In this video, I want to talk about objectivity and avoiding bias and things to be careful of.
So during our investigations or even before, we might have personal feelings about it.
It's kind of hard to come and go into something without a preconceived notion.
Outside influence.
Things like friends, family, the people that are entrusting us with an investigation, for example,
might be something in a news story that we're investigating.
Maybe we're trying to, um, verify the legitimacy of a story, and there could be a lot of outside
influence, a lot of people chiming in about what they think about that story, what their ideas are,
what their supposed evidence is, or what happened.
Our past history might influence our our perception and how we enter things.
We may have had similar cases, which goes back to past history.
We might be dealing with a subject matter that's that's very emotional to us.
Things like missing children, violent crimes, for example.
You might be a victim of violent crime and you're investigating one or someone that you know or care
about was a victim of a violent crime.
And maybe you're investigating a violent crime.
So that could definitely affect your personal feelings about things like that.
Um, it could be investigating a person that we distrust or like, or a subject matter or a group or
whatnot.
There's a lot of different things that we may go into where we have a particular idea about it or a
feeling about it, either negative or positive even.
We might have positive feelings about a certain group or a certain ideal, or things like that, or
a person, and and generally what we want to always assume the best about someone or something that
we like.
And that could be a different type of bias.
But the problem is.
When we enter investigation with bias, it's a quick way to poison it.
If I'm going in with either a positive bias or a negative bias, and I allow that to.
Corrupt my investigation.
I start looking for things to validate my feelings and what the results are going to be one way or another.
That's a really quick way to poison your investigation, and also to get bad evidence and ultimately
give bad information back to whoever we're doing the investigation for.
And you got to be really careful about that.
And we see this a lot with things like misinformation, disinformation, where people will go and they'll
research something and they they'll get a certain idea and they have certain beliefs and they go out
and they look for validation for that.
They go look for stories or posts or supposed evidence that backs up their personal ideals.
And that information turns out to be bad most of the time.
Things like the supposed news site that looks like a news site in very small print, it says, uh,
parody or um, something like that.
You know, it's, it's or the photo is photoshopped and, but and the source that they get it from is
not a credible source, but it backs up their personal bias, what they, what they want to believe.
And again, we have to be very careful about that because that ultimately the information is wrong.
And if we present that wrong information from an investigation back to our client, or if it's a legal
issue or if it's, um, something that may get someone terminated or anything like that, that ultimately
does not help anyone.
So we have to be very careful about our bias poisoning, our investigation.
We have to go with a, uh, objective mind if as much as possible, we need to try to remain objective
in our methods.
So again, if I have a.
If I have a personal bias towards something, I want to try to go in as much as possible to not allow
that to influence my decision.
I need to go in and just go, okay, well, I'm going to go let the evidence speak for itself.
I'm not going to seek out answers that lead me down a certain path.
I'm going to try to stay down the middle and collect information and then verify it.
So again, we need to, uh, remain objective.
And the evidence we collect, we can't jump to conclusions without evidence that is vetted.
So if I find information that that backs up what I would like it to be, I need to make sure that information
is good.
We need to verify our results.
Whether it backs up our, um, our beliefs or not.
We need to verify anything, any information we find.
And even if we're going in without any personal bias, it's it's always important to verify your results
and make sure that it to the best of your ability, that it is legitimate.
Our findings may not always be what we originally expected.
There's times where I went in to debunk something and it turned out to be.
From all the evidence, I found that.
Okay, well, actually, you know that that was true or it was partially true or things like that.
So.
If we have an idea or in our head that something's going to turn out a certain way, it might not.
So we have to be very cognizant of being open minded in our investigation.
The other problem is if we're if we're kind of closed off, if we're kind of figure things are going
to go a certain way, we're not going to be open to finding other information or using looking at other
avenues to find information and verify our, our results and, and find new evidence.
Our findings may not be what our clients expected.
And ultimately that's okay.
As long as.
You're pretty confident in what you found and how legitimate that information is, and that's something
that should be explained to the client ahead of time.
That.
If you if you think the evidence is going to point a certain way, it may not.
There may be a 90% chance that it is going to turn out the way you think it is, and I could find the
evidence for you, and I can back it up and I can verify everything for you.
But there is a chance that it may not.
So you need to be prepared for that.
And ultimately, we are looking for the truth.
We're not looking to say validate anyone's personal beliefs or feelings per se.
We're ultimately looking for what the actual truth is, so keep that in mind.
Try to be open minded.
And try to keep your biases out of your investigations.
Thank you for watching.
I'll see you in the next video.