NWO grant for research on legal psychological expert witness reports

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded one of their competitive Open Competition M grants to ALLP director Annelies Vredeveldt, for a project on legal psychological expert witnesses reports. The grant will be used to fund a PhD project for Eva van Rosmalen, supervised by Annelies Vredeveldt and Jan de Keijser from Leiden University.

The pot may be calling the kettle black. Are expert witness reports within legal psychology free from bias?
Legal psychologists write expert witness reports in court cases. Such reports can affect judges’ and juries’ decisions. Often the reports describe how thinking errors may have biased decision-making at various stages of the criminal justice process. For example, police officers may have been subject to confirmation bias by focusing on evidence supporting their suspicions while ignoring contradictory information. Since biases are fundamentally ingrained in human thinking processes, the question arises whether legal psychologists themselves are also vulnerable to biases. The researchers will analyse Dutch expert witness reports and conduct four experiments to test whether legal psychologists themselves are vulnerable to bias.

To read more about the other 10 VU projects awarded funding, see https://vu.nl/en/news/2025/ssh-open-competition-m-2024-funding-for-promising-researchers