Inside and outside perspectives on the relation of personal values and legal norm acceptances

Abstract

Based on a representative survey on crime prevention, this paper studies how personal values are related to persons’ acceptance of legal norms (LNA). We here take a closer look at these relations than previous research. Offenses, in particular, are classified into three offense types (no victim (OT1), legal person as victim (OT2, real person as victim (OT3)), and the persons’ ratings are studied both as observed and as individually centered data. It is found that conservation-oriented persons give higher and less differentiated badness ratings for all offenses than persons striving for hedonism and stimulation. The correlational structure of basic personal values and norm acceptance ratings for 14 different offenses, when represented via multidimensional scaling, exhibits that conservation orientation becomes a better predictor of LNA of all offense types if it is augmented by an additional value, peace of mind. When looking at centered ratings (i.e., controlling for each person’s mean ratings), social values become the best predictors of OT2 offenses (tax evasion, benefits fraud, taking bribes). Statements on the impact of personal values on general norm acceptance should, therefore, be replaced with more differentiated relations on how particular values are related to peoples’ attitudes towards particular offenses.