The Role of Cognitive Biases in Criminal Intelligence Analysis and Approaches for their Mitigation

In the domain of criminal intelligence analysis, each day an analyst has to make sense and to create insight of a large amount of different data. However, due to the nature of human cognition, these cognitive processes may lead to systematic errors, so-called cognitive biases. In this paper, based on relevant state-of-the-art, preliminary ideas how to support the mitigation of cognitive biases - included in a visual analytics environment for criminal intelligence analysis currently being developed in the VALCRI project - are presented. By analysing user requirements and aligning them to the state-of-the-art research in the area of cognitive biases and their mitigation, eight cognitive biases have been identified as the most relevant ones. Six design guidelines have been proposed that help to mitigate one of them, the confirmation bias. At the current stage, the suggested mitigation strategies and resulting guidelines are the basis for further research, development, and experiments in order to derive evidence-based scientific results.