Lawyer Monthly Magazine - April 2019 Edition

APR 2019 40 Special Feature www. lawyer-monthly .com Why Don’t We Always Act on Our Suspicions? A recent poll has revealed that the majority of professionals are concerned about becoming a target for criminals looking to exploit their professional skills and services to enable money laundering. However, various barriers could be inhibiting lawyers from reporting their suspicions. Here, we explore an alternative reason to why suspicions are not always raised: our brain and psychology. A new poll 1 for the Flag It Up campaign indicates that complying with Anti-Money Laundering regulations is a top priority for 96% of lawyers. But what could be preventing them from reporting their suspicions? It’s important to reflect on the factors that could be holding them back, such as competing motivations on their time and cognitive and cultural barriers. To overcome these barriers, we need to recognise our own biases and how they can be swayed by our environment. Criminals laundering money earn hundreds of millions of pounds each year from illegal activities ranging from selling firearms and drugs to organised immigration crime, human trafficking, and child sexual exploitation 2 . They know the triggers of suspicion and can structure transactions and deals to lessen the appearance of any red flags. But in the game of cat and mouse between crime agencies and criminals, crucial information comes from well-trained human intelligence: the subconscious, gut feeling of unease in the lawyers when suspicions are raised. What happens when we encounter suspicious activity? Our minds work less like computers and more like simulators. When we encounter a door, our brains don’t calculate “rectangular object, hinge and handle…door”, we expect a door and assume we can open it. What the mind sees is largely based on past experience, but it also knows when something in its simulation feels wrong. When our expectations are violated, part of our brain at the base of the prefrontal cortex, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), fires. That firing tells us that something in our model of the world needs to be fixed. We feel suspicion as a gut feeling, of slight distress or unease. To ease this feeling, we seek out information that will once again leave us able to predict the world. In this crucial moment, various cognitive biases can lead us from suspicion to carrying on with our day rather than further investigating and if appropriate, filing a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR) with the National Crime Agency. What might prevent us from reporting suspicious activity? Two relatedand important biases are important to recognise. The first is confirmation bias – we seek out information that supports what we already think or want to think, rather than information that properly tests our beliefs. Written by Dr. Michael Muthukrishna, Assistant Professor of Economic Psychology.