ABSTRACT
Since the early 1980s stories, or sequences of states and events, have played an important part in theories on how judges, jurors or police investigators reason with the evidence in criminal cases. Authors such as Bennett and Feldman (1981) and Pennington and Hastie (1986; 1993) argue that decision-making in criminal cases is done by constructing stories about ‘what happened’ using the evidence in the case and then comparing these stories, thus trying to find the best story, that is, the story which is accepted as most probable. A good story should not only be supported by evidential data (e.g. testimonies, forensic data) but it should also be well structured and plausible; a well-structured story is built in such a way that it is easily understandable and a plausible story correctly describes a general pattern of states and events that one expects to come across in the world. Crombag et al. (1994) also argued that a well-structured and plausible story is important in judicial decision-making. However, they also found that in many cases a good or plausible story which is insufficiently supported by evidence wins over a bad or implausible story which is supported by evidence. To overcome this problem, Crombag et al. proposed their anchored narratives theory (ANT), according to which a story should be sufficiently anchored in reality using safe generalizations.1 This anchoring of stories in reality also plays an important part in the investigative phase of a case (de Poot et al. 2004), where stories serve as guidelines in the search for new evidence. Twining (1999) and Anderson, Schum and Twining (2005) maintain that stories are psychologically necessary in the determination of the facts of a case, in that a story is used to organize and present the evidence in such a way that it is easily understandable. Like Crombag et al., they point to the dangers of stories and develop a simple protocol for analysing the plausibility and evidential support of stories.
