Veranstaltung
28
MAI 2024

14:15 - 15:45
IWH Research Seminar

Heuristic Reasoning Distorts Police Predictions of Domestic Abuse

Police in England and Wales are asked to predict the likelihood of serious recidivism in domestic abuse cases, without being given much support.

Wer
Jeffrey Grogger  (The University of Chicago)
Wo
IWH, conference room and via Zoom
Jeffrey Grogger

Zur Person

Jeff Grogger, the Irving Harris Professor in Urban Policy at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, has authored dozens of scholarly articles focusing on problems of low-income populations.

 

To join the lecture via Zoom, please register here.

Police in England and Wales are asked to predict the likelihood of serious recidivism in domestic abuse cases, without being given much support. We find variation in their skill levels, but at the same time, their predictions are generally poor. We ask how they formulate those predictions. We find substantial evidence of heuristic reasoning, including salience effects, representativeness bias, and implicitly, correlation neglect. These issues are greater for officers with lower skill levels. Analyzing decisions in prediction problems requires a means of adjusting the observed outcome for the censoring that may arise as a result of the prediction. We propose a method for dealing with such censoring which may be useful in other settings where workers charged with a prediction problem are not randomly assigned to cases.

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