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Mechanisms of Legal Effect: Perspectives from Social Psychology

Year: 2012
Type: preprint
Abstract: Social psychology plays an important role in explicating mechanisms of legal effect. Social psychological theories offer theoretical constructs that help explain the web of psychological and social causes and mediators of intentions and behaviors that legal processes seek to modify. Social psychology pertains primarily to the “Changes in Behavior” mediator in model of public health law research, positing a number of possible causal pathways by which legal systems and policies may influence behavior. From a social psychological perspective, laws and regulations can be classified according to the type of causal pathway by which behaviors are modified, for example, through changing attitudes, normative beliefs or self-efficacy concerning a specific behavior. We outline plausible pathways for many types of laws/regulations, including: 1) prevention and safety laws; 2) environmental exposure regulations; 3) laws regulating availability of health-enhancing and health-inhibiting products and resources; and, 4) “soft” laws that prompt or inform rather than command the ultimate actor (for example, labeling laws).Given the large number of social psychological theories and the need to structure disparate theories in relation to each other, the theory of triadic influence (TTI) is a comprehensive and integrative model that we use for describing relationships among various theoretical constructs. The TTI posits that laws and regulations influence behavior through multiple causal pathways, from ultimate causes, through distal influences and proximal predictors, all mediated by the proximal influences of attitudes toward, social normative beliefs about, and self-efficacy regarding a particular behavior. Reliable measures for these and other constructs are readily available.
Language: English
Field: Psychology
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W86614210
Cites: 78
Cited by: 1
Related to: 10