debiasing effect only for professional judges. Strong evidence was obtained for a relation between profession and relevance-assessment: lay judges seemed to assign a greater importance to the prior conviction than professional judges did. We discuss challenges for future research, calling other research groups to contribute additional samples.