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.