CHAPTER FOUR
Cooperation with Legal Authorities in Local Communities
In chapter 3, I examined the factors that motivate employees to cooperate with the organizations for which they work. That analysis distinguishes between two forms of cooperation—rule-following and performance. In this chapter I will extend that analysis to a second arena, that of cooperation with legal authorities—that is, the police, the courts, and the law.
My purpose in testing my ideas in this new arena is to examine the breadth of the influence of social motivations in social settings. To do so I am choosing an arena that is quite distinct from work organizations. Here I focus on communities and on people’s behavior in the communities in which they live. That behavior involves compliance with the law, but also cooperation with the police to deal with the community problems of crime and social disorder. People can help the police by reporting crime and criminals and/or by working with others to help manage problems in their community.1
In the past, as has been noted, cooperation with legal authorities has been conceptualized as involving compliance. Compliance is important because a core function of social regulatory authorities like the police and the courts is to bring the behavior of members of the public into line with the law. This is true both in personal encounters between members of the public and legal authorities, in which police officers or judges make decisions about what is appropriate conduct that people need to accept and follow, and in the case of people’s everyday compliance with the law.
The ability to shape people’s behavior is key to the effectiveness of legal authorities since, if the law does not shape the behavior of most people most of the time, the legal system is not effectively fulfilling its social regulatory function. The need for legal authorities to be able to secure compliance has been widely noted by legal scholars and social scientists (Fuller 1969). This is the case because the effective exercise of legal authority requires compliance from “the bulk of [the citizens] most of the time” (Easton 1975, 185). Decisions by police officers or judges mean very little if people generally ignore them, and laws lack importance if they do not affect public behavior (Tyler 2006a, 2006b).
Such compliance by members of the public can never be taken for granted. As Stephen Mastrofski, Jeffrey Snipes, and Anne Supina suggest, “Although deference to legal authorities is the norm, disobedience occurs with sufficient frequency that skill in handling the rebellious, the disgruntled, and the hard to manage—or those potentially so—has become the street officer’s performance litmus test” (1996, 272). Similarly, Lawrence Sherman (1993) highlights the problem of defiance by the public, and the need to minimize resistance to the directives of the police.
The studies by Mastrofski and colleagues in which social scientists observed police behavior provide some evidence about the frequency of such problems. The researchers observed police encounters with the public in Richmond, Virginia, and found an overall noncompliance rate of 22 percent: 19 percent of the time when the police told a person to leave another person alone; 33 percent of the time when the police told a person to cease some form of disorder; and 18 percent of the time when the police told a person to cease illegal behavior (Mastrofski, Snipes, and Supina 1996, 281). A replication of this study in India-napolis and St. Petersburg found an overall noncompliance rate of 20 percent: 14 percent of the time when the police told people to leave another person alone; 25 percent of the time when the police told a person to cease some form of disorder; and 21 percent of the time when the police told a person to cease illegal behavior (McCluskey, Mastrofski, and Parks 1999, 400).
Further, the studies outlined look just at immediate compliance—that is, whether people did as instructed—and not at whether people willingly accepted the decisions made by the authorities, buying into their resolution to a problem or understanding why the restrictions of their behavior are appropriate and reasonable. As the researchers note, “citizens who acquiesce at the scene can renege” (Mastrofski et al. 1996, 283). People may renege in their future behavior if they have complied in the face of coercive power. If they do so, this requires further police intervention at future times.
Recognizing the importance of gaining widespread compliance with the law, most discussions of social regulation focus on why people obey or disobey the law both in response to specific decisions and in their everyday lives. Addressing this question is the key to developing effective policing strategies, since to be able to regulate the behavior of the public, legal authorities need to accurately understand the factors that motivate people’s law-related behavior.
The form of cooperation that we would like to motivate on the part of the residents of communities has changed over the years. Early social order–based discussions of the type of public cooperation that were viewed as desirable focused upon compliance with legal rules and the decisions of legal authorities. Such compliance continues to be important (Tyler 2006a). Recent discussions have expanded that compliance frame to include the recognition of the value of voluntary compliance—that is, deference (Sunshine and Tyler 2003; Tyler and Huo 2002). However, increasingly it has become clear that we want more from community residents than mere compliance with the law.
To be effective in lowering crime and creating secure communities, the police must be able to elicit cooperation from community residents. Security cannot be produced by either the police or community residents acting alone—it requires cooperation. Such cooperation potentially involves, on the part of the public, both obeying the law (Tyler 2006a) and working with the police or with others in the community to help combat crime in the community (Sampson, Raudenbush, and Earls 1997). We need the active cooperation of members of the community to effectively manage community problems. The police, for example, need community cooperation in the form of reporting crime and criminals, as well as in joining collective efforts to combat crime via community patrols or neighborhood watch programs (Sampson et al. 1997).
In this chapter I will focus directly upon two forms of public cooperation that actively aid the police. Both reflect a type of discretionary—that is, voluntary—action in which individuals can choose whether or not to engage. The first is the willingness to cooperate with the police by providing information relevant to dealing with crime; this includes information about the location of criminals, the occurrence of crime, and other information that aids police officers in doing their jobs. The second type of cooperation involves working with the police by attending community meetings, participating in neighborhood watches, and engaging in other types of joint activities to deal with crime and disorder in the community.
It has always been recognized that the police and courts benefit when those in the communities they regulate cooperate with them in joint efforts to enforce the law and to fight crime and criminal behavior. Recent research emphasizes this point and even raises questions about whether legal authorities can effectively manage the problems of community crime control without public cooperation (Sampson and Bartusch 1998). As Mark Moore notes, “The loss of popular legitimacy for the criminal justice system produces disastrous consequences for the system’s performance. If citizens do not trust the system, they will not use it” (1997, 17).
Instrumental Motivations for Cooperation
Just as was true in the case of work settings, one important tradition is the social control or instrumental perspective, which argues that people’s actions are governed by their self-interest, either in the form of sanctions or incentives (Nagin 1998). The sanction risk involves the belief that rule-breakers are punished (Bayley 1998; Nagin 1998). The incentive involved is linked to police performance; the police can encourage cooperative behavior by giving cooperation greater potential for personal benefit for community residents in demonstrating, for example, that the police are effective in fighting crime (Kelling and Coles 1996) and/or that rule-breakers are punished (Bayley 1998; Nagin 1998).
Discussions of public trust and confidence in the police often assume that the key to public feelings about the police, the courts, and the legal system is the public’s evaluation of the outcomes that the public receives from these legal authorities. In the case of the police, their ability or inability to engage in effective crime control is frequently seen as driving the valence of public evaluations. Shared beliefs that the community can be effective in fighting crime have, for example, been shown to motivate community residents to work with each other to fight crime and disorder in their communities (Sampson et al. 1997).
Unfortunately, from the instrumental perspective, it is often not in the short-term self-interest of individuals to cooperate with law enforcement agencies. People often see little immediate personal utility in supporting police efforts to control crime by reporting crimes and criminals or by helping in community efforts to fight crime. Hence, strategies appealing to self-interest are often an inadequate basis for managing crime and security. Empirical research supports this argument by finding only weak correlations between risk and compliance (MacCoun 1993), as well as little connection between police performance and public evaluations of and cooperation with the police (National Research Council 2004; Skogan and Meares 2004).
An additional type of instrumental motivation is distributive justice. Another type of instrumental model links public behavior and policy support to issues of police fairness in the distribution of their services and protection across the community. Here the issue is whether the police fairly distribute police services, providing “equal protection to all.” Austin Sarat (1977) argues that the demand for equal treatment is a core theme running through public evaluations of the police and the courts. He suggests that the “perception of unequal treatment is the single most important source of popular dissatisfaction with the American legal system. According to available survey evidence, Americans believe that the ideal of equal protection, which epitomizes what they find most valuable in their legal system, is betrayed by police, lawyers, judges, and other legal officials” (Sarat 1977, 434). This argument roots evaluations of the police, and public reactions to them, in views about how the police distribute public resources and services. For example, a common view in poor and minority communities is that the police patrol those areas less aggressively and respond to calls for help less quickly than they do in rich and white neighborhoods. In the case of the police there are two issues: first, whether the police have provided the person being interviewed with fair outcomes, and second, whether they distribute the outcomes they provide fairly across different social and economic groups—that is, whether they discriminate against particular groups or communities.
The notion that people’s behavior with respect to the law is shaped by calculations of expected gains and losses is a core premise of rational choice theory, which is derived from neoclassical economics (Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin 1978; Nagin 1998). It is assumed that most people will calculate expected utilities by multiplying the probability of an outcome (e.g., getting caught for armed robbery or drunk driving) by its valence (very, very bad). If the laws are well calibrated, people will arrive at the desired conclusion that they should follow the law. Thus, rational self-interest is the motivational engine of the deterrence/ social control model. To regulate behavior, this model suggests that decision makers should adjust criminal sanctions to the needed level so that the expected losses associated with lawbreaking will minimize the likelihood that people will indeed break laws.
Such models focus on the ability of legal authorities and institutions to shape people’s behavior by threatening to deliver or by actually delivering negative sanctions for rule-breaking. To implement such deterrence strategies, police officers carry guns and clubs and can threaten citizens with physical injury and incapacitation, in addition to financial penalties. Their goal is to establish their authority and “[t]he uniform, badge, truncheon, and arms all may play a role in asserting authority” in the effort to “gain control of the situation” (Reiss 1971, 46). The police seek to control the individual’s behavior “by manipulating an individual’s calculus regarding whether ‘crime pays’ in the particular instance” (Meares 2000, 396). Judges similarly shape people’s acceptance of their decisions by threatening fines or even jail time for failure to comply.
While the focus of this analysis is on cooperation, this deterrence approach is still important. It matters because of the suggestion that people focus on whether they see evidence that those who break the law are punished. Hence, deterrence is a key sign of instrumental effectiveness and is linked to performance in combating crime. Thus, people view the ability of the police to manage community problems, something that an instrumental model argues should be related to the motivation to cooperate, as being linked to whether they can credibly shape the behavior of potential rule violators.
There are many bases for a critique of an instrumental model of social order maintenance. The key one that will be advanced here is that it is a costly and minimally effective system of social control (Tyler 2007). This argument flows cleanly from the discussion of instrumental mechanisms in the introduction to this volume. There instrumental mechanisms were found to be effective, but marginally so. Their influence was inconsistently discernable, and when found it was weak. Further, as outlined, that influence is resource intensive—that is, costly to create and maintain.
The high cost of the system stems from the need to create and maintain a credible threat of punishment and, relatedly, compelling evidence of performance effectiveness. People will only change their behavior when they feel that there is a reasonable risk of being caught and punished for wrongdoing, both when they are personally considering rule-breaking and when they are evaluating whether they believe that the authorities are effectively managing the problem of crime and social order in their community. People will try to hide their illegal behavior, so a system of surveillance is needed to identify wrongdoing, and that system has to both work and be seen to work.
The problems of surveillance are central to the effectiveness of performance in deterrence models, since research suggests that it is the probability of punishment, not its severity, that shapes rule-related behavior. As a consequence, a system for detecting wrongdoing must be created and maintained. It is not realistic to substitute draconian punishments for a more costly system that creates credible risks of being detected while engaging in wrongdoing. For this reason, as Tracey Meares notes, the effectiveness of “instrumental means of producing compliance always depend[s] on resource limits” (2000, 401). The relevant questions are how much in terms of financial and other benefits and burdens authorities are willing to expend in order to control crime, and how much power to intrude into citizens’ lives people are willing to allow the authorities to have.
Research does support the notion that variations in the perceived certainty of punishment do affect people’s compliance with the law, at least to some degree. People’s behavior is often, though not always, shaped by their estimate of the likelihood that if they disobey the law they will be caught and punished (see Nagin and Paternoster 1991; Paternoster 1987, 1989; Paternoster and Iovanni 1986; Paternoster, Saltzman, Waldo, Chiricos 1983). At the same time, however, perceptions of the likelihood of being caught and punished seem to have a relatively minor influence on people’s behavior, as has already been outlined (MacCoun 1993; Robinson and Darley 1995, 1997; Ross 1982). Consequently, social control strategies based exclusively on a deterrence model of human behavior have had at best limited success (see also Tyler 1997, 1998). Raymond Paternoster notes that “perceived certainty [of punishment] plays virtually no role in explaining deviant/criminal conduct” (1987, 191). Hence, deterrence is a very high cost strategy that yields identifiable, but weak, results.2
Of course, performance-based instrumental models are not always an equally effective or ineffective strategy. One of the key problems with sanctioning systems is that they require near constant surveillance of individual behavior. For obvious reasons, people are strongly motivated to hide their behavior from authorities to avoid punishment; authorities must therefore develop surveillance systems for detecting rule-breaking behavior. Deterrence is more effective when surveillance is easy, because the structure of the situation makes it easy. For example, wage earners’ incomes are easy for the government to monitor, because businesses withhold percentages from each paycheck and send the withheld amount to the government in the form of tax payments. This makes tax violations among this group relatively easy to prosecute. In other cases, however, surveillance can be quite difficult. The police, for example, have tremendous difficulty monitoring public behavior in order to identify people who are using illegal drugs, just as tax authorities have trouble monitoring the incomes of street vendors, waiters, and people who run small businesses.
The deterrence model probably also works best in the case of crimes that are committed for instrumental reasons. For example, car theft, burglary, and instrumentally motivated crimes of this type are at least to some extent motivated by calculations about the costs and benefits expected from lawbreaking behavior. Thus, deterrence approaches work best in affecting the occurrence of instrumentally motivated crimes—that is, with crimes that are motivated by rational calculations about gain and loss. So, for example, it is known that making one’s home resistant to burglary by putting in locks is very effective since instrumentally motivated thieves quickly move to the next home. Similarly, locking one’s car is very effective in lowering the likelihood that it will be stolen. These instrumental actions are significantly less effective in controlling criminal behavior that is motivated by factors other than economic gain. For example, when rape or murder occur in the context of a specific relationship, the wrongdoer is unlikely to simply move to other victims when he encounters difficulties.
There are many other crimes that are motivated not by instrumental concerns but by temporary emotional states (Katz 1988). For example, crimes such as rape, assault, and many murders occur on the “spur of the moment” and in the “heat of passion.” In such cases, the assumption that rational calculations of costs and benefits enter into the perpetrator’s “decision” about whether or not to commit such crimes is naive in the extreme. In part, this is because of intrapersonal empathy gaps: the person who is in a “hot state” cannot access or identify with how he will think or feel later upon returning to a “cold state.” Thus, crimes of passion as well as crimes committed under states of intoxication are relatively unaffected by deterrence strategies, regardless of the actual or even perceived likelihood of being caught and punished for wrongdoing.
Deterrence works reasonably well in at least some cases, such as murder, because society has devoted considerable resources to preventing murder and enforcing penalties for it. The objective risk of being caught and punished for murder is relatively high: approximately 45 percent (Robinson and Darley 1997). The likelihood of being caught for committing a murder is high enough for deterrence to be effective in lowering the murder rate. Even in this case, however, criminals are not as sensitive to the magnitude of the penalty as they are to the estimated probability of being apprehended. As a result, capital punishment does not serve to deter murder more effectively than does life imprisonment (Ellsworth and Mauro 1998).3
Social Motivations
Issues regarding the limits of instrumental motivations are clear (Tyler 2007). The question for legal authorities is whether there are other motivations that might be tapped to supplement efforts to engage public cooperation. In this case, the other motivations that we are concerned with are social motivations. This study considers the five types of social motivation outlined in the prior discussion of work motivation: attitudes, values, identity, procedural justice, and motive-based trust.
Attitudes involve people’s feelings toward legal authorities. In the case of legal authorities these items reflect generally favorable or unfavorable feelings toward the law and legal authorities.
Values included legitimacy and moral value congruence. Legitimacy reflects feelings of obligation toward the law and toward legal authorities. Moral value congruence is the degree to which people believe that the law reflects moral values and the police act morally.
Identity was assessed by degree of identification with the police. It reflects the respondents’ views about whether they share values, background, and concerns with police officers in their neighborhood. They were also asked whether they felt that the police respected them and their values and lifestyle.
Procedural justice reflected judgments about the appropriateness of police behavior. It included evaluations of the fairness of decision making (neutrality, transparency, factuality, allowing opportunities for input) and of interpersonal treatment (treatment with respect and dignity, respect for rights).
Finally, motive-based trust was based upon evaluations of the motives of the police. It reflected the extent to which police officers were judged to genuinely care about the public and take account of their needs and concerns.
Tom Tyler (2006a) has examined the role of instrumental and social motivations in shaping compliance with the law in the everyday life of Chicagoans. That study provided preliminary evidence that social motivations independently shape compliance, but focused only on a narrow set of such motivations (i.e., values). However, the study does not examine the factors shaping voluntary cooperation with legal authorities in the form of actively helping legal authorities to combat crime. Similarly, the findings of Tom Tyler and Yuen Huo (2002), a study of personal experiences with the police and courts, suggest that social motivations are important in shaping voluntary decision acceptance when dealing with the police and the courts. However, this study also does not examine the antecedents of active cooperation.
A Study of New Yorkers
This is a panel study in which New Yorkers were interviewed over the telephone at two points in time.4 (For details, see Sunshine and Tyler 2003, study 2; and Tyler and Fagan 2008.) The first-wave sample consisted of 1,653 interviews with residents of New York City, and was drawn from a stratified random sample of telephone numbers in the city, with an overrepresentation of nonwhite residents designed to produce a high proportion of Latino and African American respondents. Approximately one year following the first interview, attempts were made to recontact and reinterview all of the respondents interviewed. A subset of 830 of those originally interviewed was successfully reinterviewed. A comparison of those reinterviewed to the original sample indicates no significant differences in ethnicity, gender, age, income, or education.
The sample frame was based upon lists of eligible telephone numbers, and did not include cell phones; it was weighted by census tract to produce an ethnically diverse sample of New Yorkers. If an answering machine was reached, respondents were called again. The interviews were conducted in English or in Spanish. The ethnicity of the respondent and the interviewer was not matched. When a home was reached, the individual with the most recent birthday was interviewed. The response rate for the the first-wave survey was 64 percent of eligible respondents.
In the second-wave survey efforts were made to contact all first-wave respondents, and 53 percent were identified and reinterviewed (n = 879). Although efforts were made to trace and reinterview those respondents who had moved, only those respondents still living within the same neighborhood were included in this analysis (n = 830).
As it was designed to be, the first-wave sample (n = 1,653) was 34 percent white, 25 percent Latino, 28 percent African American, and 13 percent other nonwhite. And this diversity was maintained among those who were reinterviewed during the second time of the study (n = 879). In the second-wave sample 39 percent were white, 22 percent Latino, 28 percent African American, and 11 percent other nonwhite. In addition, the original sample was 46 percent male (44 percent in the second wave ); 40 percent were age thirty-four or under (33 percent in the second wave ); 65 percent had some college or postgraduate education (66 percent in the second wave ); and 34 percent made under $30,000 per year (32 percent in the second wave ). As planned, the original sample was diverse, and that diversity was maintained among the panel respondents.
Respondents answered a series of questions presented over the telephone with fixed response alternatives. Questions examined a variety of issues, including instrumental judgments about police performance, sanctioning risk, and distributive fairness as well as social judgments about the legitimacy of the police, identification with the police, and police procedural fairness and trustworthiness. Respondents were also asked about their voluntary cooperation with the police. The variables were assessed using the same questions in the first and second waves.
Cooperation
Cooperation involved voluntary efforts to help the police. It was assessed by asking respondents, if the situation arose, how likely they would be to call the police to report a crime, help the police to find someone suspected of a crime, report dangerous or suspicious activity, volunteer time to help the police, patrol the streets as part of an organized group, or volunteer to attend community meetings to discuss crime. The response scale was: (4) very likely, (3) somewhat likely, (2) not too likely, and (1) not likely at all.
Instrumental Motivations
Four instrumental motivations were assessed: the likelihood that rule-breakers are caught and punished (sanction risk),5 the ability of the police to fight crime (performance),6 group-based distributive justice,7 and personal distributive justice.8
Social Motivations
Five social motivations were measured: attitudes toward the law,9 values (i.e., the legitimacy of the police and law,10 the congruence of law with moral values11), identification with the police,12 the procedural justice of the behavior of the police (overall,13 the quality of decision making,14 and the quality of treatment15), and motive-based trust.16
Demographics
Ethnicity, age, gender, education and income were measured and included in the analysis.
Analysis
Instrumental and social judgments were found to be related (r = 0.23). Those members of the community who believed that the police were instrumentally effective also had social motivations for cooperating with them. Hence, instrumental and social motivations were linked. However, the linkage is weaker in this context, since the correlation in the general previous study of employees was r = 0.40.
Structural equation modeling was used to examine the influence of instrumental and social factors in shaping cooperation. That analysis used the same approach that was used in the prior study of employees, including separate analyses for the first-wave sample and for the panel sample. Because of the community context, demographic variables were included in this analysis. Prior research indicates that there are large differences in cooperation with the police that are linked to demographic factors—in particular, race. As a consequence, this analysis was expanded to include demographic influences.
The results for the first-wave cross-sectional analysis suggest that both factors play an important role in shaping cooperation. There were strong influences of social motivations (beta = 0.40, p < .001), demographics (beta = 0.12, p < .001), and instrumental motivations (beta = 0.12, p < .001). Notably, as was true in the prior analysis, when controls were placed upon prior cooperation through the use of panel analysis, only social motivations remained important (beta = 0.08, p < .01). The panel results suggest that social motivation remains important with a more sensitive panel design, while the influence of instrumental variables disappears.
These findings support the argument that social motivations are important in settings beyond work organizations. As was true in the prior study of employees, people’s willingness to cooperate with the police was shaped by both their instrumental judgments of police effectiveness and by their social motivations toward the police. But, as before, social motivations predominated, especially when a panel analysis was conducted. That panel analysis controlled for cooperation during the first-wave interviews in an analysis focused upon cooperation during the second-wave interviews, one year later.
TABLE 4.1
Motivation in a Community Setting
It is also important to note that the relative influence of social motivations is weaker in this case than was true in the management setting studied. This is consistent with the argument that there may be social-context effects, and that the balance of instrumental and social motivations may vary depending upon situational factors. In this case, ties to one’s community and to the police were weaker than ties to one’s work organization.
While it is tempting to conclude that social context is the key factor distinguishing this community-based study from the prior study of work organizations, it is also important to recognize the broader scope of the employee study. That study interviewed employees from a sample of workplaces that varied widely in size, location, nature of work tasks, and the like. Hence, it captured a wide variance in both instrumental and social motivations. This study focused upon one city’s police department. While there is certainly variation across neighborhoods, and the results show that there is variation across individuals, the range of these variations is restricted by the common setting. If, for example, this study interviewed a random sample of Americans about their local police departments, there would be much greater variation in both the effectiveness of the police and in social judgments about them. Hence, it is also possible that the findings of this study are restricted by these limitations.
Tyler and Huo (2002) also explored the basis of reactions to decisions by legal authorities. They did so in two communities—Los Angeles and Oakland, California—with different histories of police-community relations. Further, they also focused on white and minority group members. Their results suggest that context had little to do with reactions to the police. Rather, people’s reactions were primarily a response to issues of trust and procedural justice (i.e., social motivations).
Cooperation in the Regulation of a Scarce Resource
Communities cooperate to manage many problems besides crime. One example is the management of scarce natural resources (Tyler and Degoey, 1995). In this case I will examine a study conducted in the context of a naturally occurring resource allocation problem—a water shortage. This drought occurred in northern California and the respondents were residents of one affected community—San Francisco. For the study, a random sample of 636 of the adults living in San Francisco were interviewed by telephone.17
The problem of cooperation in the consumption of limited resources is an example of the type of cooperation of concern in this volume. While it is possible to restrict water use by coercion and fines, it is difficult to do so. We cannot imagine the police, for example, patrolling neighborhoods to look for people watering their lawns, filling their pools, and so on. However, another approach is to motivate voluntary cooperation with rules restricting water use via social motivations. In this case, water use rules are created by a public commission, and residents are urged to voluntarily follow them.
The focus of concern is voluntary conservation. Respondents were asked how willing they would be to conserve water if asked to do so by the water commission.18 They were also asked how important they felt it was for government to intervene and create required mechanisms for motivating compliance with rules.19
In this study, two types of instrumental motivation were measured: feeling the impact of the water shortage and viewing government policies as favorable. Those who experience the shortage as more of a problem,20 or view policies as less favorable,21 would be expected to be less motivated to voluntarily conserve. Three social motivations were measured: the procedural justice of the water commission,22 trust in the motivations of its members,23 and the legitimacy of that commission.24
The results of a regression analysis of the type already outlined are shown in table 4.2. They support the suggestion that social motivations have a distinct influence on voluntary cooperation (beta = 0.19, p < .001). In addition, instrumental motivations shape cooperation (beta = 0.19, p < .001). Together these variables explain 9 percent of the variance in voluntary conservation behavior. The analysis also suggests that social motivations are strongly linked to accepting government rules. If respondents view government as procedurally just and trustworthy, they are more willing to support government imposed rules (beta = 0.12, p < .05). Similarly, people support rules when the problem is having a greater impact upon them and is thus more relevant in instrumental terms (beta = 0.25, p < .001).
TABLE 4.2
Cooperating with Authorities to Limit Resource Consumption
These findings suggest that the arguments made in the context of community efforts to fight crime are broader in scope. People will cooperate voluntarily with authorities seeking to restrict their use of common resources based upon social motivations. Interestingly, social motivations are also key to being willing to accept imposed government regulation. The extension of the findings to the arena of imposed regulations also illustrates the point made in the prior section—that context matters. Instrumental issues were found to be relatively more important in the context of imposed government regulation.
Policy Implications
The distinction between instrumentally based estimates and social motivations as antecedents of cooperative behavior highlights the possibility of two types of legal culture. The first is a culture that builds public cooperation on the basis of people’s judgments that the police, the courts, and the legal system can effectively manage problems of crime and social disorder. Such an instrumentally based society depends upon the ability of legal authorities to create and maintain a credible threat of punishment for wrongdoing, as well as more generally demonstrating that they can control crime.
The important role played by social motivations in shaping people’s law- related behavior indicates the possibility of creating a society in which citizens have social motivations that lead to cooperation. Such a society is based upon the willing cooperation of citizens, a cooperation flowing from supportive attitudes and values, identifying with the police, and viewing police policies and practices as both fair and as suggesting that the authorities are trustworthy.
Socially motivated cooperation develops from people’s own feelings about what is appropriate social behavior, and is not linked simply to the risks of apprehension and punishment or to evidence of police competence. The results reported make clear that such a society is possible in the sense that social motivations shape cooperation. If people’s social motivations are engaged they are more voluntarily cooperative with legal authorities.