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Chapter 8. Societal Orientations and Reactions to Personal Experiences with Legal Authorities
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Chapter 8 Societal Orientations and Reactions to Personal Experiences with Legal Authorities WE HAVE already examined the psychology underlying people 's reactions during their personal experiences with legal authorities. We found that the behavior of legal authoritiestheir fairness and their motives-influences people's willingness to defer voluntarily to their decisions and directives. In particular, people are more willing to accept decisions that are arrived at through processes they understand to be fair and that are made by authorities whom they trust. We now want to examine the additional influence, if any, of general societal orientations on what happens during people's personal experiences with legal authorities. We expect that not everyone approaches a personal experience with the same prior orientation toward the law, toward their community, and toward society. For example, some people see legal authorities as more or less legitimate than do others, some people feel more or less strongly connected to the other people in their community, and some people feel more or less identified with society. Here we focus directly on the question of whether prior societal orientations have an impact on the nature of personal experiences. How might general societal orientations shape personal experiences? In this chapter, we test two arguments. The first argument is that favorable societal orientations encourage voluntary decision acceptance. The second is that general societal orientations shape the importance that peopleattach to whether they experience procedural justice during their experience and whether they feel motive-based trust toward the authorities with whom they are dealing. 124 Trust in the Law Do Favorable Societal Orientations Encourage Deference Toward the Police and Toward Judges? Tyler (1990) demonstrated that those with a greater sense of obligation to obey the law are more likely to do so. We expect that people who are more likely to view the law and legal authorities as legitimate, who feel closer ties to others in their community, and who feel more identified with American societyare also more willing to defer to legal authorities. Further, we expect that there is a direct, or main, effect of societal orientations onboth deference and satisfaction with authorities. Peoplewith more positive orientations are more willing to defer than those with less positive orientations, controlling for the favorability of the outcome. We also expect that those who are more likely to view authorities as legitimate or whoidentifymore strongly withthe UnitedStatesbase their judgments more strongly on the degree to which they receive procedural justice and feel motive-based trust when dealing with legal authorities. Conversely, we expect them to rely less strongly on the favorability or fairness of their outcomes. This prediction involves an interaction between societal orientations, process-based and outcome-based judgments about experience, and deference to decisions. It suggests that societal orientations determine how much weight people put on process and outcome issues when deciding whether to defer to particular police officers and judges. We again contrast the two basic images of how people might decide whether to defer to the decisions of legal authorities. One image links the willingness to accept those decisions to theirfavorability and fairness. To represent that image, we use a summary index of the favorability and fairness ofthe outcome. The second image links the willingness to accept decisions to evaluations of elements in the process through which the decisions are made. We consider a summary measure of procedural justice , the trustworthiness of the motives of the authorities involved, and assessments of the quality of their decision making and of the quality of their treatment of the person involved. These four aspects of procedure are collectively referred to as process-based judgments. Here we examine conditions that facilitate or hinder process-based reactions to individual police officers or judges. To what degree do general social orientations moderate the basis on which people decide whether to accept the decisions of these legal authorities during personal experiences with them? We test the argument that generalized societal orientations matter because they change the psychology underlying people's reactions to particular legal authorities. We expect that [34.201.19.151] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:41 GMT) Societal Orientations and Reactions to Personal Experiences 125 people who have a more positive societal orientation focus more strongly on issues of trustworthiness and fair treatment when deciding whether to accept the decisions made by these authorities. Do those with stronger social bonds with a group or group authorities more willingly accept the decisions of those authorities and follow group rules? We predict that people...