Consenting to searches and the 4th Amendment: Situated social cognition within the "totality of circumstances" analysis

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Under the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, people have the fundamental right to be free from unreasonable searches. A search does not violate the 4th Amendment when a person voluntarily consents to be searched, and people routinely and frequently consent to police requests to search. The reasons why people consent to police searches, even when they are in possession of illegal material, are poorly understood. As a result, it is difficult for courts to assess voluntariness of consent in a systematic way. The purpose of this research is to identify factors that influence the voluntariness of consents and to identify factors that may increase coercion to consent. Situated cognition is a psychological theory arguing that the social and physical situation in which events occur can affect how a person perceives an event and behaves during an event. This project will apply situated social cognition to the consent search situation to determine what aspects of the social and physical situation in which the consent search takes place might make people more likely to feel coerced to consent. Across a series of studies, the influence of situational factors will be investigated such as the physical environment (size of the search space, lighting and temperature), the relative physical positions of the searcher and person being searched, and the physical and psychological connection between the person and the property being searched. The research will be conducted by creating a situation in which a request to search will be made. This new application of situated social cognition to the legal system will advance the theory generally, making the research important theoretically. The results of this research will provide important information to courts in their consideration of consent searches which will be essential to the protection of fundamental Constitutional rights.