COR Paper Development Workshop

Friday, May 6, 2022

12:00-1:30pm

SBSG 1517

“Reporting Wrongdoing”

By Patrick Bergemann (Assistant Professor, Paul Merage School of Business)

Discussants:

Irene Vega (Assistant Professor, Sociology, Social Sciences)

Val Jenness (Distinguished Professor, Criminology, Law and Society, Social Ecology)

Lunch will be provided.

Please RSVP to cor@uci.edu for lunch order and to receive the paper to read before the workshop.

Abstract

In many settings, witnesses of wrongdoing can report to internal authorities such as managers within an organization, or to external authorities such as the police. Yet why they report to one versus the other is not well established. In this paper, we introduce the concept of alignment to demonstrate that witnesses’ categorization of perpetrators as in-group or out-group members and prevailing categorizations within the social environment matter for reporting behavior. When wrongdoers are viewed as in-group members by witnesses and other group members, individuals tend to report to internal authorities. When wrongdoers are viewed as out-group members by witnesses and other group members, individuals tend to report to external authorities. When views are misaligned, reporting is less likely to occur. We evaluate this theory using the extreme case of villagers’ reporting of illegal Taliban activity in Afghanistan in 2017 and 2018, where observers of crimes could report to external authorities such as the National Police, to internal authorities such as village elders, or to no one at all. Situating individuals within their social context shows how responses to wrongdoing arise from the interaction between self and others, as wrongdoing becomes defined as either a local or a more general problem.