Compliance And Obedience Research Paper

If the law does not shape the behavior of most citizens most of the time, bringing those people’s actions into conformity with legal rules, then the legal system is not effectively fulfilling its social regulatory function. In fact, the ability to secure widespread compliance with the law is often viewed as a central characteristic of effective legal authorities. ‘The law-giver must be able to anticipate that the citizenry as a whole will … generally observe the body of rules he has promulgated’ (Fuller 1971, p. 201), since the effective exercise of legal and political authority requires compliance from ‘the bulk of (citizens) most of the time’ (Easton 1965, p. 185). Hence, ‘a judge’s ruling means little if the parties to the dispute feel they can ignore it. Similarly, passing a law prohibiting some behavior is not useful it if does not affect how often the behavior occurs’ (Tyler 1990, p. 19).

Recognizing the importance of gaining widespread compliance with the law, most discussions of compliance focus on the issue of why people obey or disobey laws. One straightforward and widely noted perspective on this issue is the deterrence, sanctioning, or social control perspective. That perspective argues that law gains its influence over people’s behaviors because people are concerned about being caught and punished for wrongdoing. It is based upon the rational choice model of personal motivation, which views people as motivated by the desire to maximize their gains and to minimize their costs in social interactions.

From the deterrence perspective, two issues are relevant to decisions about whether or not to comply with the law. These issues are the expectation of gain, and the expectation of loss. The expectation of gain involves the person’s estimate of the likely gains from engaging in law-breaking behavior. That estimate is a multiplicative combination of the estimated likelihood of gain and the expected amount to be gained. For example, a person contemplating robbing a bank has an estimated gain that reflects his sense of the likelihood that he will gain a particular sum of money from robbing a bank.

The expectation of loss involves the possibility of being caught and punished for engaging in rule- breaking behavior. This expectation can be broken down into two components: estimates of the likelihood of being caught and punished for law-breaking (the probability of punishment), and estimates of the expected magnitude of such punishment (the severity of punishment). These two estimates are typically multiplied to produce the subjective estimated risk associated with law-breaking behavior.

One way to reduce the amount of law-breaking behavior is to minimize the possibility of gain that is associated with such behavior. So, to minimize the risk of robbery, taxi drivers put their profits in a floor safe and people carry little pocket money when they go out at night. However, since the amount to be gained by law-breaking is typically beyond the control of legal authorities, studies of deterrence usually focus on the ways in which changing either the estimated probability of punishment or the estimated severity of punishment affect the occurrence of criminal behavior.

The likelihood of being caught and punished for breaking the law can be changed in many ways, such as by increasing the number of police officers seeking to solve crimes, by raising the likelihood that charges will not be dismissed, and by altering legal procedures to change the likelihood of conviction. The move toward a nonunanimous jury decision rule or the use of smaller jury, for example, increase the likelihood of being found guilty for a crime.

The severity of punishment can be altered by increasing the penalties for various crimes or by limiting or eliminating parole. The recent increase in the number of crimes for which criminals in the USA might receive the death penalty is one highly salient example of heightening the potential severity of punishment.

When legal authorities heighten either the actual likelihood of being caught and punished for wrong-doing or the severity of punishment, they are in-creasing the objective risks of rule-breaking. The authorities assume that these changes alter people’s subjective estimates of the likelihood and severity of punishment for wrongdoing, and, as a consequence, lead to lower levels or rule-breaking behavior. Studies on the deterrent effect of estimated risk suggest that such deterrence effects do occur (see Nagin, 1998). While studies often find evidence of deterrence effects of rule-breaking behavior, the magnitude of those effects is typically small. For example, MacCoun (1993) examines deterrence studies in the area of drug use and estimates that approximately five percent of the variance in drug use behavior can be explained by variations in the expected likelihood and/or severity of punishment. Other studies using panel designs fail to find evidence of any significant independent deterrence effects (Paternoster et al. 1983, Tyler 1990). Hence, when deterrence effects occur, their magnitude is low.

The deterrence effects identified are more strongly associated with people’s estimates of the probability of punishment than they are with the anticipated severity of punishment (Nagin and Paternoster 1991, Paternoster 1987, 1989, Paternoster and Iovanni 1986). This suggests that efforts to increase compliance with the law need to focus on increasing the presence of the police, on encouraging apprehension, and/or on raising the likelihood of conviction in the courts. Efforts to lower the crime rate by intensifying penalties—such as the proliferation of death penalty offenses—will be relatively less successful.

Why are risk judgments not more strongly related to law-breaking behavior? One reason is that judgments of risk have to be reasonably high to influence people’s behavior—i.e., they have to exceed some threshold level to be psychologically meaningful (Ross 1982). However, in most actual situations, the objective risks of being caught and punished are quite low. For example, the objective risk of being caught, convicted and imprisoned for rape is 12 percent, for robbery 4 percent, for assault, burglary, larceny and motor vehicle theft, around one percent (Robinson and Darley 1995). Of course, the psychological or subjective estimate of risk is the key to people’s behavior—not the objective risk. Research suggests, however, that subjective risks are, if anything, lower than objective risks. As a consequence, subjective estimates of risk are quite low.

Ross (1982) applies the psychology of deterrence to the problem of drunk driving. He suggests that raising risk estimates enough to lower the rate of behavior, while not impossible, involves prohibitively high costs in terms of police manpower and citizens’ willingness to accept state intrusions into their personal lives. He argues that it is difficult to implement deterrence approaches within democratic societies. Interestingly, Ross argues that even the intensive efforts of Scandinavian authorities, including random road blocks and other similar expensive and intrusive law enforcement measures, are insufficient to create and maintain subjective risk estimates that are high enough to deter drunk driving. Many of the problems associated with deterrence-based strategies are structural; they concern our general inability to monitor people’s opportunities to break laws.

This argument suggests that there are situations in which deterrence strategies will be more or less effective in deterring law-breaking behavior. The two key variables that determine how conducive a situation is to a deterrence approach are the ease of behavioral surveillance and the level of resources that society is willing to devote to the task of surveillance. The effects of behavioral surveillance on the rate of law-breaking behavior can be illustrated by tax payments. If people are wage earners, their income is recorded, the possibility of hiding cheating is low, and the opportunities for effective deterrence of law-breaking behavior are high. The societal resource variable is illustrated by the case of murder. The objective risk of being caught and punished for murder is high (around 45 percent; Robinson and Darley 1997) because society has committed considerable resources to re-solving this type of crime. Because society is willing to devote sufficient resources to investigating murders, the likelihood of being caught for committing a murder is high enough for deterrence to be effective in lowering the murder rate.

However, the case of deterring murder illustrates an important limit to deterrence strategies. They are more effective in shaping the crime rate for crimes that are committed for instrumental reasons. For example, car theft, burglary, and crimes of this type are typically motivated by calculations about the costs and benefits expected from law-breaking. However, other crimes are expressive; they are more strongly shaped by one’s emotional state and events of the moment. Crimes of this type, such as rape and many murders, occur on the ‘spur of the moment’ and in the ‘heat of passion.’ Such crimes are not influenced by deterrence considerations, irrespective of the possibility of being caught and punished for wrongdoing. Deterrence approaches work most effectively in shaping the occurrence of instrumentally motivated crimes.

The problem faced by those responsible for the everyday enforcement of law in democratic societies is that, for most crimes, the resources devoted to law enforcement are low and the opportunities for cheating are high. As a consequence, deterrence strategies are unlikely to be a sufficient basis for an effective system of social regulation. Deterrence can form the foundation of efforts to maintain the legal order, but they cannot be a complete strategy for gaining compliance. To ensure sufficient public compliance, citizens must have other reasons for obeying the law.

Social psychologists typically divide the motivation for social behavior into two basic components. The first are people’s assessments of the potential gains and risks associated with engaging in various types of behavior. The influence of these judgments has already been examined. The second are the internal values that shape people’s feelings about what behavior is appropriate. Behavior based upon internal values is especially important to the legal system, since the desire to be consistent with internal values leads people to obey the law voluntarily. As a consequence, to the extent that people are following laws because of their internal values, society need not put its resources into supporting agents of social control. Further, such voluntary compliance is more reliable because it does not vary as a function of the person’s circumstances. When one drives up to a stop sign on a deserted road at night, one’s internal values lead one to stop, even when the possibility of punishment for ignoring the law is essentially nonexistent. It has been widely suggested that the ability of legal systems to function in democratic societies depends upon the system’s ability to gain such voluntary compliance with the law (Easton 1975, Engstrom and Giles 1972, Parsons 1967, Sarat 1977, Scheingold 1974).

What type of internal values might lead people to obey the law? Two types of values have been re-cognized as central. The first value concerns how people view the morality of engaging in illegal behaviors. Morality is concerned with personal feelings about what is right or wrong. For example, murder would still be viewed by most people as immoral, even if it were not illegal; drug use, in contrast, is regarded by many people as moral, even though it is illegal. The second value concerns how people view the legitimacy of law and legal authorities. Legitimacy denotes people’s sense of the degree to which they have a personal obligation to obey social rules.

1. Morality

Studies generally suggest that people’s views about the morality of engaging in rule-breaking behaviors shape their willingness to engage in those behaviors. Further, the influence of morality is typically found to be greater than that of the probability of punishment for rule-breaking. A classic study illustrating this point is that of Schwartz and/orleans (1967), which evaluated the effects of a persuasive appeal to pay taxes on taxpayers’ behavior. Citizens received either no appeal, an appeal based on the risk of being punished, or an appeal based on the immorality of cheating. The influence of the appeal was established by examining the level of taxes paid before and after the appeal. In the control group which received no appeal, the average change in taxes paid was -$13 dollars. In the sanction-based punishment group, the average amount paid increased $181. In the appeal to moral conscience group, the average payment increased $804.

Other studies support the argument that moral values influence law-related behavior, and that they have a greater influence than do variations in the threat of punishment. Tyler (1990) compared the influence of sanction threats and moral judgments about law-breaking on people’s everyday obedience to the law. He found that moral values significantly influenced law-related behavior and were more influential than were variations in the perceived risk of being caught and punished for wrongdoing. Paternoster (1989) also examined the influence of sanction threats and moral values on everyday law-related behavior and found that moral values were the primary factor shaping people’s behavior. And Gras- mick and Green (1980) and Grasmick and Bursik (1990) found that moral values were more central to people’s law-related behavior than were their concerns about sanctions.

Paternoster and Simpson (1996) also found that moral values had an important influence on whether or not people committed corporate crimes. Their study involved interviews with business students and executives who were given hypothetical situations in which they might break laws. They found that moral considerations exerted a ‘powerful and independent source of social control’ (p. 579). They also found that moral judgments constrained the operation of risk judgments. If people felt that law-breaking was immoral, considerations of the gains and losses associated with law-breaking became ‘virtually superfluous’ (p. 549) to their decisions about whether or not to follow the law. On the other hand, if people did not feel that law-breaking was immoral, their law-breaking behavior was linked to their risk judgments.

The degree to which moral values support the law depends upon the degree to which the behaviors that the law defines as illegal correspond to public views about what is right and wrong. When these two elements coincide, people’s motivation to obey the law should be especially strong, since law-breaking is then not only illegal, but also immoral. Robinson and Darley (1995) systematically examine the relationship between formal law and public views about what is right or wrong and demonstrate that there are a number of discrepancies. Such discrepancies, to the degree that people are aware of them, should lessen people’s motivation to comply with the law.

Studies of public opinion about the law suggest that the most persistent sources of public discontent with law involve public perceptions that: (a) too many criminals go unpunished due to legal ‘technicalities’ such as the insanity defense and the exclusionary rule, and (b) the sentences given for crimes are too lenient. In both cases, studies suggest that public views exaggerate the discrepancy between public conceptions of what is morally appropriate and what actually occurs.

One compliance-enhancing strategy available to the legal system is public education about what the law actually says and what the courts actually do. Such a strategy may be beneficial in increasing public compliance with the law by showing people that the law is more consistent with their moral values than they think. However, the work of Robinson and Darley (1995) makes it clear that if the public accurately understood the totality of the criminal and civil law, they would recognize a number of discrepancies between public morality and the formal law. Hence, any long-term effort to bring law and public morality together must involve some efforts to reconcile true discrepancies between the law and public morality.

2. Legitimacy

The second internal value that shapes behavior toward the law is the legitimacy of the law and of legal authorities. A law has legitimacy when others feel obligated to obey it. A legitimate authority is one which is entitled to have its decisions and rules accepted and followed by others. In the case of law, people feel a personal responsibility to comply voluntarily with those laws that are created and enforced by legitimate legal authorities. In contrast to morality, legitimacy is a general acceptance of the right of the law to dictate appropriate public behavior. When authorities possess legitimacy, they are better able to regulate effectively the behavior of citizens.

Tyler (1990) examined the influence of views about the legitimacy of the law on citizens’ everyday compliance with the law. He found that legitimacy had a significant influence on the degree to which people obeyed the law. Further, that influence was greater than were the effects of variations in the estimated probability of punishment. He has already asserted that legitmacy is a key value.

Studies suggest that the key to developing and to maintaining the legitimacy of law and of legal authorities lies in citizens’ evaluations of the procedures through which legal rules are created and implemented. Studies of local legal authorities, such as the police and local courts, make it clear that the central element that shapes public evaluations of their legitimacy are evaluations of the fairness of their procedures (Tyler 1990; Tyler et al. 1989). This is also true of citizens’ evaluations of national level authorities, including the Supreme Court (Murphy and Tanenhaus 1969, Tyler 1993, Tyler and Mitchell 1994) and Congress.

The key to effective social regulation is recognizing that people’s experiences with legal authorities not only shape their immediate compliance behavior, but also change their views about law and legal authorities in ways that lead to lasting compliance with the law. Studies indicate that experiencing fair procedures both leads to greater adherence to third-party decisions over time (Pruitt et al. 1993) and encourages long-term obedience to the law (Paternoster et al. 1997, Sparks et al. 1996). When legal authorities act in fair ways, they encourage the immediate acceptance of their decisions and enhance the values that lead to long-term compliance with the law.

3. The Law-Abiding Society

The distinction between risk gain estimates and internal values highlights the possibility of two types of legal culture. The first is a culture that builds public compliance on the basis of people’s concerns about the possibility of being caught and punished for wrong-doing. Such a deterrence-based society depends upon the ability of legal authorities to create and maintain a credible threat of punishment for wrongdoing. The studies outlined demonstrate that, while deterrence influences law-related behavior, the social context of democratic societies makes it difficult for authorities to engage in the levels of surveillance needed to sustain a viable legal system.

To be viable, a legal system requires that citizens’ behavior be influenced by internal values that promote compliance most of the time. Democratic societies depend heavily on people’s self-regulatory motivations. Both public views about the morality of engaging in illegal behaviors and widespread feelings of obligation to obey legitimate legal authorities are central to such voluntary compliance with the law. Internal values, then, are critical in creating a society based upon the willing consent and cooperation of citizens. That cooperation develops from people’s own feelings about appropriate social behavior, and is not linked to the risks of apprehension and punishment that people estimate to exist in their social environment.

A law-abiding society cannot be created overnight through changes in the allocation of resources within government agencies, because such changes only alter the expected gains and/or risks associated with compliance. It depends upon the socialization of appropriate social and moral values among children and the maintenance of those values among adults. Evidence suggests that the core elements in the creation and maintenance of such social values are: (a) the belief that law is consistent with public views about morality, and (b) the judgment that legal authorities follow fair procedures in exercising their authority.

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