Collaborative Research: Individuals' Assessments of Legitimate Authority

维持社会秩序还有赖于普通公民认识到行使法律权威是合法的--也就是说，即使在没有外部(基于威慑的)遵守动机的情况下，也值得尊重。当当局被视为合法时，公民就会有更强的内在动力来遵守法律并与执法者合作。这项研究解决了两个关键问题。执法机构的哪些特征赋予当局合法性？公民行为合法性的后果是什么？它同时使用实验室和实地实验室实验，后者通过关注低收入、主要是少数族裔社区的受试者来加强政策相关性，这些受试者的执法经验可能与典型的学生受试者群体不同。评估合法权威的因果关系是一个令人惊讶的棘手的经验问题。鉴于公民遵守法律的动机可能是威慑和公民对合法性的看法，如何以一种与公民对惩罚的预期分开的方式来衡量合法性？这项工作采用了新颖的实验，旨在分离公民的外在(威慑)动机和内在(基于合法性)动机之间的关系。

Maintaining social order also depends on ordinary citizens perceiving that the exercise of legal authority is legitimate -- that is, deserving deference even in the absence of extrinsic (deterrence-based) compliance motivations. When authorities are viewed as legitimate, citizens have an enhanced intrinsic motivation to comply with the law and to cooperate with those who enforce it. This research tackles two key questions. What features of enforcement institutions bestow legitimacy on authorities? And what are the consequences of legitimacy for citizen behavior? It employs both laboratory and lab-in-the-field experiments, the latter of which enhance policy relevance by focusing on subjects from low-income, mostly minority communities, whose experiences of law enforcement may differ from those of typical student subject pools. Assessing the causal antecedents of legitimate authority is a surprisingly tricky empirical problem. Given that citizens' compliance with the law may be motivated both by deterrence and by citizens' perceptions of legitimacy, how can legitimacy be measured in a way that is separate from citizens' anticipations of punishment? This work employs novel experiments designed to decouple the relationship between citizens' extrinsic (deterrence) and intrinsic (legitimacy-based) motivations.