Heuristics and cognitive biases in experts. Specific analysis of physionomic expertise

Abstract

This article will analyze the decision-making process of forensic experts in an expert report: specifically, in physical comparisons.

As human beings, forensic experts can be influenced by biases and heuristics in certain steps of their expertise. This issue has consequences for everyone involved: the expert themselves, the suspect, and, of course, the final recipient, usually the judicial authority.

Orthodox economics, in its quest to turn human economic behavior into a science, has argued that human beings are always rational.

Behavioral economics emerged in the 1970s to question these precepts and highlight a certain irrationality in human beings.

This article will demonstrate how the emergence of the scientific method in physiognomic expertise has shaped an objective protocol, in the form of behavioral intervention, eliminating much of the heuristics present in traditional facial comparison processes.