The Mr. Big technique on trial by jury

ABSTRACT

Mr. Big is a Canadian undercover police technique used to elicit confessions. Undercover officers befriend the suspect, and gradually draw them into a fictitious criminal organization. Upon meeting the boss of the organization, ‘Mr. Big’, the suspect is pressured to confess. When evidence from the sting operation, including the confession, is presented later in court, it may induce juror moral prejudice towards a defendant. We evaluated how situational and dispositional sting factors (crime task severity, financial incentive, and defendant intelligence) influence mock juror moral prejudice and decision-making in Mr. Big cases. Results from Experiment 1 (N = 270) showed fewer guilty verdicts in the high incentive conditions. In Experiment 2 (N = 1,666), high incentive and low defendant intelligence were related to fewer guilty verdicts, more favorable ratings of defendant character, and more skeptical evaluations of confession evidence. Additionally, there were differences between community and student participants on multiple outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Mr. Big interrogation
• false confessions
• jury decision-making
• prejudice
• verdicts

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Christina J. Connors http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2703-0915

Notes

1 We did not re-examine the effect of crime task severity, due to the difficulty of achieving a manipulation that would be both salient as well as ethically sound.

2 A more conservative priori power analyses was conducted in Experiment 2 to ensure sufficient power, in part so that we could assess trending effects of incentive from Experiment 1.

3 We collected extra participants to account for potential participant drop out.

4 There were n = 7 community respondents who were recruited through online social media advertisements, and received no compensation.

5 Due to the large number of variables in the path analyses, only the significant results are presented. See Supplementary Materials 4 for information on all results.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Grant to the second and third authors.