Limits on legitimacy: moral and religious convictions as constraints on deference to authority.
Various versions of legitimacy theory predict that a duty and obligation to obey legitimate authorities generally trumps people's personal moral and religious values. However, most research has assumed rather than measured the degree to which people have a moral or religious stake in the situations studied. This study tested compliance with and reactions to legitimate authorities in the context of a natural experiment that tracked public opinion before and after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case that challenged states' rights to legalize physician-assisted suicide. Results indicated that citizens' degree of moral conviction about the issue of physician-assisted suicide predicted post-ruling perceptions of outcome fairness, decision acceptance, and changes in perceptions of the Court's legitimacy from pre- to post-ruling. Other results revealed that the effects of religious conviction independently predicted outcome fairness and decision acceptance but not perceptions of post-ruling legitimacy.
Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA. lskitka@uic.edu
Linda J
LJ
Skitka
Christopher W
CW
Bauman
Brad L
BL
Lytle
D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008137:Longitudinal Studies; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D028681:Moral Obligations; D009014:Morals; D009922:Oregon; D010465:Perception / Q000502:physiology; D011639:Public Opinion; D012069:Religion and Psychology; D012297:Right to Die / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence*; D017236:Suicide, Assisted / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000523:psychology*; D055815:Young Adult