Falling Under the Lens of Suspicion: Identifying Behavioral Factors that Generate Suspicion

What makes an innocent 911 caller sound like a suspect? Behavioral, linguistic, and demographic triggers of suspicion at the earliest stage of an investigation.

Award: NSF Law & Science / NSF Human Networks & Data Science 2146834 (Role: Co-PI)

In every false conviction case, there came a point in the investigation when an innocent person became a suspect. Despite the countless accounts of how this presumed guilt can start a chain reaction of confirmation bias that taints all stages of the criminal justice process, little is known about what triggers suspicion about the innocent person in the first place. Drawing from existing and to-be-created databases, the overarching goal is to identify and understand what demographic, behavioral, and linguistic factors initially spark suspicion and trigger dangerous confirmation bias processes leading to false convictions - with a particular focus on one of the earliest moments in which a person might become a suspect: when they call 911. A key hypothesis is that when witnesses’ behaviors violate expectations, people “morally typecast” the witness as less capable of being a victim and more capable of being a perpetrator. Increasing basic understanding on how these expectations are formed, how they are violated, and how they interact with witnesses’ gender and race, is a critical step towards predicting whether callers are ultimately charged with the crime they are reporting. Moreover, understanding how these processes emerge will be critical in developing state-of-the-art curriculum to educate police about their expectations’ accuracy and consequences, and to educate attorneys on defending clients they believe to be innocent.

Selected papers

  • Bean, S. R., Lawrence, M., Duran, N. D., Wulff, A. N., Reeder, I., Kassin, S. M., & Salerno, J. M. (2026). From caller to suspect: Identifying behaviors that trigger suspicion in 911 calls. Law and Human Behavior, 50, 182–204. [PDF]
  • Salerno, J. M., Bean, S. R., Duran, N. D., Wulff, A. N., Reeder, I., & Kassin, S. M. (2025). Failing to express emotion on 911 calls triggers suspicion through violating expectations and moral typecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition. [PDF]

See the full list on the publications page.