Maintaining the Social Order

Abstract

The starting point of most discussions of the law is compliance, since the purpose of creating laws and empowering legal authorities is to establish and maintain social order by regulating public behavior. The issue addressed by Why People Obey the Law is how such compliance can best be achieved. During the past several decades the dominant approach to securing compliance has been through the threat or use of punishment-that is, via deterrence. The use of deterrence was ubiquitous at the time this book was written in the 1980s, and it has remained the dominant approach to maintaining social order into the twenty-first century (Nagin 1998).Deterrence strategies are one example of instrumental strategies, which are based upon the assumption that the primary factors motivating human behavior are incentives and sanctions. In the context of regulation, this vision leads to a de terrence strategy, linking sanctions to rule breaking, while in the organizational literature it leads to a view that performance is enhanced via incentives, with de sired performance linked to the provision of rewards (Tyler and Blader 2000).One argument in favor of using deterrence as an approach to securing com pliance is that it is a strategy that works. Interestingly, as research has accumu lated about the influence of risk assessments on law-related behavior, this gen eral assertion has been widely qualified. Studies suggest that deterrence some times significantly influences law-related behavior, and sometimes does not. In fact, one finding of Why People Obey the Law, a result typical of studies in this area, is that once other factors are accounted for, there is no significant influence of risk-related judgments on compliance with the law. Further, even when risk is found to have an influence, the magnitude of that influence is small. For exam ple, in a review of studies of drug use, MacCoun (1993) estimates that only around 5 percent of the variance in drug-use behavior is explainable through variations in risk estimates.In addition to mixed evidence regarding effectiveness, the widespread use of deterrence approaches has led to serious negative side effects (Tyler 1997a. One such side effect is the dramatic growth in the American prison popula tion, leading the United States to be a world leader in the proportion of its popula tion that is incarcerated. Further, since deterrence policies are directed primarily at the disadvantaged, their use has undermined police-community relations in ur 269