Military Loyalty as a Moral Emotion

Loyalty as a Moral Emotion

Loyalty is an understudied yet crucial component to cohesion and effectiveness. It is telling that the seminal work on small unit cohesion (e.g., Siebold, 2007) mentions yet never defines what is meant by loyalty. Kirke (2009) identifies the loyalty/identity structure as central to belonging within nested groups that matches Connor’s (2007) description of loyalty layers. Further, Salo and Sinkko (2012) acknowledge the importance of loyalty in their affective component of cohesion yet do not explore it further. Similarly, Verweijen (2018) notes the importance of loyalty but does not explain it, while Käihkö (2018), in a review of the literature critiqued by Siebold (2018), calls for new approaches. What we offer to this debate is a more theoretically and empirically grounded exploration of the experiences of loyalty from servicemen. While many authors reflect on military decision-making by drawing on cognitive frameworks, the conception of loyalty as a moral emotion that we advance in this section suggests that it is important to focus on the underlying reasoning processes.

We explore loyalty from a symbolic interactionist perspective (Blumer, 1986; Goffman, 1961) as it directs us to examine the lived experience of loyalty as a situated emotion. Emotions emerge in the context of an actor’s interactions within their social sphere (Connor, 2007), within social relationships (Kemper, 1984), and are recursively reproduced via the social structures that they in turn support (Barbalet, 1998; Collins, 1984). Consideration of the group and organizational contexts of individual interpretation and action is vital as emotional interactions are novel and habitual, enabled and constrained by circumstances both past and present (see Collins, 1984, 2004; Hendry & Seidl, 2003; Luhmann, 1995). However, we acknowledge the disagreement within the sociology of emotions literature concerning the origins of feelings (Hallett, 2003; Turner, 2009) and how they might be studied (Katz, 1999).

Within organizations, emotional norms and emotional management help goal attainment through individuals managing their feelings to fit social expectations (Fields, Copp, & Kleinman, 2006; Hochschild, 1983, 1998; Hockey, 1986). For instance, how a group defines a given situation in which they must act helps individual members determine what actions they ought to undertake. Consistently, employing the same interpretation of actions and rules results in habitualized patterns (Blumer, 1986) as group members share an imagined set of assumptions about feeling rules (Butler & Gross, 2009; Hallett, 2003; Harber, 2009; Rimé, 2009). As such, differing social units express different emotion cultures, where local particularities shape the emotional climate (Turner, 2009). As Haidt (2012) notes with the moral foundations theory approach, loyalty/betrayal is a key foundation of decision-making and tribal coherence.

Previously, scholars such as Coleman (2009), Fletcher (1995), Keller (2007), and Klenig (2014) have examined loyalty as a virtue and as a principle for social cohesion, with much debate on the “value” of the feeling. Consequently, while there are sophisticated inquiries concerning how virtuous loyalty ought to be done, we have only a partial understanding of how loyalty is practiced.

We propose that loyalty is a moral emotion rather than just a behavior or an instrumental, contract-like relation (Connor, 2007, 2018; Keller, 2007). This allows us to deploy an interactionist framework and ask how loyalties inform a person’s sense of self (identity), connection to others, and sensemaking processes. Morals have an emotional basis; they are felt (Connor, 2010; Haidt, 2012; Prinz, 2007) and cannot be disentangled from one another. Hence, though not in the sense of virtue ethics but in the sense of social experiences and expectations, an emotional bond functions at least to some degree as a moral bond, and vice versa. That is, an emotional bond can make me feel as though I owe an obligation to someone or something, and a moral bond with someone or something can elicit certain emotions in response to the fulfillment or failure to fulfill the terms of said bond.

Invariably relational to associated others and wider society, moral emotions bear a vital normative component that is concerned with the words and deeds that individuals ought, or ought not, to perform. Moral emotions such as loyalty motivate behavior in line with a person’s moral code (Prinz, 2007). Prinz (2007) argues that moral emotions are intrinsically motivating as they impel us to react to the source of the emotion. For instance, when someone we know violates rules or norms that we value, we not only experience strong emotional reactions, they motivate us to seek redress (Prinz, 2007). Herein, moral emotions serve as a person’s guide to immediate and future action.

To act out of a sense of loyalty, or to repudiate one’s loyal relationship to another by acting in contravention of it, is to ask oneself what one ought to do in a particular circumstance given an existing relationship with another. In this way, loyalty normatively orders an individual’s relationships with others and, generally, guides their actions in accordance with the needs and interests of those to whom their loyalty is attached. Thus, the lived experience of loyalty is intrinsically bound up with others and ties into our intimate sense of belonging. Through this, the lived experience of loyalty discloses an individual to themselves as a normative actor whose actions are guided by consideration of the commitments they make to others as well as what others expect of them.

All emotions involve an element of reciprocity (Connor, 2007); however, loyalty depends upon reciprocity and the fulfillment of responsibilities to others. Notably, this reciprocity is neither contractual nor instrumental in essence (though it may involve contractual and instrumental elements) but rather is founded upon the belief of a mutual recognition of value between at least two or more people (Connor, 2018).

Although complex, loyalty is a deeply felt moral emotion insofar as genuine loyalty from one person to another implicates that individual’s sense of self-identity. Voluntarily committing to a reciprocal relationship validates the value of those others to and for oneself. To be genuinely loyal is therefore, in part, to assert who you are and intend to be. Expectations of social interaction and validation of identity also shape emotional experience (Bericat, 2015). Actors form emotional attachments to roles that in turn inform their sense of self. For example, with nationalism and national identities, pride and loyalty are often strongly felt and, without such emotional attachments, roles and allegiances would be able to be much more readily discarded (Connor, 2007). As our shared experiences of belonging within these groups affirms us as valued members, our loyalty to the group develops. Yet, even as loyal relationships affirm self-value, the multiplicity of loyal relationships we maintain produces the potential for loyalty conflicts.

Loyalty relationships are highly discretionary and targeted rather than general and diffuse. An individual’s commitment to a particular group ordinarily reflects some degree of loyalty to at least one or more members of the group. However, loyalty to a group member does not imply loyalty to the group as a whole, just as loyalty to the group as a whole does not necessarily imply loyalty to all group members (Connor, 2007). Per this, the strength of an individual’s loyalty relationships is variable and iterative, developing via shared experiences to wax or wane. Loyalties can be conflicting, and different loyalties can arise and take precedence in different scenarios (Coleman, 2009).

For groups, having loyal members is vital to perpetuating the group. Insofar as groups require the acquisition of resources for the achievement of group goals, the fostering of loyalty among a group’s members motivates them to commit to satisfying the group’s needs. However, to the extent that individuals have multiple loyalty layers, differences in the strength of an individual’s loyalty to different groups will translate into differing levels of commitment. A group with mildly loyal members will find it harder to satisfy its needs if those members have stronger commitments elsewhere. Yet creating a strong bond between an individual and a group can be difficult. Contractual arrangements and instrumental incentives are common means by which groups try to obtain such commitment from its members. But such arrangements are ultimately provisional per the existence of the contract and the ongoing satisfaction of promised incentives.

Conversely, the effective socialization of loyalty among a group’s members creates a moral bond between an individual and group that is emotionally charged and implicates an individual’s self-identity. An individual who is loyal to a group does not just identify the group as comprising part of their self-identity, it also provides for them a normative guide to action. Loyalty prompts an individual to reflect upon their actions in terms of the group’s needs and interest: to fulfil my commitment to this group, how ought I act in this situation. An intended function of loyalty at the meso-level is to produce social cohesion among the members of a group such that they identify the group’s needs and interests with their own, over and against the satisfaction of the needs and interests of others. This is why military institutions place such special emphasis on loyalty and intensely socialize new recruits. Sublimation of individual identity into one of the strong group identification is a key purpose of military training and addresses the problem of motivation to fight (Janowitz, 1959; Moskos, 1976; Shils & Janowitz, 1948; Siebold, 2006, 2007, 2011, 2018). This is elsewhere classified as primary-group cohesion, defined as the emotional bonds within the unit and toward its leader (Salo & Sinkko, 2012).

Thus argued, this article serves a 2-fold purpose; on the one hand, to advance the study of loyalty as a moral emotion that is pragmatically fostered by groups among group members and on the other hand to explore how military members understand their lived experiences of loyalty and the functions they saw it fulfilling in a military context.

Method

Interviews with 24 retired military servicemen were conducted to understand how loyalty was operationalized during their deployments, the meanings of loyalty to them, and their experiences of military loyalty. Participants were males aged 25–70 who had been deployed in war, peacekeeping, and humanitarian missions including both Gulf Wars, Vietnam, the Solomon Islands, and East Timor. All had served in the Australian Defence Force (ADF) for at least 5 years and up to 25 years. We recruited males for this study due to the homosocial and hypermasculine nature of the military (Wadham, 2013, 2016) and the legacy effect of the exclusion of women from combat roles meaning few would meet the recruitment criteria. Subjects were recruited in 2013–2014 via advertisements in retired service organization newsletters and e-mail lists. Snowball sampling was then undertaken via initial respondents. A research assistant (RA) who was very familiar with the military and military sociology (a former ADF member who had previously been deployed himself) was hired to conduct the interviews. The RA was naive to the theoretical framework being explored so as to limit bias/leading in questioning. Questions were focused on the subjects’ thoughts and experiences of loyalty and hence the questions were semi-structured to allow for an open exploration of the research concepts (interview questions are presented in Appendix). Interviews went for 1–3 hr. Transcripts were professionally transcribed then de-identified, pseudonyms are used in this article.

Data analysis was inductive and iterative with a grounded theory approach to data collection (Grbich, 2007; Srivastava & Hopwood, 2009). To avoid confirmation bias, an author, who was very experienced in interviewing and qualitative data analysis (Noack-Lundberg, 2013), but not in military sociology, undertook coding and data analysis initially and separately from the other authors (who were already aware of the study purpose and grounding/framing literature). Emerging themes were then cross-checked, confirmed, and discussed (Flick, 2002; Lieblich, Tuval-Mashiach, & Zilber, 1998). We approached the data with a framework derived from the combination of military cohesion and emotion literatures (Neuendorf, 2017; Stemler, 2001). We utilized an inductive analysis (Patton, 2002) allowing themes and patterns to emerge from the data through an iterative multi-loop system where transcripts were critically analyzed by all researchers. The team engaged in repeated interpretations and reinterpretations toward a stable understanding of the themes revealed by the interviews. The quotes used in Results are the most illustrative examples of the themes that consistently arose from each interview transcript.

There are limitations with the data set. Davies and Dwyer (2007), building on Law (2004), explain how difficult it can be to research emotion from historical narrations (see also Bondi, 2014; Katz, 1999). In the interviews, our subjects were remembering experiences, and the accounts provided are therefore dependent on the subject’s recollection and processing of events. The interviews produced data concerning how male-gendered subjects experienced loyalty and thus does not include data concerning how female-gendered subjects may experience loyalty in a military and in what ways this may differ from those of their male counterparts. Further, the data set only collected snapshots of a set of Australian former servicemen whose experiences were distributed across time and organizational positions. Hence, our research did not capture data involving servicemen with specific shared experiences that could be compared with one another. However, the nature of this data, as comprising snapshots of experience across time and organizational position, does permit us to suggest that there is some degree of common experience among servicemen regarding loyalty in the military.

Results

Our study revealed the experiences of loyalty in the Australian Military context. The concept of reciprocity emerged as having a significant effect on small unit cohesion. We found that some respondents distinguished between loyalty and mateship, where mateship, as synonymous with friendship, denoted a liking for and connection with others in the unit. Conversely, they acknowledged that they could be loyal even to people they disliked, as long as they were task competent and part of the “team.” Our findings accord with the literature on likeability, professionalism, competence, and acceptance (Bury & King, 2015; King, 2013). This leads us to propose that loyalty may be socialized and practiced differently across organizations, cultures, and historical periods. In the case of the respondents and the ADF, the “mateship doctrine of loyalty” involved very strong reciprocity norms and informal in-group norm regulation that respondents acknowledged could produce norm underenforcement, organizational rule violations, and procedural noncompliance. The study also revealed a recurring theme of loyalty as a prioritizing guide by which respondents interpreted events and rationalized their actions on behalf of the group and other group members.

Discussion

The themes that emerged from our analysis accord with the wider literature on cohesion, reciprocity, and the ordering function of loyalty. Reciprocity emerged as a prominent theme, framed around “mateship,” as soldiers claimed that they knew their mates “had their backs” and would protect each other. This reciprocity was usually framed in terms of personal sacrifice or willingness to be exposed to harm and risk. Reciprocity, or the expectation of it, was also a glue within the social relationship, allowing soldiers to presume support and protection in the future. While reciprocity is a key element of emotions (Kemper, 1984) this is particularly the case with loyalty, as reciprocity seems to be a primary component of the subjects’ experience. At the intimate interactional level, these loyalty feelings make sense and have a strong interactional base to them. The complexity of loyalty to more abstract entities such as “army” or “nation” and the conflicted feelings that our subjects expressed challenges our thinking around loyalty.

First, it is apparent that we can be loyal to abstract entities and to social actors other than people (such as our pets, Connor, 2018). As long as the actor feels that there is a loyalty relationship, they will act upon that (perhaps imagined) relationship. However, bureaucratic entities like militaries and nation states take an instrumental view of emotion as motivator and can’t feel emotions as our subjects did. Thus, when organizational imperatives/activities overrode the desires of the individual, the subjects felt that they had been betrayed in a very emotional, loyalty-based sense. Conversely, some participants retained a high level of loyalty to the military, as they felt the organization had given them unique career opportunities and more than adequate financial recompense, and they had developed a strong sense of identity as exceptional, moral citizens. The complex nature of loyalty and reciprocity to the organization shows how conflicted the feeling is when deployed from abstract entities to the lived experience of the individual.

Our research findings replicated those of previous studies, in that loyalty was strongly associated with small-group cohesion (Andrews, Michele Kacmar, Blakely, & Bucklew, 2008; Bartone, et al., 2002; Charbonneau & Wood, 2018). Our data suggested that the distinction between social and task cohesion, drawn by both Kirke (2009) and Siebold (2006, 2007, 2011), is relevant for understanding loyalty and cohesion in small units. Subjects spoke of unit cohesion in terms of task competency and social cohesion. The cohesion appeared to be the stronger unifying process. Notably, unlike Kirke (2009), themes of leadership and its relationship with loyalty were not present in the data set. On this point, the understanding of loyalty and its function within military organizational structures would benefit from specific research regarding the relationships between loyalty, trust, leadership, and performance. Additionally, further work needs to draw on King (2006, 2013) and Kirke (2009) to explicate the complex interplay of task and/or social bonding—acknowledging, as Kirke rightly does—that interpersonal bonds are complex social interplays embedded with systems and structures that are always in flux.

We also found that loyalty to the smallest units such as platoon/section or to one’s mates would generally override other loyalties. While this would function to encourage soldiers to sacrifice for each other during deployment, in practice, it was also demonstrated that this strong loyalty could lead to cover-ups of unethical behavior. Furthermore, some servicemen saw these identities as exclusive, leading to the creation of strong in-groups and out-groups. This loyalty supported and enhanced development of strong group identities, but this could lead to enmities developing with groups considered to be outside, in order to strengthen in-group identity and cohesion.

Wolfe and Darley (2005) found that mechanisms such as cognitive dissonance and deindividuation came into play in situations where there was a protracted conflict and there was a need to distinguish civilians from combatants in situations where this distinction was not immediately clear. “Nation Partiality” (Roblyer, 2005) also meant that soldiers were more likely to see people in out-groups as all having the same views about the conflict and therefore all as potential enemies (Wolfe & Darley, 2005). In uncertain situations, minimizing losses from one’s own group became paramount, and soldiers may prioritize limiting these losses by, for example, harming enemy civilians (Hoge et al., 2004, Kooistra & Mahoney, 2016; Wolfe & Darley, 2005). It is a concern that strong in-group loyalties combined with ingrained and automatic responses could lead to a failure to make ethical decisions under pressure.

In 2015, Bericat appealed to scholars to make greater efforts to theorize and conduct empirical research that connects microlevel lived experiences with meso-level dynamics and macro-level structures, arguing that “any description, explanation or sociological understanding of a social phenomenon is incomplete…if it does not incorporate the feeling subject into its study of structures and social processes” (p. 5. original emphasis). Apropos loyalty, it is apparent that individual experiences of loyalty are important for meso-level dynamics, such as those observed in small unit cohesion. According to Bericat (2015), a robust sociological account of loyalty needs to link microlevel experiences of loyalty with meso-level group dynamics as well as contextual sociopolitical structures and movements in which the feeling subject(s) are embedded. This is relevant as we are able to observe the significance of loyalty to politico-cultural phenomena such as nationalism, militarism, and patriotism; movements that are strongly predicated upon the enculturation and narrativization of loyalty among members and supporters. What remains unclear here though are the means by which microlevel experiences of loyalty are implicated within and conditioned by macro-level social phenomena.

Loyalty serving as a prioritizing function was evident throughout interviewee’s accounts: guiding their decision-making, social heuristics, and behavior. Interviewees spoke to the ways in which their multiplicity of loyalty relationship were prioritized in moral terms such that the needs and interests of one group were elevated over and against the interests of others. The interviewee’s repeated and sustained interactions with fellow soldiers both fostered and degraded loyalty between specific members, with in-groups and out-groups, and the wider military institution. In symbolic interactionist terms, the data suggested that the subjects were highly discriminating between social relationships, task cohesion, and emotional bonds and that interactive experiences herein played significant roles in informing later interactions.

Assessed from a meso-level sociological perspective, the obvious functionalist extension of the interviewee’s responses can be articulated. Loyalty operates to morally and emotionally bind a group’s members to the group as a whole, such that they prioritize the in-group’s needs. Hereby, the in-group is sustained and reproduced. However, this can also be assessed from a macro-level political perspective to propose the following: if loyalty is a moral emotion that functions to prioritize the needs and interests of one or more groups over and against one or more other groups, then this prioritization invariably serves to sustain and reproduce the needs of some social structures over others.

As long as social structures are conceived as historically contextualized and politically intended structures, then loyalty provides an individual with moral and emotional reasons to pursue and achieve what are, effectively, political ends. This is why Ossewarde (2009) proposes that “loyalty is a political concept” (p. 133): sustaining and reproducing a social grouping requires members to commit themselves by furnishing their time and energy to procure resources, create outputs, and maintain in-group functionality. Ordinarily, contractual arrangements and instrumental incentives may be used to achieve such ends. However, the limited durability of contractual arrangements and the contingency of instrumental incentives mean that any grouping that is predominantly dependent upon these forms of social relationships will ultimately be fragile in the long term. Loyalty complements and enhances such instrumental arrangements by providing group members with moral and emotional reasons to achieve goals.

Conclusion

A core problem for militaries is how to train people to override moral codes forbidding extreme violence. Loyalty to one’s immediate peers, nested within wider loyalties to the organization and nation, coupled with a sense of duty to fulfill one’s mission, work to enable soldiers to kill. In situations where soldiers are immersed with others in their units and face high-conflict, high-pressure, unusual situations together, a robust bond develops. Reciprocated loyalty allows soldiers to face these situations with a strong sense that their fellow soldiers will do anything for their mates. These observations are not new. What we are adding to our understanding is the interactional emotionality of cohesion explored through the lens of loyalty. The insights on how our subjects prioritized their loyalties and the consequent effects on feeling and decisions is a novel finding that needs further research with current members and a diversity of militaries. The lived experiences of loyalty have significant implications for the management of loyalty, cohesion, and proper conduct within the military.

Loyalty is a fragile emotion, especially when felt toward actors or entities removed from the immediate interactional milieu of the person. If, as we’ve argued elsewhere, loyalty denotes an expectation of future conduct, based on past feelings/events to structure current activity (Connor, 2007, 2018), then loyalty can evaporate or become disloyalty when there is a perceived breach of the expected reciprocity. This theme came out strongly to explain how cohesion worked. It was the subjects’ very strong expectation that their “mates” would do anything for them, and vice versa. This is entirely functional in a life or death combat situation, but the feeling and expectation extended into everyday mundane soldiering, and later, life activities. The complexity of loyalty to wider entities, especially when breached indicates how hard it is for organizations to take advantage of loyalty at the abstract level, as breaches in reciprocity are inevitable as the needs of the organization outweigh the desires of the individual.

Loyalty and group identification can fuel cognitive dissonance and deindividuation, when protecting one’s own is seen as the most important goal or when decisions need to be undertaken in high risk, uncertain environments (Wolfe & Darley, 2005). As moral emotions are strongly tied to group identifications, and this can affect decision-making, training that incorporates “moral fitness” (Schut, Graaff, & Verweij, 2015) should also be supported in military contexts. While loyalty works to bond units together and can be a powerful motivator, the kind of loyalty that means cohesion overrides moral imperatives cannot be allowed to be the most prominent factor shaping decisions.