5 What other factors affect distrust?
There are a number of factors that might influence trust or distrust forensic science? For example,
- Forensic evidence could be present in a case, but the prosecutorial service (the CPS in England and Wales or Crown Office in Scotland) thinks that the evidence presented by the prosecution is not sufficient to meet the threshold of charging and/or admissibility in court.
- There could be concerns about the impartiality of scientists working in laboratories.
- There might be inadequate funding for police to undertake sufficient forensic science analysis.
- The cost of compliance with regulation could cause forensic laboratories to be dismissive about accreditation.
Our research (Kapageorgiadou et al., 2024) identified that these were some of the structural or systemic factors that were perceived as contributing to distrust in the delivery and communication of forensic science (as opposed to the science itself). Some of these factors are beyond the direct control of forensic scientists or professionals.
Activity 2 Factors that affect trust and distrust
When listening to someone speak about scientific evidence, does the delivery influence your trust or distrust of forensic science? Listen to the audio clips from forensic scientists providing explanations about DNA. Consider how trustworthy, understandable, honest, educated, confident, intelligent and professional each speaker sounds.
Transcript: Audio 1
Transcript: Audio 2
What did you notice about the voices that you listened to? What can you say about where those speakers are from and what their backgrounds are?
Answer
When we listen to voices, we make all sorts of explicit and implicit judgements about them. These judgements directly influence the extent to which we trust both the individuals themselves and what they are saying. In a large-scale linguistic study in the context of forensic science evidence, we found that people rate ‘posh’ speakers of received pronunciation highly in terms of status traits such as intelligence, professionalism, and level of education, compared with speakers from Yorkshire. Yorkshire speakers were, however, rated more highly in terms of solidarity traits such as trustworthiness, honesty, and understandability. We would expect the same pattern with any regional accent.
Female speakers were rated more highly than male speakers for those same solidarity traits.
These findings highlight the importance of thinking about how forensic science evidence is communicated, not only in terms of what is said, but also how it is said and by whom. Our data (Hughes et al, in preparation) show that there are often competing factors: people may judge ‘posh’ speakers as being more professional, but less trustworthy, while speakers with regional accents may be judged as being more trustworthy, but less professional.
If you want to learn more about how accent influences how people are judged (specifically in the courtroom), watch this BBC morning live video [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] .