Ethical Decisions between the Conflicting Priorities of Legality and Group Loyalty: Scrutinizing the “Code of Silence” among Volunteer Firefighters with a Vignette-Based Factorial Survey

ABSTRACT

In this study, we examine volunteer firefighters’ inclination toward a “code of silence”. The likelihood of not reporting fellow group members’ deviant behavior is increased by group standards such as loyalty, but this comes at the cost of violating the law. A factorial survey was conducted with volunteer firefighters in Germany to test the influence of several factors in determining whether whistleblowing or conforming to a “code of silence” was more likely. The results show that the question of whether a firefighter will disclose a deviant action depends on the severity (e.g. the forcefulness) of the team’s or the team member’s wrongdoing. External threats turn out to have a significant opposite effect and foster the “code of silence”. Our results suggest that the factors that influence volunteer firefighters in this regard are similar to those that previous studies on the code of silence postulate as influencing professional working groups such as the police.

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Notes on contributors

Julia Kleinewiese

Julia Kleinewiese is a researcher at the Department of Sociology, Kiel University. Her research interests include volunteering, social deviance and the negative and positive effects of social cohesion.

Peter Graeff

Peter Graeff is professor of Sociology and Empirical Research at the Department of Social Science, Kiel University. His research interests include trust, volunteer behavior, corruption, social capital and statistics/methodology. He has published in numerous journals such as the Journal of Mathematical Sociology, PloS One and Rationality & Society.