Miss rate neglect in legal evidence

Abstract

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.