Breaking the law makes people seem less moral, even when the act is unchanged

Being told that an action was illegal made people judge the very same behavior as more morally wrong, and the person doing it as less moral, according to our new research published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Laws can be understood as reflecting society’s moral values. Behaviors that people consider especially harmful or unacceptable are more likely to be prohibited. Research supports this direction of influence, showing that public opinion and prevailing moral attitudes can shape legal decisions and even affect the perceived legitimacy of the law.

But the relationship may also work in reverse. If the law tells us what society, or an authoritative institution, has deemed acceptable or unacceptable, could knowing whether something is illegal actually change how morally wrong we think it is?

Previous studies investigating this possibility have produced mixed findings. High-profile legal decisions have sometimes shifted public attitudes in the direction of the law, sometimes had little effect, and sometimes produced more complicated responses. One explanation is that real-world legal rulings are accompanied by political debate, media coverage, and strong pre-existing beliefs, making it difficult to isolate the influence of legality itself.

Mane Kara-Yakoubian (myself: @ManeYakoubian) and colleagues therefore examined whether an action’s legal status could serve as a simple cue that people use when making moral judgments. Across four experiments, we tested whether this influence would persist when people broke laws unintentionally, when laws came from a totalitarian rather than democratic government, and when legal rules agreed or conflicted with prevailing social norms.

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Across the four studies, the final analytic samples included 1,053 participants. Experiments 1-3 recruited participants from a Canadian university psychology research participant pool, resulting in final samples of 228, 250, and 254 participants, respectively. Experiment 4 recruited Canadian residents through Prolific and retained 321 participants after exclusions.

Participants read ten scenarios describing morally relevant behaviors carried out in fictitious countries, such as burning a national flag, using a racial slur, hunting deer, or abandoning a shopping cart, among others. Depending on the experiment and condition, the same behaviors were described as illegal or “not illegal.”

Participants rated how morally wrong each action was on a seven-point scale from 1, “not at all wrong,” to 7, “very wrong,” and rated the actor’s moral character on a seven-point scale from “extremely immoral” to “extremely moral.” They also completed the 30-item Moral Foundations Questionnaire, which measures concerns related to harm, fairness, loyalty, authority, and purity; our analyses focused particularly on its six-item Authority component.

Experiment 1 manipulated legality within participants, whereas Experiment 2 used a between-subjects design that also varied whether an illegal act was committed intentionally or unintentionally. Experiments 3 and 4 used mixed designs, varying legality within participants while manipulating government type or social norms between participants. Specifically, Experiment 3 varied whether laws came from a democratic or totalitarian government, while Experiment 4 varied whether local residents considered the behavior socially acceptable, socially unacceptable, or provided no social-norm information.

Across all four experiments, legality consistently influenced moral judgment. Participants rated identical actions as more morally wrong when they were described as illegal rather than not illegal, and they also evaluated the people performing those actions as less moral. Importantly, this was not simply because intentionally breaking a rule was viewed negatively.

In Experiment 2, illegal actions were judged more harshly even when participants were explicitly told that the person had broken the law unintentionally, although intentional law-breaking produced the harshest judgments.

In Experiment 3, the effect also persisted regardless of how the law had been created. Illegal actions and their actors were judged more negatively whether the laws came from a democratically elected government or a totalitarian government in which citizens had no say.

Social norms mattered too, but they did not simply replace the influence of the law. In Experiment 4, participants judged behaviors more harshly when local residents considered them socially unacceptable and more favourably when residents considered them acceptable, yet legality continued to affect moral evaluations across the social-norm conditions.

Legality had its greatest influence when the law and prevailing social norms pointed in the same direction—for example, when an illegal action was also socially disapproved of. When legality and social norms conflicted, however, the effect of legality was no longer significant.

Individual differences mattered as well: in three of the four experiments, participants who more strongly viewed respect for authority as a moral virtue showed a larger effect of legality on their judgments.

One limitation is that although we also used fictitious countries to minimize pre-existing beliefs about particular nations and their laws, participants may still have projected their own associations onto those countries.

Taken together, our findings suggest that laws may do more than regulate behavior or reflect existing moral values: legal status itself can become part of the information people use to decide what is morally right or wrong and how they evaluate the people involved.

The research, “Between law and conscience: Act legality shapes moral evaluation,” was authored by Mane Kara-Yakoubian, Jonathan A. Fugelsang, and Alexander C. Walker.