Moa Lidén

Biography 

Dr. Moa Lidén holds a PhD from the Law Faculty, Uppsala University, Sweden. The title of her doctoral thesis is “Confirmation Bias in Criminal Cases”. The thesis consists primarily of scenario-based experimental studies with police officers, prosecutors and judges, which examine the prevalence of confirmation bias as well as potential debiasing techniques. Also, the thesis comprises two archival studies that test the notion of a ‘systemic confirmation bias’ manifested in that wrongfully convicted individuals remain wrongfully convicted even though they both appeal and petition for a new trial.  

The title of Moa’s post doc project is “Reliability and Biasability of Criminal Evidence” and the overall aims of this project are to examine sources of errors, which are attributable to human cognition, and influence two different types of criminal evidence; forensic evidence and witness evidence. The research also aims to examine how such errors are best dealt with and taken into account in criminal investigations and proceedings. 

Forensic and witness evidence pose quite different challenges to the legal system. Forensic evidence is often considered very reliable and/or even unbiasable and it may be difficult for legal actors to understand the mechanisms by which such evidence can become flawed, as this often requires an understanding of the forensic evidence that only experts in the respective forensic fields can be expected to have. This is different from witness evidence, which is not generally considered reliable and unbiasable, rather the contrary, but lacking other evidence, legal actors still have to decide whether a witness testimony can be trusted or not, in order to make decisions (regarding e.g. the focus of the criminal inquiry, whether to press charges or whether to convict) in a given case.