Understanding bystander behavior during police interventions: a test of the procedural justice effect under different social relations with targets

• In Event: Police-citizen encounters and perceptions: procedural justice, crime reporting, contested encounters and bystanders

Abstract

Research on police-citizen interactions suggests that procedural justice enactment by police officers enhances public acceptance of their legitimacy, leading to greater cooperation, compliance, and satisfaction from citizens (Tyler, 2006). However, the role of bystanders in the police context is generally underexplored. Relying on previous vignette research (Nivette et al., 2022), the current study tests whether the procedural justice effect replicates to bystanders, depending on bystanders’ social relatedness with the target as recipient of a negative police intervention outcome. Drawing on prior work (Brockner et al., 2015; Liebst et al., 2019; Mayer et al., 2009), we predict that the reactions of bystanders with a close social relation to the target are influenced less by police procedural justice than the reactions of bystanders with a more distant social relation with the target.
A between-subjects vignette study presents respondents with a situation in which they are bystander to a traffic stop incident between a police officer and a target. The design crosses two factors: procedural justice and social relation. Bystander behavior is measured as the probability indicated by the respondent that they would intervene in the intervention. We expect main effects of procedural justice and social relation: respondents will indicate to exert more intervention behavior in the unjust condition, compared to the just condition; and more in the close relation condition, compared to the distant relation condition. Further, we expect an interaction: the procedural justice effect is weaker for the close, compared to the distant relation condition.
This research may inform police officers, who oftentimes based on the scientific literature get advice to enact as procedurally fair as possible, that bystander cooperation is not always a given and might be influenced by the social relatedness to the target of an intervention.

Authors

• Nette Vandenhouwe, KU Leuven

• Karin Proost, Open University and KU Leuven

• Lieven Brebels, KU Leuven

• Philip Germeys, KU Leuven