Bystander Reporting on a College Campus: Moral Intuitions as a Precursor to Informal Social Control

ABSTRACT

Research in criminology finds that moral intuitions influence both offending and punitive reactions to offending. However, no prior studies have examined the influence of moral intuitions on bystander reporting. To fill this gap, I examine the influence of moral intuitions on bystanders’ likelihood of engaging in indirect informal social control by reporting a range of deviant behaviors to campus authorities. Deviant behaviors include common deviance (cheating on college work), uncommon deviance (theft and property damage), and dangerous deviance (alcohol induced unconsciousness and attempted rape). Using a large sample of college students (N = 1,593), I find that respondents with strong individualizing moral intuitions that emphasize care for the vulnerable, are more likely to report dangerous deviance while respondents with strong binding moral intuitions that emphasize social order and cohesion, are more likely to report both dangerous deviance and uncommon deviance. I also find that respondents’ moral intuitions have no bearing on their likelihood of reporting common deviance. Finally, I find that for dangerous deviance, moral intuitions and gender interact in unexpected ways. This study provides compelling evidence that a moral intuitionist approach is useful for studying bystander reporting as a form of informal social control and suggests new directions for theoretical advancement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ These include programs such as Green Dot and Bringing in the Bystander™ that encourage bystanders to engage in various types of interventions in response to sexual assault, depending on the situation.

² At my home university, for example, students, staff, and faculty regularly receive messages from the central administration advising that, “If you see something, say something,” followed by a list of campus authorities to whom various acts of wrongdoing should be reported.

³ Moral Foundations theorists have suggested the possibility of a sixth foundation, Liberty/oppression, which emphasizes abuses of power; however, this new foundation has not yet been integrated into the measurement instrument and so is not included in the current study (Graham et al. 2018).

⁴ Other empirically supported models include general strain theory (Broidy and Agnew 1997), liberation and criminal opportunities theory (Chu, Hebenton, and Toh 2021), and biological differences in fearfulness as measured by resting heart rate (Olivia et al. 2017).

⁵ For example, a message issued recently to the entire University community, stated: “All members of the Penn State community are asked to remain mindful of their individual commitment to the Penn State Values by helping to keep the University a safe and ethical institution.” “The University does not condone wrongful conduct by any member of the Penn State community, no matter what position he or she may hold.” “Penn State encourages the reporting of misconduct. If you see something, say something” (emphasis added).

⁶ Exploratory analyses predicting the reporting of each deviance type from the five moral foundations provided by MFT are shown in Appendix B. Although I did not put forth specific hypotheses regarding the effects of each moral foundation net of the others, the results shown in Appendix B confirm that (1) moral foundations within the individualizing domain (i.e., Care/harm and Fairness/cheating) independently predict the reporting of dangerous deviance; (2) moral foundations withing the binding domain – particularly, Authority/subversions, and Sanctity/degradation – independently predict the reporting of uncommon deviance; and (3) no moral foundation predict the reporting of common deviance. These results are consistent with those shown in Table 2.

⁷ For the sake of thoroughness, I also examined the four moral intuitions by gender interaction terms for Models 5 and 6 (i.e., common deviance) and found that none were significant.

⁸ As suggested by one of the anonymous reviewers, future research might also explore whether the interaction between binding moral intuitions and the gender of the reporter holds for male as well as female victims of sexual assault – since the victim’s gender could impact perceptions of vulnerability, which may be linked to reporting. While the item used (“Seeing a student trying to take sexual advantage of another student who is clearly drunk.”) likely cued respondents to envision a female victim, we cannot be certain this was the case.