Peter Sutcliffe was interviewed nine times and the accent on a hoax tape counted in his favour. The tape had been played to the nation, and walking away from it would have meant admitting the enquiry had chased the wrong voice. Former senior detective Bob Pointer and private investigator Ben Cardall take the sunk cost fallacy into the incident room and the interview room, on both sides of the table.

In this episode:
- What the sunk cost fallacy is, and what theatre tickets and Concorde reveal about it
- Barry Staw's escalation research and why the most senior person in the room is most at risk
- The Yorkshire Ripper enquiry, the Wearside tape and the Byford Report
- How investigators rate the same evidence differently depending on their theory
- Spotting the sunk cost fallacy in witnesses and subjects who have committed to a story
- Why authentic dissent beats a devil's advocate, and Holmes's Norbury protocol
- Sincere listening, ORBIT and the premortem as field tools

If you have ever defended a theory because of what it cost you, subscribe and tell us in the comments which case you held onto too long.

Tags: sunk cost fallacy, escalation of commitment, tunnel vision investigation, confirmation bias, investigative interviewing, behavioural analysis, Yorkshire Ripper investigation, Byford Report, ORBIT interviewing, premortem, Sherlock Holmes deduction, Deductionist podcast

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Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

#podcast #ripper #sunkencost

Hannah Fry went through every past season of The Traitors looking for statistical patterns, then got recruited as a traitor herself. Maths can predict human behaviour across a crowd with unnerving precision. Point it at one person and the predictions fall apart, for reasons chaos theory explains.

In this episode:
• Why crowds behave like equations, from Hannah Fry's London riots model to the near repeat burglary effect
• How geographic profiling narrows a search without naming a suspect
• What the mathematics of love leaves out, and how overfitting fools analysts
• Chaos theory done properly, with Edward Lorenz, the butterfly effect and the MusicLab experiment
• Why 160 machine learning teams still could not predict human behaviour in individuals
• Bayesian reasoning as the bridge from pattern to person, tested on the taxicab problem
• The Sally Clark case and the statistical errors that convict the innocent

Subscribe for the method behind every case, and learn to predict human behaviour without ever having to guess.

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Everything else you need -- https://linktr.ee/bencardall

Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`

#maths #traitors #behaviour

The evidence in a romance scam is all there in writing. Every message, every apology, every “be careful, there are scammers on here” sits in the chat log like a frozen crime scene. Dr Elisabeth Carter, criminologist and forensic linguist, reads those crime scenes line by line, by hand, and she joins Ben Cardall and Bob Pointer to show exactly how the crime is built.

Most people picture a romance scam as a lonely pensioner and an oil rig sob story. The language shows something far more deliberate: credibility first, rapport second, then a slow transition where the scammer turns vulnerable and the victim offers the money nobody asked for. Elisabeth explains genre mapping (why the exaggeration we tolerate in normal dating, and the countdown clocks we tolerate on Black Friday, make red flags look green), how organised crime groups pass victims between operators to keep them awake, where sextortion enters, and why AI has made the old spelling mistake test useless.

Bob brings the reverse order technique from interview practice, Ben brings a super recogniser’s view of deepfake dating profiles, and the live chat brought receipts. You’ll leave with one rule that would stop most romance scam attempts dead in their tracks.

Victims of romance fraud get called gullible. The research describes grooming, coercion and abuse. By the end of this episode, you’ll see why.

🎧 Scam Secrets with Dr Elisabeth Carter, Shari Vahl and Alex Wood (BBC Radio 4): https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/scam-secrets/id1828899532 or search “Scam Secrets” on BBC Sounds
🔗 Dr Elisabeth Carter, Kingston University: https://www.kingston.ac.uk/about/staff/dr-elisabeth-carter
📖 Elisabeth’s latest book: The Language of Romance Crimes (Cambridge University Press)
🚨 Report fraud (England, Wales, NI): https://www.reportfraud.police.uk or 0300 123 2040
🚨 Scotland: call Police Scotland on 101

Subscribe if you want to see whether the Real Life Sherlock reputation survives ninety more pages of this.

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E-SCAPE GAME -- https://www.youtube.com/@thedeductionistteam
Everything else you need -- https://linktr.ee/bencardall

Music provided by https://robertjohncollinsmusic.com/`