Controlling for Confirmation Bias in Child Sexual Abuse Interviews.

Confirmation bias is one of the most important sources of error in clinical assessment and clinical judgment. There has been little scholarship on the role of confirmation bias in forensic interviews with children who may have been abused sexually. This article reviews relevant research and explores the possible role of confirmation bias in forensic interviews. Confirmation bias may come into play because these interviews usually are conducted under the auspices of one side of the adversarial judicial system, the prosecution. In addition, the existing forensic interview protocols have paid little explicit attention to confirmation bias, instead focusing on decreasing the likelihood of suggestibility within the interview (although rarely are there efforts to detect suggestibility before the forensic interview). Finally, this article offers eight practical suggestions regarding how to further mitigate confirmation bias in these important forensic interviews, including increased training in how confirmation bias can affect forensic interviews, increased psychometric investigation of current interview protocols (particularly their sensitivity and specificity), and expanding forensic interview protocols and training to address confirmation bias explicitly.