Vol. 15 No.9 (September 2005), pp.850-856
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RIGHTS AND DUTIES: EMPIRICAL CONTRIBUTIONS AND NORMATIVE COMMENTARIES, by Norman J. Finkel and Fathali M. Moghaddam (eds.). Washington DC: American Psychological Association, 2005. 305pp. Hardcover. $69.95. ISBN: 1-59147-166-4.
Reviewed by: Jeffrey E. Hecker, Matthew W. King, and Kelly Patten, Department of Psychology, University of Maine. Email: Jeff_Hecker [at] umit.maine.edu
In THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RIGHTS AND DUTIES: EMPIRICAL CONTRIBUTIONS AND NORMATIVE COMMENTARIES, editors Norman Finkel and Fahali Moghaddam endeavor to address important questions about the definitions of, and relationships between, rights and duties. In the introductory chapter they note that the well-known line of psychological research on “bystander intervention,” triggered by the Kitty Genovese murder, produced some interesting findings about people’s understanding of their personal duty. Unfortunately, this line of research faded away and very little psychological research on rights or duties has been carried out since bystander intervention studies were popular in social psychology. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, including the passing of the Patriot Act and the “War on Terrorism,” important questions about rights and duties spring to mind. Does the government of one country have the right to invade another in order to hunt down terrorists because of its duty to protect its people? Does the government’s duty to protect its citizens supercede citizens’ personal rights? In the context of recent events, the editors make a strong case for renewed attention from psychologists to basic questions about rights and duties.
Scholars and social commentators note an increase in calls for the protections of the rights of individuals and the various groups to which they belong (e.g., women, gay, children, mentally ill, disabled, and so on). The editors point out that there are important empirical questions about rights and duties to which we do not know the answers. “Does this predominance of rights talk actually mean that there is a neglect of duties? Does talk in fact translate into problematic actions for the citizenry such that people fail to act on duties to other people, to groups, and toward the government, and vice versa?” (p.5).
Finkel and Moghaddam describe three goals for their text. The first is to aggregate empirical research about rights and duties produced by psychologists from around the world. The second is to strengthen the interchange between psychological research and other disciplines that have struggled with questions of rights and duties. The third goal is “to identify promising questions for future research.” In the service of these goals, the editors asked contributors to address at least one of three sets of questions (19 questions in total). The first set has to do with basic questions about rights and duties including their justification, how they are influenced by culture, and people’s understanding of them. The second set [*851] of questions focuses upon the relationship between rights and duties, and the third set, with duties and rights as independent constructs.
In Parts I and II of this edited volume, the contributers summarize empirical findings regarding rights, duties and culture (Part I) and the relationship between rights and duties (Part II). Part III includes commentaries on the empirical chapters by scholars from the so-called normative disciplines: philosophy, history and political science, as well as a final commentary by the editors.
Part I: Empirical Contributions on Rights, Duties and Culture
In Chapter 2, Dario Spini and Willem Doise describe their program of research on the social representation of human rights. Spini and Doise provide an interesting and succinct historical chronicle of rights and duties which laid the groundwork for their research, developed within the context of social representation theory. “Social representation theory analyzes the intervention of patterns of social regulations and communications in the way individuals describe and explain social issues they are confronted with” (p.28). Within this theoretical framework, Spini and Doise summarize findings concerning cross-cultural beliefs about individual rights. Much of the work looks at how individuals in various cultures view the 30 articles of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (which is reprinted as Appendix A of the book), and how well these articles represent beliefs held about rights and duties.
Doise’s and Spini’s research supports the hypothesis that there are shared categories of rights and duties cross-culturally. Similarly, the categorizations produced by philosophers and legal experts and those discovered through empirical investigation of the lay public share many features.
Doise and Spini conclude the chapter with a discussion of how their findings relate to the second set of questions raised by the editors, those having to do with the relationship between rights and duties. They interpret their findings as indicating “a primacy of rights over duties in declarations” such as the United Nations Universal Declaration. Duties tend to be specified in law and enforced by states, whereas rights tend to be defined more abstractly. Finally, their surveys suggest that citizens view the state as having a greater role in socioeconomic rights than in individual rights and duties.
Siegfried Hoppe-Graff and Hye-On Kim describe a cross-cultural study of the understanding of rights and duties in adolescents from Germany and South Korea in Chapter 3. This chapter is presented as an empirical journal article. The researchers surveyed 261 German and 235 South Korean adolescents (ages 12 to 16) using sentence completion and open-ended questions about rights and duties, as well as who “lays down” rights and duties.
To summarize briefly, the authors find similarities and differences in the ways German and Korean youth understand rights and duties. The differences are consistent with what one might expect in adolescents coming of age in collectivist (Korean) versus individualistic [*852] (German) cultures. For example, the German youth emphasized the importance of obeying laws and rules in their thinking about duties, whereas the Koreans emphasized the inner experiences associated with duties (e.g., obligations, responsibility, respect).
Although the authors did not explicitly address the questions put forth by the editors, their findings clearly have implications for the first set of questions regarding cultural influences on rights and duties.
In Chapter 4, Moghaddam and Riley describe a cultural theory of the development of rights and duties and present three propositions drawn from their theory:
1. Common to the human experience are a number of biological and functional conditions that give rise to primitive social practices, social behaviors that are universal and essential for the survival of individuals.
2. The development of language in children is associated with the learning of cultural interpretations of primitive social relations, such as turn taking, as involving rights and duties.
3. In relationships that are (a) changing, so that the norms and rules of behavior are uncertain or (b) adversarial so that the conflict is actual or very possible, those with equal or less power will give priority to rights and those who enjoy greater power will give priority to duties (pp.78-79).
In the first half of the chapter, the authors summarize empirical evidence consistent with these propositions.
The second half of the chapter presents the findings of three empirical studies which are representative examples of research on some of the central aspects of the authors’ theory. The first two studies survey American and Iranian adults about their attitudes toward rights and duties of adults and children. The third study is a survey of American, Chinese and Russian adults and illustrates some similarities across cultures about perceived features of rights and duties.
The chapter concludes with Moghaddam and Riley attempting to address four of the questions presented in Chapter 1. The organization and content of this chapter do not flow logically or hang together particularly well. The authors’ attempt to address the four questions at the conclusion of the chapter really does not draw upon or integrate the material discussed earlier.
Chapter 5, by Winnifred R. Louis and Donald M. Taylor, addresses questions about rights and duties from the social-psychological perspective of group norms. They review the literature on intergroup relations and argue that the social-psychological literature does not support the proposition of universal rights and duties. Rather they “present a strongly relativistic account of rights and duties” (p.106).
Louis and Taylor review the literatures on the influence of group norms on individual behavior, citing classic social psychology experiments and discussing the processes by which norms influence behavior. The authors also describe how the relative amount of rights versus duties rhetoric is related to whether advantaged or disadvantaged groups [*853] initiate the discussion. They argue that duties talk by advantaged groups serves the function of delegitamizing dissident groups.
In the conclusion to their chapter, Louis and Taylor address seven of the questions posed by the editors in Chapter 1, citing the social psychology literature to support their responses, and, unlike the preceding chapter, the authors’ responses follow from the literature reviewed earlier in the chapter.
Section II: Empirical Contributions on the Relationship Between Rights and Duties
In Chapter 6, Tyler discusses empirical research on Americans’ sense of duty with respect to obeying their government institutions. He begins by presenting the argument made by some authors that Americans, as a culture, are completely rights-focused, overly protective of our individual freedoms and resistant to responsibilities to the rest of society. His thesis is that Americans, in fact, do have a sense of duty that is evinced in a willingness to follow rules and regulations. He argues, with empirical support, that Americans tend to feel a duty to obey their government even when the rules conflict with their personal beliefs, so long as they perceive the rules to have been derived fairly and impartially. In fact, they empower their governments to make rules that restrict their freedoms, based on a belief that only a body with authority over everyone is able to solve social problems and ensure that all citizens contribute their fair share. Tyler discusses a number of bases for Americans’ sense of duty in this regard. For instance, people may tend to feel unclear about their duties to others and experience a fear that, in this litigious society, their actions may be misinterpreted. Allowing the government to define our duties to each other creates a sense of legitimacy and normalization. Americans, Tyler argues, are not negligent of their duties to others by doing nothing more than obeying the law, because the law defines a fair level of responsibility. Tyler’s arguments are clearly and convincingly presented, supported with a number of illustrative case examples.
In Chapter 7, Finkel addresses the relationship in American legal thinking between black-letter law – the law as it is officially codified – and commonsense justice – the dynamic sense of fairness underling public opinion of how the law should operate. His discussion centers on a narrative analysis of research where ordinary citizens were charged to make a personal assessment of some of the most controversial court cases in American legal history. In doing so, he attempts to explicate the relationship between black-letter law and commonsense justice. The relationship revealed through this research, Finkel observes, is that the two perspectives differ on a number of grounds, most notably in their decision-making process, either through examination of precedent and strict interpretation or based on a moral evaluation of fairness according to current societal standards. The empirical results suggest that, in general, participants reasoning from the perspective of commonsense justice disagree with the historical decisions reached by judges and justices. Finkel expounds on these findings to reveal Americans’ implicit sense of ethical duty and how black-letter law and commonsense justice operate as [*854] effective checks and balances to each other.
Finkel’s arguments reflect a high level of analysis, at times made more dense by a somewhat legalistic writing style. The sections of the chapter do have a logical thread that unifies them, but the train of thought may not be entirely clear on the first read. Finkel’s thesis, however, is valuable and in accord with the goals of the book to explore public perception of rights and duties and provide a basis for normative commentary.
In Chapter 8, Philip J. Moore, Stephanie Spernak, and Enid Chung, utilize the context of the doctor-patient relationship to address several key questions posed in the book’s introduction: what is the nature of rights and duties, what is the relationship between them, and how do they change over time? They selected the doctor-patient role because of its centrality in American culture and its usefulness as a model for examining these questions. As they indicate, it is a relationship whose focus and power balance have changed over time, thus providing a useful example of right and duty evolution. Moore, et al., describe a number of doctor-patient relationship models that have been ascendant at different points in the history of modern medicine. The original emphasis was on the duties of the physician and the physician’s authority to direct the course of treatment unilaterally, but the relationship has evolved to today’s consumer model where patients’ rights are paramount and doctors are held accountable for all that they do. The authors demonstrate, however, that there are still discrepancies between patients’ expectations of their rights and how doctors practice their duties, regardless of how rights are legislated at the official level, which has led to increasing patient dissatisfaction. The authors conclude with a normative commentary on how the doctor-patient relationship reveals the symmetrical nature of rights and duties, and a call for a more interpersonally-focused model of medicine that will even that balance.
Moore and colleagues have a clear and accessible writing style, making for a well-organized chapter, although the concluding commentary digresses somewhat from the original context before returning to the final arguments. Overall the chapter fits well with the purpose and goals of the book, grounding a discussion of rights and duties in an important aspect of American society.
In Chapter 9, Stephen Worchel provides an analysis of how rights and duties define individuals’ places within groups and the location of both those individuals and groups within the larger culture. Grounding his commentary in the social psychology literature, Worchel explores the fundamental paradoxes inherent in group membership, such as the individual’s struggle for acceptance and uniformity while simultaneously trying to maintain an independent sense of self, which is pitted against the group’s interest in conformity and loyalty, something that can only be done effectively by allowing group members to develop their unique identities. Worchel describes how individuals and groups exist in a reciprocal relationship, with individuals negotiating rights in exchange for fulfilling duties to the group, and with groups negotiating to limit the rights of individuals so as to advance the interests and survival of [*855] the group. This relationship between individuals and groups, Worchel asserts, exists in the cultural context, with cultures defining the fundamental structure on which rights and duties are defined – individualistic cultures emphasize individuals’ rights over the group’s, while collective cultures emphasize the opposite. Worchel uses this discussion to advance his argument against the existence of “universal” human rights, insisting that essential rights of individuals change across time and culture and cannot exist independently of the disparate groups that fulfill different duties to its members.
Worchel provides a thorough and convincing argument for the inclusion of social psychology in any consideration of individual and group rights and duties. His approach emphasizes the theoretical, at the expense of empirical support except in the abstract. His anecdotal examples, however, are relevant and helpful in understanding his points. What he does do well is construct a framework of group dynamics that will provide a useful basis for future research, thus aligning his chapter with the goals of the book.
Part III: Normative Commentaries
Part III begins with a commentary by the renowned philosopher, Rom Harre’ (Chapter 10) who is critical of the book’s editors and contributors for not explicitly discussing the ontology of rights and duties. Harre’ notes that much of the empirical work on rights and duties discussed is really about “the ways in which people talk about their obligations and the demands they can make on others” (p.223).
Harre’ presents four questions for students of rights and duties:
1. What is the source of the obligations that the talk of duties and rights seem to create?
2. Is there a discourse rule requiring that the assertion of the existence of a right entails the assertion of the existence of a corresponding duty, and that the assertion of a duty implies the existence of a corresponding right? In other words, is there a universal, context-independent correspondence between duties and rights?
3. Are there any concepts of rights and duties found in the discourse of all human societies in which social order is discursively managed? Are there universal duties and rights? Are they applicable only to human beings?
4. Does informal duties and rights talk dominate or give way to formal discourse concerning rights enacted by legislative bodies? How is the transition from informal to formal managed? (pp.225-226).
Harre’ concludes his commentary calling empirical researchers to task for reifying “right” and “duty,” for treating these words as if they are entities. Harre’ notes that the more important question is functional: “What are these words being used for?”
In Chapter 11, Thomas Haskell brings an historian’s perspective to the issues of rights and duties. Haskell acknowledges the editors’ point that “rights talk” currently dominates western culture; while talk of duty, particularly to God and [*856] country, were more common in earlier periods. He disagrees with the book’s editors, however, in their view that rights have superceded duties. Haskell writes, “Contrary to what Finkel and Moghaddam seem to believe, I see no reason to suppose that the overall results of this steady expansion of rights has been a general shrinkage of constraints” (p.247).
Haskell points out that the increase in rights for one segment of the population is usually associated with greater constraints (duties) on others. “Women and minorities have no doubt experienced a loosening of constraints over the past century and a half, but that goal was achieved by imposing on all the rest of us constraints that did not previously exist” (p.247). Haskell sees rights and duties as being “different aspects of a single package of rules governing human interaction in some specified situation” (p.248).
The third normative commentary is from a political scientist, Thomas Spragens, Jr. (Chapter 12). Spragens offers an interesting discussion of the relationship between empirical beliefs and moral validity, cautioning that because something is empirically shown to be acceptable or right to a majority of people, does not make it morally right.
In the final chapter, the editors revisit questions of the universality of rights and duties, the relationship between rights and duties, and the methods employed in cross-culture research.
The editors of this volume have largely achieved the goals they set. The empirical chapters summarize relevant research literatures and provide direction for future empirical research. The normative commentaries are provocative and encourage cross-disciplinary thinking. For scholar interested in studying the psychology of rights and duties, the volume provides a jumping off point. The book would also be useful for graduate level courses in the psychology of justice, social psychology, social justice or cross-cultural psychology.
Taken as a whole, the book represents an important contribution. The content is varied, ranging from the concrete to the theoretical and philosophical, ensuring that readers with a wide range of reasons for reading the book will find something of interest. It is likely that those who read it will obtain an improved perspective on our understanding of rights and duties in the 21st century.
Clearly, there is much room for psychological research into people’s understanding of rights and duties, the relationship between their perceptions of rights and duties and their actions and the implications of this work for broader efforts to defend human rights. THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RIGHTS AND DUTIES nicely summarizes the knowledge-base at this point in time. It is worth noting, however, as more a comment of the state of the art than on the quality of the contributions to this volume, that of the 19 questions posed in the first chapter, most are left unaddressed. Hopefully, this book will be an instigator for growth in this area of inquiry.
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© Copyright 2005 by the authors, Jeffrey E. Hecker, Matthew W. King, and Kelly Patten.