Laws and Moral Judgments

An experiment was conducted with English university students to determine if knowledge of the existence of criminal laws regarding certain forms oJ conduct as well as information concerning peer opinions on these matters could alter judgments of the morality or immorality of the pertinent actions. The students first indicated their attitudes on a large number of issues and then were given information dealing with four behaviors. Three conditions were established: a group told laws existed defining the actions as legal or illegal, a group told their peers overwhelmingly approved or disapproved of the behaviors, and a control group in which no influence was exerted. Analyses of the changes in judgments of the moral propriety of the behaviors revealed that both knowledge of the law and knowledge of a peer consensus led to greater shifts in judgments in the influence direction than was displayed by the control group, but the peer consensus apparently had a greater effect. Subsidiary analyses suggested that the moral judgments of highly authoritarian subjects were more strongly influenced by the peer consensus than by knowledge of the law, while the judgments made by people scoring high on a scale assessing traditional social responsibility tendencies were moderately influenced by both the laws and peer consensus.