Award Abstract # 1823661
Psychological Assessment of Voluntary Consent

NSF Org: SES
Division of Social and Economic Sciences
Recipient: CORNELL UNIVERSITY
Initial Amendment Date: July 2, 2018
Latest Amendment Date: December 13, 2018
Award Number: 1823661
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: reginald sheehan
SES
 Division of Social and Economic Sciences
SBE
 Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences
Start Date: September 1, 2018
End Date: August 31, 2021 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $250,855.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $250,855.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2018 = $250,855.00
History of Investigator:
  • Vanessa Bohns (Principal Investigator)
    vkb28@cornell.edu
  • Roseanna Sommers (Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: Cornell University
341 PINE TREE RD
ITHACA
NY  US  14850-2820
(607)255-5014
Sponsor Congressional District: 19
Primary Place of Performance: Cornell University
Ives Hall
Ithaca
NY  US  14850-2820
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
19
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): G56PUALJ3KT5
Parent UEI:
NSF Program(s): LSS-Law And Social Sciences
Primary Program Source: 01001819DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT
Program Reference Code(s): 9178
Program Element Code(s): 137200
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.075

ABSTRACT

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution aims to protect the public from unreasonable search and seizure by requiring authorities to have probable cause before conducting a search. However, the vast majority of police searches today are authorized by citizens' voluntary consent. Consent searches do not require probable cause, which means that an individual can be singled out based on an officer's hunch, or for no reason at all. The legality of these consent searches rests on the "voluntariness test," an assessment of whether a reasonable person would feel free to refuse the officer's request or walk away. This test requires third-party decision-makers to engage in a perspective-taking task. They must determine how it would feel to be approached by a police officer and confronted with a search request. A key insight from social psychology is that people tend to perform such tasks poorly. In particular, people underappreciate the role of situational pressure and feelings of discomfort when judging others' behavior. This insight suggests that outside observers may not fully recognize the distress citizens are likely to experience when considering the prospect of saying "no" to a police officer. In a series of experiments, the current research will assess whether these perspective-taking errors cause outside observers to systematically overestimate how free a reasonable person would feel to refuse a search request, and, accordingly, whether the voluntariness test is biased against citizens who have consented to a search.

This research will introduce and validate a new experimental paradigm through which to examine the psychological task of assessing voluntariness. In this paradigm, one group of participants will be asked an intrusive and consequential search request, while another group of participants predicts how a reasonable person would respond to this request. It is hypothesized that participants in the "prediction" condition will underestimate compliance rates, despite having access to all the same information as participants in the "actual search" condition. In pilot studies, this paradigm generated large differences between predicted and observed compliance, indicating its promise for addressing long-standing questions related to the perceived and actual voluntariness of consent search. In addition to testing for main effects, the current research will test for moderation by features of the search request that might reduce the gap between perceived and actual voluntariness. Notifying participants that they could refuse a search without penalty, a frequently proposed solution by critics of consent search sometimes referred to as "Miranda-for-search," was not found to be effective at reducing this gap in pilot studies. Thus, the current research will explore alternative possible solutions, such as seeking written consent. Identifying features of the search request that effectively decrease the gap between perceived and actual voluntariness is essential for developing empirically supported policy recommendations related to changes to the law and/or to the practices used by law enforcement agents to obtain consent from citizens.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

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Sommers, R. and Bohns, V. K. "The Voluntariness of Voluntary Consent: Consent Searches and the Psychology of Compliance" The Yale law journal , v.128 , 2019 Citation Details

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution aims to protect the public from unreasonable search and seizure by requiring authorities to have probable cause before conducting a search. However, the vast majority of police searches today are authorized by citizens' voluntary consent. Consent searches do not require probable cause, which means that an individual can be singled out based on an officer's hunch, or for no reason at all. The legality of these consent searches rests on the "voluntariness test," an assessment of whether a reasonable person would feel free to refuse the officer's request or walk away. This test requires third-party decision-makers to engage in a perspective-taking task. They must determine how it would feel to be approached by a police officer and confronted with a search request. A key insight from social psychology is that people tend to perform such tasks poorly. In particular, people underappreciate the role of situational pressure and feelings of discomfort when judging others' behavior. This insight suggests that outside observers may not fully recognize the distress citizens are likely to experience when considering the prospect of saying "no" to a police officer.

We assessed in a series of experiments whether outside observers would systematically overestimate how free a reasonable person would feel to refuse a search request. Using an experimental paradigm in which one group of participants was asked an intrusive and consequential search request, while another group of participants predicted how a reasonable person would respond to this request, we found, as hypothesized, that participants in the "prediction" condition underestimated compliance rates, despite having access to all the same information as participants in the "actual search" condition. This paradigm consistently generated large differences between predicted and observed compliance, indicating its promise for addressing long-standing questions related to the perceived and actual voluntariness of consent search, and accomplishing the objective of successfully validating an experimental paradigm for examining the psychological task of assessing voluntariness. We further tested the robustness of this paradigm to different conditions (i.e., searching a bag instead of a phone, and conducting a higher-stakes search by claiming to search participants’ web search history), as well as diverse participant populations. We found the general finding to be highly robust to varying features of the request and to different participant populations.

In addition to testing for main effects, we also tested moderation by features of the search request that might reduce the gap between perceived and actual voluntariness. Contrary to predictions, notifying participants that they could refuse a search without penalty, a frequently proposed solution by critics of consent search sometimes referred to as "Miranda-for-search," was not found to be effective at reducing this gap, nor was seeking written consent with a consent form.

The robustness of this overall tendency for observers' to overestimate the voluntariness suggests this is important evidence to consider when assessing whether the standard voluntariness test is biased against citizens who have consented to a search.


Last Modified: 10/04/2021
Modified by: Vanessa K Bohns

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