From Evidence to Justification: How Causal Attribution Shapes Public Judgments of Police Searches

Probable cause, required by the Fourth Amendment, and reasonable suspicion, articulated by the Supreme Court in Terry v. Ohio (1968), are distinct legal standards that authorize different levels of police intrusion. Although these standards differ in legal doctrine, both rely on subjective evaluations of evidentiary sufficiency. Drawing on attribution theory and research on heuristic judgment, this study investigates how evidence type (direct vs. indirect), crime-rate context (high vs. low), and competing legal standards influence public shape evaluations of police searches. A 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment was conducted with 299 U.S. participants. The data were analyzed using a serial mediation model (PROCESS Model 6). The study finds that evidence type was the strongest predictor of search justification, perception of guilt, and likelihood of finding relevant evidence. Crime-rate context also increased support for police searches, whereas legal standards had smaller effects on search justification and perception of guilt. Serial mediation analyses showed significant indirect effects through perception of guilt and the sequential pathway through perception of guilt and likelihood of relevant evidence from the search. These findings suggest that public evaluations of police conduct are shaped by evidentiary and contextual information as well as legal standards, highlighting the role of psychological processes in legal decision-making.

References

Terry v. Ohio, 392 U.S. 1 (1968).

Illinois v. Gates, 462 U.S. 213 (1983).

Brinegar v. United States, 338 U.S. 160 (1949).

United States v. Cortez, 449 U.S. 411 (1981).

Ornelas v. United States, 517 U.S. 690 (1996).

LaFave WR, 2012, Search and Seizure: A Treatise on the Fourth Amendment (5th ed.). Thomson Reuters/West, Minnesota.

Slobogin C, 2007, Privacy at Risk: The New Government Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Crespo AM, 2020, Probable Cause Pluralism. The Yale Law Journal, 129(6): 1276–1366. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/probable-cause-pluralism

Heider F, 1958, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey.

Kelley HH, 1973, The Processes of Causal Attribution. American Psychologist, 28(2): 107–128. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0034225

Pennington N, Hastie R, 1992, Explaining the Evidence: Tests of the Story Model for Juror Decision Making. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62(2): 189–206. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.62.2.189

Heller KJ, 2006, The Cognitive Psychology of Circumstantial Evidence. Michigan Law Review, 105(2): 241–305. https://repository.law.umich.edu/mlr/vol105/iss2/2

Illinois v. Wardlow, 528 U.S. 119 (2000).

Tversky A, Kahneman D, 1973, Availability: A Heuristic for Judging Frequency and Probability. Cognitive Psychology, 5(2): 207–232. https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0285(73)90033-9

Meares TL, 2015, Programming Errors: Understanding the Constitutionality of Stop-and-frisk as a Program, not an Incident. The University of Chicago Law Review, 82(1): 159–179. https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/uclrev/vol82/iss1/7

Palagashvili L, Goodman NP, 2023, Behavioral Public Choice and Policing in America. Behavioural Public Policy, 7(3): 432–461. https://doi.org/10.1017/bpp.2022.21

Slobogin C, Schumacher JE, 1993, Reasonable Expectations of Privacy and Autonomy in Fourth Amendment Cases: An Empirical Look at “Understandings Recognized and Permitted by Society.” Duke Law Journal, 42(4): 727–775. https://doi.org/10.2307/1372830

Kovera MB, Russano MB, McAuliff BD, 2002, Assessment of the Commonsense Psychology Underlying Daubert: Legal Decision Makers’ Abilities to Evaluate Expert Evidence in Hostile Work Environment Cases. Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, 8(2): 180–200. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8971.8.2.180

Yogev T, 2024, Attribution Matters: How Causal Explanations Influence Perceptions of Dangerousness and Racial Classification. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 51(3): 312–332. https://doi.org/10.1177/00938548241307234

Ask K, Granhag PA, 2005, Motivational Sources of Confirmation Bias in Criminal Investigations: The Need for Cognitive Closure. Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, 2(1): 43–63. https://doi.org/10.1002/jip.19

Tversky A, Kahneman D, 1974, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science, 185(4157): 1124–1131. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.185.4157.1124

Ross LD, 1977, The Intuitive Psychologist and his Shortcomings: Distortions in the Attribution Process, in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 173–220). Academic Press, New York.

Goff PA, Eberhardt JL, Williams MJ, et al., 2008, Not yet Human: Implicit Knowledge, Historical Dehumanization, and Contemporary Consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 94(2): 292–306. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.94.2.292

Slobogin C, 1991, The World without a Fourth Amendment. UCLA Law Review, 39(1): 1–107.

Quillian L, Pager D, 2001, Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime. American Journal of Sociology, 107(3): 717–767. https://doi.org/10.1086/338938

Hayes AF, 2022, Introduction to Mediation, Moderation, and Conditional Process Analysis: A Regression-based Approach (3rd ed.). Guilford Press, New York.

Cushman F, Young L, 2011, Patterns of Moral Judgment Derive from Complexities of Causal Attribution. Cognitive Science, 35(6): 1051–1075. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01178.x

Grinfeld S, Lagnado DA, Gerstenberg T, et al., 2020, Causal Responsibility and Robust Causation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 149(10): 1940–1959. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000755

Previous article in this issue

Next article in this issue