Emotion: The forgotten component of legal socialization

Abstract

Legal socialization researchers have largely ignored the importance of emotion in the legal socialization process and engagement in crime. The purpose of the current study was to argue the potential importance of moral emotions (e.g., guilt) in legal socialization and take a preliminary step to integrate an emotion component into an existing model.The current study investigated whether the moral emotion of guilt, using both proneness and anticipatory measures, would predict rule-violating behavior (RVB) as part of the integrated cognitive legal socialization model. The study used survey data from 474 participants who were part of a longitudinal study of adolescent rule-violating behavior. Results showed that guilt proneness functioned as a predictor of RVB in parallel with legal reasoning, while anticipatory guilt served as a mediator in parallel with normative attitude mediators. Enforcement status (i.e., feeling people should be punished for committing RVB) mediated the relation between guilt proneness and RVB, while normative status (i.e., approval for engaging in RVB) and anticipatory guilt mediated the relation between legal reasoning and RVB. These findings help to advance legal socialization by demonstrating the unique contribution of emotion in legal socialization theory and provide a foundation for future research in this area. The implications for the role of emotion in both the integrated cognitive legal socialization

Breaking rules for moral reasons: Development and validation of the Prosocial and Antisocial Rule-Breaking (PARB) scale.

“…Individuals who have strong moral characteristics and perceive authorities as behaving in an unfair manner may be less likely to internalize the values exemplified by those authorities, perceive those authorities to be less legitimate, and subsequently engage in more prosocial rule-breaking. Similarly, prior research on the effect of moral and legal reasoning on rule-breaking through the integrated cognitive legal socialization model (e.g., Cohn et al, 2010, 2012; Cole et al, 2021) can be expanded to determine if reasoning capacity affects prosocial and antisocial rule-breaking differently. In this sense, prosocial rule breakers would be expected to have high moral reasoning but low legal reasoning.…”

“…Empathy allows one to feel what others are feeling, and highly empathic individuals engage in prosocial behavior to reduce shared distress and promote shared positive affect (Morelli et al, 2015). Guilt-prone individuals are likely to anticipate the aversive feelings of guilt associated with antisocial behavior, so they avoid acting antisocially and engage in prosocial behavior to avoid feeling this way (Cole et al, 2021; Tangney et al, 2007b).…”

Breaking Rules for Moral Reasons: Development and Validation of the Prosocial and Antisocial Rule-Breaking (PARB) Scale

“…Empathy allows one to feel what others are feeling, and highly empathic individuals engage in prosocial behavior to reduce shared distress and promote shared positive affect (Morelli et al, 2015). Guilt-prone individuals are likely to anticipate the aversive feelings of guilt associated with antisocial behavior, so they avoid acting antisocially and engage in prosocial behavior to avoid feeling this way (Cole et al, 2021;Tangney et al, 2007b).…”

“…Another limitation that should be addressed is the lack of existing theory to support the conceptualization of prosocial rule-breaking. To address this, we drew from other disciplines to support the conceptualization of prosocial rule-breaking, such as research and theory from the psychology of emotion (e.g., Batson et al, 1981;Tangney et al, 2007a), criminology (e.g., Gottfredson & Hirschi, 1990;Rebellon et al, 2008), cognitive psychology (e.g., Barriga & Gibbs, 1996;Kohlberg, 1971), economic game theory (e.g., Rand et al, 2012;Savikhin & Sheremeta, 2013), and legal psychology (e.g., Cole et al, 2021;. We believe that the consilience between these disciplines offers support for our conceptualization of prosocial rule-breaking but we also respect and understand the value of incremental theoretical developments within disciplines, which is admittedly lacking here.…”

“…Individuals who have strong moral characteristics and perceive authorities as behaving in an unfair manner may be less likely to internalize the values exemplified by those authorities, perceive those authorities to be less legitimate, and subsequently engage in more prosocial rule-breaking. Similarly, prior research on the effect of moral and legal reasoning on rule-breaking through the integrated cognitive legal socialization model (e.g., Cohn et al, 2010;Cohn et al, 2012, Cole et al, 2021 can be expanded to determine if reasoning capacity affects prosocial and antisocial rule-breaking differently. In this sense, prosocial rule breakers would be expected to have high moral reasoning but low legal reasoning.…”