Moral Solidarity, Identification with the Community, and the Importance of Procedural Justice: The Police as Prototypical Representatives of a Group's Moral Values

Abstract

In this paper we demonstrate that people's cooperation with the police is motivated in part by their judgment that the police are prototypical representatives of the group's moral values, as is predicted by the social identity approach. We further show that people evaluate the degree to which the police reflect the group's moral values by assessing the fairness of the procedures they use to exercise their authority, as is argued by the relational model of authority. Finally, the social identity approach and the relational model of authority are shown to interact:.people who are uncertain about their status in the group are shown to be concerned more strongly about procedural justice issues than about issues of distributive justice. In this paper we attempt to clarify why people support and cooperate with the police. We are concerned about three types of support: compliance with the law, cooperation with the police, and willingness to empower the police with discretionary authority. Our interest is in the motivations that shape these types of public support. We contrast two motivations-instrumental and moral-and explore the importance of each.