Behavioral profiling for compliance: the role of legitimacy, norms, and prior conduct

Understanding whether compliance tendencies generalize across legal domains is central to behavioral public policy. This study examines whether psychological mechanisms that shape compliance in one context also predict decisions in others. Using a multi-vignette survey conducted in the United Kingdom (N = 498) across 7 regulatory scenarios, we assess how perceptions of injunctive norms, reputational risk, attitudes toward legal objectives, legal legitimacy beliefs, perceived cost, perceived complexity, and self-efficacy influence stated compliance intentions. Several mechanisms show cross-domain consistency, although they are measured within each vignette. Legitimacy and injunctive norms are robust predictors, while moral costs and perceived risk exhibit moderate but patterned effects. Other influences, such as perceived burden or alignment with specific rules, vary more sharply across contexts, indicating that compliance reflects both situational features and cross-domain variation in interpretive tendencies. These findings have implications for trust-based and risk-based regulation. Cross-domain tendencies offer some support for differentiating oversight based on past behavior, yet the observed contextual variation cautions against mechanistic profiling. Effective regulatory design should combine broader psychological levers with context-specific strategies, recognizing both stability and flexibility in how people interpret legal demands. The study contributes to debates on the generalizability of compliance mechanisms and offers behavioral insights for more calibrated and responsive enforcement.