You don’t know: knowledge as supportive alibi evidence

Abstract

Until now, supportive evidence for alibis has been conceptualised into two distinct types: witness and physical evidence. The present study examined whether knowledge, as a third type of supportive evidence, can contribute to the understanding of evidence for alibis. Three experiments were conducted in which police detectives, laypersons and undergraduate students were asked to evaluate four alibis with witness, physical or knowledge supportive evidence, or with no supportive evidence. The results from the three experiments show that knowledge evidence is equally believable as strong witness evidence. We also found that not all items of strong physical evidence are evaluated as equally strong and believable. We therefore suggest adjusting the criteria to determine the strength of physical evidence and conducting more research on knowledge evidence.

Key words:

• alibi
• knowledge
• police detectives
• supportive evidence
• taxonomy

Ethical standards

 

Declaration of conflicts of interest

 Ricardo Nieuwkamp has declared no conflicts of interest

Robert Horselenberg has declared no conflicts of interest

Peter J. van Koppen has declared no conflicts of interest

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee [the standing ethical committee of the Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience at Maastricht University³] and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Kim Michelle Rietman and Michelle Huygen for their help in collecting the data.

Notes

1 A journey of about 1 hour and 62 km.

2 In 2021, 87% of all the inhabitants in the Netherlands possessed a smartphone (source: https://opendata.cbs.nl/#/CBS/nl/dataset/84888NED/table?ts=1655812656197, consulted 21 June 2022) and 85% in the United States of America (source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/219865/percentage-of-us-adults-who-own-a-smartphone/, consulted 21 June 2022).

3 ECP-124 11_01_2013 & ECP-124 11_01_2013_A1

Additional information

Funding

This study was financially supported by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research [NWO, grant number 404-10-349].