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

根据美国宪法第四修正案，人们享有不受无理搜查的基本权利。当一个人自愿同意被搜查时，搜查并不违反第四修正案，而且人们通常也经常同意警察的搜查请求。为什么人们会同意警察的搜查，即使他们拥有非法物品，人们对此却知之甚少。因此，法院很难系统地评估同意的自愿性。本研究的目的是确定影响自愿同意的因素，并确定可能增加强制同意的因素。情境认知是一种心理学理论，认为事件发生的社会和物理情境会影响一个人对事件的感知和在事件中的行为。该项目将把情境社会认知应用于同意搜索情境，以确定同意搜索发生的社会和物理情境的哪些方面可能使人们更有可能感到被迫同意。在一系列的研究中，情境因素的影响将被调查，如物理环境（搜索空间的大小，照明和温度），搜索者和被搜索者的相对物理位置，以及人与被搜索财产之间的生理和心理联系。研究将通过创建一个请求搜索的情况来进行。这种将情境社会认知应用于法律制度的新方法，将使这一理论得到普遍的推进，使这一研究具有重要的理论意义。这项研究的结果将为法院考虑征求同意提供重要资料，这对保护基本宪法权利至关重要。

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.