The first major objective of this project is to provide the most up-to-date review of the available research on the different mechanisms that have been associated with compliance. To do so, the project has brought together contributions from a group of international experts, in the state-of-the-art Cambridge Handbook of Compliance (Cambridge University Press). This peer-reviewed volume, comprising over 1000 pages and 69 chapters (of which several were written by the members of the project and the remainder by leading international experts on the subject), provides a state-of-the-art academic summary of the field. It covers the different conceptualizations of how legal rules come to shape behavior, the different theories and empirical findings on different mechanisms through which rules affect behavior, and the way in which these mechanisms play out in particular interventions aiming to promote compliance. Moreover, this volume covers the different methods to study the interaction between law and behavior, and case studies from different legal and policy domains where this plays out. In addition, the project has produced and published a second book, The Behavioral Code (Beacon Press). This (popular scientific) book summarizes the literature in an accessible and fun manner for the general public and for different policy audiences. Moreover, it also addresses the general notion of behavioral jurisprudence the project seeks to develop. It was voted one of the essential books in 2021 on popular science blog Behavioral Scientist, and was a 2022 finalist for the Association of American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE Awards) and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel Awards. Last, the project has yielded a methodologically-oriented edited volume, Measuring Compliance: The Challenges in Assessing and Understanding the Interaction between Law and Organizational Misconduct (Cambridge University Press, 2022). This book provides vital in-depth insight into the methodological challenges of studying the way that law comes to shape behavior, and the limits of the available scientific knowledge on this question. In this way, this volume provides a vital resource for academics and practitioners seeking to study or monitor compliance.
The second major objective of the project is to study how lawyers who are tasked with shaping better behavior – prosecutors, regulators, and compliance officers – think that they can achieve this. The project has adopted two methods to study this. On the one hand it has studied behavioral assumptions of highly influential judges, focusing on influential decisions of the US Supreme Court. Here it has sought to understand how these judges analyze the behavioral effects of law in major criminal justice decisions, focusing specifically on claims about the deterrent effect of punishment in cases involving the death penalty or major sentence enhancement (i.e. Three Strikes And You’re Out-cases). More specifically, the project examines how justices analyze whether punishment deters, whether they directly refer to empirical studies, and whether their analysis is aligned with the available empirical evidence on this question at the time of their decision. In this way, the project reveals behavioral intuitions and the role of social science at the highest level of judicial decision making in the US. On the other hand, the project has examined this question by conducting an in-depth analysis of the thinking of actors who are tasked with operating the law and changing human conduct. For this purpose, interviews have been conducted with a range of actors, including prosecutors, compliance officers, regulators and police officials, in both the Netherlands and China. These interviews will be analyzed to reveal how these actors see behavioral change as part of their job, how they think the law can change behavior, and how their views on behavioral change relate to scientific insights on this question. The project will synthesize these insights to reflect more generally on the role that social science plays (and could play) in the operation of law.
Last, the project aims to understand more generally when (and why) people’s intuitions about what shapes compliance may differ from scientific evidence about this question. To study this, it has developed three distinct approaches. Firstly, a survey examining how counterintuitive scientific research about compliance is. Secondly, a survey examining which behavioral mechanisms and interventions people perceive to shape particular offenses. And finally, an experiment to assess how people process empirical scientific information when tasked to make decisions about law and behavior. Beyond this, the project group has also examined people’s intuitions about what makes others comply with COVID-19 mitigation measures, as part of a related, large-scale project on pandemic compliance. The unique setup of this study allows people’s intuitions to be directly compared with scientific evidence on what shapes compliance in this setting, based on the exact same population.
