Would you hand over your unlocked cellphone to a stranger? Think about all the things you access on your phone – text messages, website logins, photos, notes, banking apps… Now what if a police officer asked to look at it – would you let a police officer look at your unlocked phone? If you said no, you might be surprised by what research says, and may even change your answer by the time you finish reading this post.
In the United States, the Fourth Amendment guarantees citizens protection “in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause…” (U.S. Const. amend. IV). However, individuals can give up that right against unreasonable searches through consent – for example, when a police officer asks a person, “Do you mind if I search your car today?” during a stop on the side of the road, and the person responds, “No problem officer, you can search, I have nothing to hide,” they are giving consent, which gives the police officer the authority to search without needing to get a warrant. Of State Patrol agency searches, consent searches can account for up to 85% of all searches (see Dias et al., 2024, Table 1). Now, this is not often an issue, as most consent searches don’t lead to arrests or finding contraband, but can become an issue when something is found, and the person subsequently finds themselves in court. At the heart of the current debate is not the search itself, but the ability for one to say no to an officer asking to search their belongings.
Psychologically, it is incredibly difficult to engage in “perspective-taking,” as people usually fall victim to using their own experiences when trying to picture how someone else must feel or behave. To successfully make estimates about others’ actions and behaviors, people must first adjust from thinking within their current emotional state to independent of their emotional state. Then, they must adjust from thinking of themselves to thinking of others. These adjustments are very difficult to make on their own, so when combining them, there are often several errors made, resulting in a third-party – maybe a juror, or a judge – to come to (sometimes significantly) different decisions than the person actually going through the experience does.
In “Consent Searches and Underestimation of Compliance: Robustness to Type of Search, Consequences of Search, and Demographic Sample,” researchers were interested in comparing what people experience to people imagining someone else experiencing the same event (i.e., forecasting what the experience would be like). Imagine if the researcher told you:
“Before we begin the study, can you please unlock your phone and hand it to me? I’ll just need to take your phone out of the room for a moment in order to check your web search history.”
What would you do? How many people do you think gave up their phones?
Forecasters in the study predicted that a reasonable person would hand over their phone on average 34% of the time. But 94% of people directly asked actually gave the researcher their phone! Therefore, the forecasters substantially underestimated how many people would comply with the researcher request. Moreover, 66% of participants who gave researchers their phone said the researcher would be able to access sensitive information (like SSN and passwords) on the phone without any additional passwords.
Although this research does not directly examine responses to police requests, the findings are important, nonetheless. In all interactions with the authorities, remember your rights – the constitution protects you from having to say yes to these kinds of searches. So, with all this in mind, would you give a police officer your unlocked phone?
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