Vol. 1, No. 2 (April, 1991), pp. 28-29
LEGAL SOCIALIZATION: A STUDY OF NORMS AND RULES by Ellen S. Cohn
and Susan 0. White. New York: Springer-Verlag, 1990. 224 pp.
Reviewed by Tom R. Tyler, Department of Psychology, University of
California, Berkeley.
The authors of this manuscript begin by pointing out the
pervasiveness of legal rules within organized groups. This
centrality of rules raises the key question of how people respond
to such efforts to restrict and regulate their behavior. Why do
people sometimes comply with rules, often voluntarily, and on
other occasions resist the directives of authorities? The
authors' book, LEGAL SOCIALIZATION, represents an ambitious
attempt to demonstrate the importance of legal development theory
to the understanding of the psychology of compliance with legal
rules. Their introductory chapters articulate clearly what a
legal development theory model of compliance hypothesizes and
contrast the predictions of this model to those of its plausible
rival model--social learning theory.
The legal development theory framework utilized by the authors
flows from the cognitive developmental perspective of Piaget,
amplified by Kohlberg, and applied to legal reasoning by Tapp and
Levine. This perspective argues that people actively reason about
legal rules and that the structure of their thinking shapes their
behavior toward the law. The authors contrast this perspective to
a social learning model of compliance which emphasizes the role
of environmental contingencies in shaping law related behavior.
As the authors note, the key distinction between these models is
in the relative weight they assign to factors within the person
and within the environment in shaping orientations toward the
law.
The heart of this book is the description of an ambitious effort
to test the value of a legal development theory model of
compliance within the context of compliance by residence students
with dormitory rules and regulations. The authors use a
longitudinal approach, interviewing four group of students during
the fall and spring of an academic year. Two of the groups live
within artificially created dorm environments -- one within which
dormitory rules are externally imposed and enforced by dorm
officials and the other in which dorm rules are shaped and
enforced by students elected by their peers. A third group
represents two control groups of dorm residents, interviewed in
dorm settings not constructed by the investigators. Finally, a
separate random sample of the student population is interviewed.
The authors' research approach is well conceived and carefully
executed. It takes advantage of both naturally-occurring and
experimentally created opportunities for legal socialization and
directly addresses the theoretical issues raised by the authors.
Past studies of legal reasoning have found little relationship
between abstract legal reasoning and behavior toward legal rules.
The authors hypothesize that this failure to find legal
development effects occurs because such effects are manifested
indirectly. They test, and find support for, a model in which
legal reasoning shapes attitudes about the appropriateness of
rule-breaking (normative status) and about the appropriateness of
punishing those who break the rules (enforcement status). They
predict that these attitudes will, in turn,
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influence actual rule-following behavior. Hence, their findings
support legal development theory predictions by showing that the
level of individual legal reasoning indirectly influences
behavior in relationship to laws. The findings of this study also
support a second key suggestion of legal development theory.
Since legal development theory links the level of legal reasoning
to having opportunities to reason about legal rules, particularly
situations in which a person takes the role of others, it
predicts that the peer-oriented dorm culture created by the
authors should stimulate the development of legal reasoning. The
authors find indirect evidence suggesting that the peer culture
has this predicted effect. For example, they find that students
in a peer culture are more likely to approve of the enforcement
of legal rules restricting behaviors of which they disapprove.
While the authors point to several types of indirect evidence
supporting the value of a peer-oriented culture, it is troubling
that they find no evidence that levels of legal reasoning
actually increase within that culture (p. 72). In fact, levels of
legal reasoning remain constant within all of the authors'
conditions. Nonetheless, the authors point to several types of
indirect evidence suggesting that the peer culture differentially
shaped thinking about legal rules.
Overall, the authors findings provide strong support for the
importance of a legal development theory perspective on
compliance. It is clear from the results they report that the
manner in which people reason about law has an important
influence on their behavior. However, the authors' findings do
not lead to the discrediting of a social learning perspective.
Their findings also suggest that the situational factors
emphasized by social learning theories are an important influence
on attitudes and behavior toward the law. Social learning
influence is manifested both directly (p.84-85) and
interactively. Recognizing that both influences occur, the
authors propose the development of an interactive model which
incorporates the influence of both internal reasoning about the
law and external pressures on compliance behavior. Of particular
interest is their suggestion that conflict in the social
environment stimulates thinking about rules, i.e. that reasoning
is reactive, not generative. Hence, their results suggest that
environmental factors influence the degree to which people think
about their reasons for having and obeying legal rules.
This book is an important demonstration of the importance of the
legal development perspective to any complete understanding of
people's law-related behavior. It demonstrates that people's
reasoning about the law has important implications for their
law-related behavior. Such a demonstration is especially
important because the authors contrast their model to a social
learning model, which emphasizes the importance of the
contingencies within the social environment. The suggestion that
the regulation of behavior occurs primarily through control over
rewards and punishments within the environment has become central
to recent discussions of law-abidingness within the law and
social science community. The results reported in this monograph
represent a welcome reassertion of the importance of exploring
people's reasoning about the principles underlying their
obedience and disobedience with legal rules.