Why Your Instincts Are a Liability in Professional Investigations
When navigating the world of workplace, civil rights, and compliance investigations, “credibility” is often the load-bearing wall in the architecture of a defensible compliance report. If it holds, the report stands; if it fails, the entire investigation collapses under the weight of litigation. Yet, for many investigators, the assessment of credibility is “the Trap”—a space where professional objectivity is frequently surrendered to biological bias.
The Anatomy of the Trap
Every investigation plan dictates that we must weigh the evidence. But when the evidence is human testimony, we fall prey to what social scientists call the heuristic of the “likable witness.” We are hardwired to believe that confidence equals accuracy and that institutional authority equals inherent integrity.
The Top 5 Human Weaknesses in Assessing Credibility
If your investigation relies on the “vibe” of the interview room, you are likely falling into one of these research-supported traps:
- The Halo Effect: Perceiving a high-status individual (a Dean, a VP, or a renowned SME) as inherently more reliable due to their professional accomplishments.
- The Consistency Fallacy: The false belief that a perfectly consistent story is the only sign of truth. Research shows that honest memory is often fragmented; “perfect” consistency is frequently a sign of a rehearsed script.
- Appeals to Authority: A susceptibility to technical complexity or institutional rank used to bypass the investigator’s scrutiny of the facts.
- Implicit Bias: The unconscious filtering of reliability through the lens of shared background, gender, or communication style.
- The Demeanor Myth: The debunked belief that physical “tells”—like eye contact or fidgeting—are reliable indicators of a witness’s accuracy.
The Documentation Exit—and Its Limits
In artifact-heavy environments, the most prudent approach is often to refrain from making a character-based finding. If the server logs, email chains, and Teams and Slack messages tell the story, the investigator does not need to decide if a witness is being truthful in spirit. They simply need to state that the account is “irreconcilable with the objective record.”
However, we must acknowledge the inherent limitations of this “Documentation Exit.” In many high-stakes scenarios—particularly the classic “he-said, she-said” conflict—the record is silent. There are no emails, no logs, and no witnesses. In these moments, simply refraining from a finding is not a neutral act; it is a failure to resolve a risk.
This is where a strong investigative protocol becomes essential. When artifacts fail, a standardized forensic framework allows an investigator to navigate the gap between “silence” and “certainty” without falling back on gut instinct.
Call to Action: Is Your Protocol Enough?
Does your current internal investigation framework rely on the subjective “judgment calls” of your staff when the documentation runs dry? We invite you to ponder: Are your organization’s investigations currently subject to hidden weaknesses due to a lack of formal protocol?
Braden Powell, LLC helps organizations design investigative frameworks that provide clear paths forward even when the evidence is purely testimonial. We can help you bridge the gap between ‘instinct’ and ‘systematization’ by reviewing and auditing your current investigative governance frameworks and protocols. We can also help you develop customized investigative playbooks that introduce and improve the effectiveness of your use of the rubrics and protocols.
Contact us to begin the year with the institutional infrastructure necessary to calibrate your team’s findings against a sustainable and defensible standard.