The Contributions of Social/Organizational Psychology to Policing

The shared theme for this issue is identifying the past and possible future contributions of the theories and research of social/organizational psychology to addressing societal issues and promoting social reform (Brockner & Bobocel, 2024). My focus is on law and legal institutions/authorities, with a particular concern for the police. The field of law has not generally drawn upon social/organizational ideas and research findings. Unlike fields such as public health and management, law schools do not typically have behavioral science groups. Law and psychology have generated a large research literature on various aspects at the intersection of these two fields, but that literature has not generally focused on legal authorities such as the police or the courts outside of the context of adjudication. Psychologists have studied the quality of evidence and decision-making by jurors, judges, and prosecutors (see Tyler, 2022). Empirical research on the police and courts, to the degree it has occurred, has been centered in criminology. While rigorously empirical, that literature does not generally draw upon the psychological literature on organizations. I suggest that there is a great deal to be gained by bringing social/organizational theories and research findings more directly into efforts to design policing, and that is the focus of this article (Tyler & Nobo, 2022).

The police are the most frequently personally encountered legal authorities in the criminal legal system; even those without personal experience have typically observed police actions within their communities (Tyler et al., 2015). Further, the type of high-visibility deaths that make national news most frequently involve the police and occur in a disturbingly high number of cases. While police shootings capture public attention, especially in recent years, there are many other instances of the use of force which cause physical injury and mental anguish to citizens, many of whom are not resisting and do not have weapons (Quattlebaum & Tyler, 2020). Such interactions are often widely observed and communicated through social networks in communities (Tyler & Nobo, 2022). The high public visibility of the police and of notable instances in which their behavior is questionable to the public make policing an obvious focus for efforts to understand what social/organizational psychology can contribute to society by improving policing.

Social/organizational psychology makes a key contribution to policing by offering a legitimacy-based model of policing. This model is theoretically driven and empirically supported. The basic argument is that people obey the law because they believe it is legitimate and that legal authorities are entitled to be obeyed (Kelman & Hamilton, 1989; Milgram, 1974). Legitimacy is an internal motivation that flows from people's values rather than a response to contingencies in the environment.

Legitimacy-based approaches to policing shift the orientation away from crime reduction via sanctioning toward a more cooperative and consensual approach in which people both defer to and work with the police, thereby lowering tensions and lessening the need for the police to be and be seen as coercing the public. Legitimacy-based policing promotes the view of social order maintenance as a shared concern of the police and the people in the community (Tyler & Nobo, 2022).

Lewin's classic work in social psychology (see Lewin et al., 1939) further suggests that legitimacy is shaped by the fairness of the procedures through which authorities make decisions. His work does so by highlighting the role of electing leaders and deliberating to develop group goals. The idea of procedural justice was later elaborated by Thibaut and Walker (1975) and by Leventhal (1980). Thibaut and Walker's work in particular links the procedural justice of trials to the acceptance of verdicts. Procedural justice theory (e.g., Lind & Tyler, 1988) suggests that people make distinct evaluations of the appropriateness of the way authorities or institutions exercise their authority, and then use those evaluations to shape judgments of the legitimacy of authorities, which in turn shape behaviors such as deference to the decisions of legal authorities.

The final argument about the basis of procedural justice judgments is that authority relations are about more than social exchange, that is, the desire to gain resources/opportunities and avoid costs. Messages communicated by authorities shape perceived inclusion and status and thereby affect recipients’ self-esteem and well-being. Such messages are communicated by the quality of treatment aspects of procedural justice (messages of respect, courtesy, and dignity), which signal whether authorities are benevolent and sincere (i.e., have trustworthy motives).

Taken together, the legitimacy-based model makes three arguments. First, judgments about legitimacy shape people's behavior. Second, judgments about legitimacy are shaped by their evaluations of procedural justice. Third, judgments about procedural justice are distinctly influenced by assessments of the fairness of decision-making (voice, neutrality) and the fairness of interpersonal treatment (respect, trustworthiness). The latter judgments are linked to issues of status and standing.

These three arguments are contained within the group-value model (Lind & Tyler, 1988), the relational model of authority (Tyler & Lind, 1992), and the group engagement model of cooperation (Tyler & Blader, 2000). The primary objective of these models is to address the question of why procedural justice is a strong antecedent of legitimacy. The models focus on three distinct concerns: decision satisfaction (group-value model); the evaluation of authorities (the relational model of authority); and identification with and involvement in groups and organizations (the group engagement model), but the same psychology underlies each concern. It is recognized that people use justice-related information to make inferences about their self-identity and self-worth. As representatives of a group, organization or society authorities speak for those entities and what they say and do conveys information about a person's standing and status.

These three ideas: (a) legitimacy as a basis for deference, (b) procedural justice as a key antecedent to legitimacy, and (c) identity concerns as a way to evaluate the fairness of interactions with authorities, present a theoretically driven and empirically supported alternative to the force-based model that has dominated policing for decades. They suggest that force is not the only framework through which to police communities.

An example of the normative basis of police legitimacy is found in the aftermath of the protests following the murder of George Floyd. Longitudinal research shows that this instance of police misconduct lowered the perceived normative obligation to obey the police but did not impact perceptions of coercion. In other words, people distinguished their judgments about obligation from concerns about the costs of noncompliance (Cross et al., 2023). If the police act in ways that are seen as unjust, their legitimacy declines. However, the aspect of compliance that is linked to the ability of the police to compel through the threat or use of force remains.

The procedural justice literature suggests that people's evaluations of the justice of procedures reflect their assessment of four key aspects of those procedures (Blader & Tyler, 2003). Voice is the degree to which people are allowed to present their evidence, state their case, and explain their views before decisions are made. Neutrality involves procedures that make decisions in fact-based, unbiased ways that apply rules consistently across people. Transparency and explanation enhance awareness of neutrality. Treatment with dignity and respect as a person and a member of the community is a third factor. A final element is whether people believe that the authorities are sincerely acting out of a benevolent and sincere desire to do what is best for the people or community involved (i.e., have trustworthy motives). Assessments of procedural justice generally are based on at least these four factors.

In Why People Obey the Law Tyler (2006) tested and found support for the previously outlined arguments about the psychology of legitimacy by conducting empirical research focused directly on legal authorities and institutions. The basic pattern of his results is that legitimacy and risk assessment (i.e., concerns about the negative consequences of noncompliance) both shape compliance, but that the influence of legitimacy is stronger. Interestingly, a more recent study of the residents of the United States conducted in 2012 found that legitimacy was more influential than risk, as did a study of the residents of the European Union conducted in 2010 (Tyler, 2019).

A large body of research has subsequently strongly supported the argument that procedural justice is a key to legitimacy and that it—both through legitimacy and directly—shapes compliance with the law, deference to the decisions of legal authorities, and cooperation with those authorities in helping them to maintain social order (Bolger & Walters, 2019; Walters & Bolger, 2018; Weisburd & Majmundar, 2018).

Legitimacy-based approaches have been widely influential in scholarship about legal institutions. Court systems have drawn upon the idea of legitimacy that is rooted in procedural justice to redesign the civil and criminal courts. California, for example, made it the basis for a 5-year statewide initiative (Denton, 2007). Similarly, the ideas of procedural justice have supported a variety of forms of criminal legal reforms ranging from restorative justice conferences (Johnstone, 2011) to drug courts (Gottfredson et al., 2007). Many police departments have also redefined their missions, internal organizational cultures, and strategies to emphasize legitimacy-building through procedurally just policing (Tyler & Nobo, 2022). In 2015, President Obama's Task Force on 21st-century policing labeled legitimacy the first pillar of policing and advocated efforts such as procedurally just policing to achieve it. Finally, studies of prisons have shown that a more procedurally just jail or prison climate lowers both in-prison violence and postrelease recidivism (Beijersbergen, 2016).

The scope of these effects is broad. Consider an example in the arena of schools (Tyler & Trinkner, 2018). An intervention in which teachers are trained to be fairer in the way they treat misbehaving high school students reduces the likelihood of their being suspended in the future (Okonofua et al., 2016). Similarly, procedural justice is important in situations involving regulation (Tyler & Markell, 2010), health care (Mentovich et al., 2014), and public policy acceptance (Leung et al., 2007; Walker & Baxter, 2017).

The relational or identity-based aspect of authority has been important because it suggests that the actions of legal authorities shape identity-related judgments like self-esteem among members of the public (Bradford et al., 2017). This is first reflected in general effect of police actions on people's feelings of self-identity and self-worth. The police are authority figures and represent the state. The way they treat members of the public is therefore a statement about standing within society, something that influences self-identity and feelings of self-worth.

The importance of identity issues is also demonstrated by a moderation effect linked to the conditions under which people care about and thus are influenced by procedural justice. People care more about whether they experience fairness when they identify with the community and the police (Madon et al., 2022; Murphy & McPherson, 2022). Identification with the community and the police also influences how people react to instances of police misconduct, such as the George Floyd murder (Jackson et al., 2023). People whose identities are more closely intertwined with the community are more strongly impacted by how the police treat them and others in the community because police actions more strongly affect their identity.

Identity is not only important for those impacted by policing. It also shapes the views of police officers. Officers think about their own identity (the self-legitimacy that justifies controlling others through force). Such views shape how they act within the community (Bradford & Quinton, 2014; Bradford et al., 2014; Radburn et al., 2018; Stott et al., 2018). Research shows that both officers and departments devote considerable time to legitimating themselves and justifying, among themselves, what they do through various routes, with a particular reference to building solidarity among officers and a shared sense of the nobility of policing and the competence and moral virtue of police officers.

Why is this research on the police valuable? First, it provides psychologists with valuable information with which to address the concerns of the legal system, which have traditionally been centered around harm reduction via crime suppression. No new policy in criminal justice can advance in the face of public concerns about crime unless it can show that it controls crime. The legitimacy-based model of policing controls crime as well as and perhaps better than sanction-based policing. Therefore, it is a viable alternative to traditional sanctioning models that focus on deterrence and as outlined an alternative that has additional benefits.

Expanding the goals of policing

The key point is that adopting a model based on social/organizational psychology offers advantages to society. It provides a road map toward progress in terms of economic, social, and political development. Legitimacy-based policing builds public engagement in communities (Tyler & Jackson, 2014; Tyler & Nobo, 2022). Hence, it offers a path forward for community development. As communities develop, the motivation to commit crimes declines and crime becomes less of a problem.

In terms of policing, changing the strategy of policing allows an expansion of the goals of policing. Policing does not need to be a continual effort to maintain order by imposing it upon communities through the threat or use of force. Rather, the police can engage a cooperative public in copolicing. One of the key findings of research on policing is that, while legitimacy and force both have a role in shaping compliance, willing deference and active cooperation flow almost entirely from legitimacy. If the police are viewed as legitimate, they can copolice with the community, lowering the need for police officers and increasing the effectiveness of those officers still working in the community.

Finally, the police can involve themselves in community building. Why does this matter? The United States is currently in a period of low crime, relative to an earlier “crack cocaine” era. Even recent spikes of crime have not invalidated this point. How should this be managed? Currently, it is being managed by inducing public panic, for example, by conservative political leaders and some police authorities seeking to fan fears of crime to justify continued, even increased, funding for traditional policing activities. An alternative would be to facilitate repurposing the police so that their mission is to work with communities to enhance their development. This provides the police with a valuable mission that is important irrespective of the rate of crime, but it is a capacity that depends upon changes in how the police relate to the community.

The law has traditionally focused on stopping rule-breaking, just as policing today is concerned about the rate of crime. A key insight from organizational psychology is that the absence of bad behavior is not the same thing as the presence of positive behavior. Employees who sit at their desks all day and do not steal anything are not therefore desirable. In this case, the absence of harm does not mean that we have enabled individual well-being or community vitality. Psychological models provide a framework for pursuing positive goals, that is, for moving beyond a model of harm reduction toward one of individual growth and, in the aggregate, community development.

This reasoning is very consistent with the tenets of positive psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000). Psychology has its share of discussions about how to be resilient and cope with loss and harm, but it also considers how to live a vital and fulfilling life. What organizational approaches recognize is that this is also an issue at the organizational-community-societal level. The quality of a person's life is intertwined with the quality of their community and society, so it is important to have positive goals at all levels.

It is not inherent in criminal legal authority to focus primarily or exclusively on harm reduction. As an example, Liebling (2004) articulates a model of prisons in which they are held to account for whether they promote the well-being of inmates. In recent decades those advocating for efforts to help prisoners have faced the argument that it is hard to improve well-being, and that rehabilitation does not work. Fortunately, psychologists have compellingly dispelled these suggestions; rehabilitation can be effective (Fondacaro, 2015). The criminal legal system, even the extreme case of a prison, can be an engine of individual well-being and through it, greater community vitality; psychology shows how to achieve those two intertwined goals.

The Psychology of Organizations

An additional benefit of social/organizational psychology for policing has been to focus on the internal dynamics of police departments (Tyler et al., 2007). Initially, the concern over low levels of public trust and confidence in the police led to an outward focus on how to restore public trust and confidence in the police by changing police–citizen interactions. The question was what the police could do when interacting with the public to build trust. This naturally leads to a focus on programs such as procedural justice, implicit bias, or empathy/deescalation training that are directed at giving the police new ways of managing public interactions.

Most initial efforts did not consider the internal structure of police departments. It became apparent through interviews with police officers that police officers in the field often do not experience their own departments as having the features of a procedurally just organization. As a consequence, a second piece of literature developed focused on changing the internal dynamics of police departments. This effort with police departments is paralleled by the already noted similar effort to reorganize court systems. These efforts parallel the many attempts to use the findings of procedural justice research within for-profit organizations.

The fundamental point is that it is hard to tell police officers that procedural justice is important while at the same time running a command-and-control police department in which there is little voice, policies are not transparent and are not explained, and officers feel disrespected and do not trust their superiors to protect them. If leaders do not act in a procedurally just way toward officers, telling field officers that the public deserves such treatment seems disingenuous. The actions of chiefs and supervisors model appropriate ways to deal with less powerful others; no wonder, then, that officers treat the public in the ways they experience their own work organizations. This parallels the finding in for-profit organizations that employees treat customers the way they are treated by their supervisors (Schneider & Bowen, 2009).

Research shows that changing the culture of police departments along procedural justice lines has multiple advantages (Trinkner et al., 2016; Wolfe & Lawson, 2020). For officers, it lowers stress and improves their physical and mental health (Hartley et al., 2011; Mumford et al., 2021). For police authorities, it increases department legitimacy and produces a more motivated police force which is more willing to follow department rules. Finally, officers are less likely to use force when they deal with members of their communities (Carr & Maxwell, 2018).

This latter point is especially important. A department can order officers to take procedural justice training and tell them to treat the public differently. But, if the department treats officers more fairly, a natural consequence is that they will treat people in the community more fairly. Given the widespread finding that training is often ineffective, these results point to something that organizational psychology can learn from the experience of police departments and import back into the general management literature. This is not to say that training has no impact: training does change officer behavior in the field (Weisburd et al., 2022; Wood et al., 2020), but training is a band-aid in the absence of more fundamental (structural and/or cultural) organizational change. This is particularly true when, as noted, the behaviors advocated are not those experienced by officers when dealing with their supervisors.

Intrinsic Versus Extrinsic Motivation

Legitimacy-based policing is important because it changes the model of motivation that authorities utilize in their efforts to shape behavior. A social psychological approach argues that we should motivate people not via the threat or use of force but rather based on people's values. This reflects a shift from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation.

The goal of the legal system is to modify behavior. From a psychological perspective, restricting behavior is the most challenging type of influence for authorities to successfully enact since people do not want to be told they cannot do something that benefits them. Similarly, the success of laws has traditionally been measured by whether they lead to compliance. Authorities ask: Do people obey the law and comply with the decisions of legal authorities? The police are a key authority to whom compliance is important since, as noted, for most people they are the public face and contact point with the law. But the same issue comes up with judicial authorities and in examinations of peoples’ everyday law-related behavior.

Psychology critiques the framework that intertwines compliance and cooperation with the threat or use of force (deterrence). While the threat or use of sanctions can and often does shape behavior it requires a high level of resource expenditure to obtain modest results (Kleiman, 2009; Paternoster, 2010). Further, the ability of sanctions to shape behavior is uneven; indeed, many studies fail to find effects (Chalfin & McCrary, 2017; Paternoster, 2010).

In addition, the use of a sanction-based model has several prominent disadvantages. By approaching the community with a force-based model, the police highlight issues of dominance that frame interactions in ways that heighten and escalate the conflict, leading to the already-mentioned problems of the use of force. Even when the use of force does not cause fatalities, it can lead to resistance that results in injuries and trauma to both officers and civilians. Ironically, these harms are not balanced by equivalent gains, since the use of force is frequently deployed against people who are not resisting (Tyler & Nobo, 2022) and, when deployed, is not better at securing compliance than other approaches (McCluskey, 2003). This problem is heightened by an exaggerated feeling of threat (relative to actual risk) that is reinforced by the American policing culture (Sierra-Arevalo, 2021).

Studies further suggest that the deterrence approach does not build, and can even undermine, trust, and confidence in legal authorities. For example, on the aggregate level, the crime rate in the United States has dropped steadily for decades, while public trust in the police has not risen (Tyler et al., 2015).

On an individual level, psychologists recognize that actions taken in response to situational pressure are unlikely to change people's attitudes. If environmental forces are salient, then people attribute their actions to those forces and not to their own views. If people do not see their behavior as a response to the environment, they are more likely to believe that they have chosen to act as they do based on their own values. A police officer standing before civilians wearing a gun and carrying a club will get compliance, but civilians will infer that they acted as they did because of the presence of force, not voluntarily. They will not infer internal reasons for acting when external pressures are salient.

Police leaders often opine that the costs of force-based models are a regrettable but inevitable collateral consequence of using the only viable model of social control—the threat or use of force to compel compliance. A key argument of social/organizational psychology is that there are other models of authority that are equally or even more effective in achieving the goals of compliance and cooperation without the costs of using the deterrence approach (Tyler & Nobo, 2022), such as the previously described legitimacy-based model. These models are beneficial because they activate people's intrinsic motivations to obey the law.

Are intrinsic and extrinsic motivations opposed? Social psychologists have long argued that a focus on contingencies in the environment undermines the influence of intrinsic factors on behavior (Deci, 1975). A similar argument is made in the crowding out literature in economics (Frey, 1997). This idea is illustrated by the widely cited paper “a fine is a price” which suggests that creating a sanction-based framework around a behavior undermines value-based motivations (Gneezy & Rustichini, 2000). Based on this literature, intrinsic (value-based) and extrinsic motivation (reward/cost-based) have been seen as being in conflict. Not only do reward/cost-based models not promote legitimacy, but they can actually undermine it.

Recent studies, however, raise the possibility that sanctions can be used without damaging legitimacy, if the sanctions are deployed through procedures that people evaluate as being just (Verboon & van Dijke, 2011; Yasrebi-De Kom et al., 2022). This suggests that we could use sanctions in ways that do not undermine and maybe even increase legitimacy.

An excellent example of this possibility is Weisburd's recent research on hotspot policing (Weisburd et al., 2022). In the study, police were concentrated in locations of high crime to increase surveillance but were also trained to use principles of procedural justice. As a result, crime declined and legitimacy increased.

This approach might be particularly useful in addressing one of the key problems of instrumental models of policing, which is the lack of an end game. Deterrence focuses on crime suppression in the immediate moment. Because sanctions as traditionally implemented do not build legitimacy, they can never be removed, so a community will always need the police, the courts, and prisons. However, if sanctions can suppress immediate crime and can be implemented in ways that build legitimacy, then over time this approach does have a self-regulatory endpoint, because as communities become vital crime naturally declines. It is perhaps unrealistic to imagine that the police and the legal system would disappear, but reductions in scale are likely consequences of community development.

Rethinking Authority Dynamics

The legitimacy-based model differs from the coercion-based model in several ways. However, it is similar in placing the focus of attention on the person: legitimacy-based policing focuses on people's values (an internal focus) while coercion-based policing is oriented toward the situation (an external focus). Both models view changing the individual as the primary goal of the law.

It is possible to draw upon social psychology to further change the way that the legal system addresses problems. In particular, social psychology shifts the focus from the person to the situational/environmental factors that shape the actions of people in the community and to the organizational policies and practices that shape the actions of police officers.

The current focus within the community is through a “bad actor” (i.e., perpetrator-focused) model, which assumes that the key question we should ask following a crime is about the motivations of “criminals,” that is, what type of person are they and should they be punished for their actions. In the case of an issue of excessive use of force, the same attention is given to the actions of the particular officer or officers involved. Did they make reasonable judgments and were their actions justified in the circumstances?

When a crime is committed the law focuses on the perpetrator, seeking to do a reactive evaluation of their character and motives when the crime was committed as bases to determine appropriate punishment. Laws acknowledge that circumstances shape behavior, but the predominant focus is on the person who commits a crime and what that behavior tells us about their character, as a prelude to sanctioning.

As the psychologist Craig Haney makes clear (Haney, 2020), underweighting situations is a general tendency in law. When defendants are accused of crimes, the influence of long-term and immediate situational pressures is underweighted. The result is that there is less motivation to do an aggregate-level investigation of the circumstances, immediate and long-term, that motivate crimes. The assumption is that the best response to deviance by civilian rule breakers is to change the individual offender and deter others, primarily through sanctioning. This approach turns the focus away from societal issues and centers concern on the consequences of misbehavior, not on its antecedents, and focuses attention on the individual. An organizational focus, in contrast, is concerned with proactively identifying changes in the long-term and immediate environment that would lower the likelihood of wrongdoing and making those changes in advance of crimes.

A social/organizational psychology model also approaches problems of the excessive use of force by the police by suggesting such errors often flow from poorly designed organizations. Such an approach would be to look for problematic patterns in behavior across officers and redesign policies and practices to minimize reproducing those behaviors in the future. This does not mean that officers might not be sanctioned, but it does mean that the concern is less with the idea of a few bad officers than with poor models of selection, training, pay/promotion, and bad policies and practices. In other words, behavior is viewed primarily as a function of the situational context, not of individual actors.

Some criminologists have embraced a situational approach. Sherman (2018) argued for an approach to instances of police violence that is modeled on the National Transportation Safety Board, an investigative agency that deals with transportation accidents. That agency’s mission is framed around investigation with the goal of correcting systems, not of punishing individuals. As a consequence, those involved cooperate more willingly and openly. And it is less likely that undesirable behaviors will be repeated since anticipatory redesign seeks to make proactive changes to prevent recurrences. And it is more likely that causes will be understood because the approach is more neutral and less accusatory, with officers and their peers and representatives less likely to “circle the wagons” and prevent transparency. A focus on situations is proactive. The goal is to redesign situations to prevent problems from occurring.

A proactive system-level approach of the type common in social/organizational psychology is possible but requires changes in the legal model of responding to events. Those changes would move policing, as well as adjudication and corrections, more in the direction of social/organizational psychology.

An example of the importance of situations is found in the work of Goff and colleagues on the use of force by police (Pryor et al., 2020; Swencionis & Goff, 2017). The excessive use of force is more likely to occur in situations in which the police make rapid decisions under highly emotional circumstances. An example is when the police capture someone that they have been pursuing. Emotion is high and the police are involved in real-time decisions involving perceived danger and risk, something that is found to lead to the overuse of force. A situational approach is to change policies and procedures to emphasize de-escalation, for example, by standing off until multiple officers are present and the situation is secure. Ideally, the officers involved in a chase, whose emotions are elevated, should never approach the civilian or participate in the arrest. This is just one of many examples of how a focus on operational rules can anticipate and minimize problems.

An additional example of the benefits of a social/organizational psychological approach is provided by the legal approach to bias in policing. For decades the legal system conceptualized bias as a motivation for action that exists, but is not directly observable, within individual officers. Legal authorities have sought evidence of this counterproductive motivation in the form of expressions of bias by legal actors, that is, some form of “smoking gun” such as uttering a racial slur or making direct statements that apply racial stereotypes. At the same time, the legal system has long rejected the use of aggregate system-level evidence of disparate impact as evidence for bias.

It has always been challenging to demonstrate such individual-level bias in any given set of actions because it is an inner psychological state and these challenges have increased with the recognition of implicit bias. Psychologists have repeatedly demonstrated that people who do not believe they are racist or sexist nonetheless show signs of acting upon such biases (Eberhardt, 2019; Sue, 2010). This type of evidence has impacted law (Redfield, 2017), leading to efforts to confront bias throughout the legal system, including the police, based on identifying systemic level “disparate impact” and using it as a trigger to motivate reform. Disparate impact is a guide to the situations in which bias may be present and it directs efforts to change policies and practices.

The manner in which the legal system manages issues of bias illustrates both the problems of the legal model and the potential gains of social/organizational reframing. The effort to base legal cases on inferences about the existence of bias within individual legal authorities has hindered progress. Recent social psychology has emphasized that bias is better thought of as a consequence of situations (Payne et al., 2017; Swencionis & Goff, 2017; Vuletich & Payne, 2019).

Progress has occurred when psychologists and legal authorities have focused on situational issues, guiding their actions using empirical research showing disparate impact (American Bar Association, 2018). When disparate impact occurs, it is desirable to change the structure of the situation. Moving the discussion away from disagreements about what is compelling evidence of biased motivations in a particular officer toward identifying situations in which disparate impact occurs and changing them has been encouraged and enabled by the robust social/organizational literature on bias.

Concerns about policing are intertwined with concerns about prejudice, stereotyping, and bias because police actions are particularly directed at minority group members. However, they are more general organizational critiques of the mission that the police embrace, the goals they seek to achieve, and the policies and practices they implement (Quattlebaum & Tyler, 2020; Stoughton et al., 2020). Black Americans are the disproportionate victims of this general model, but it influences everyone in our society. Even if the police treated everyone in the same way, the social/organizational perspective on police institutions would suggest that their functioning could be improved by adopting the system-level, proactive institutional design framework of social/organizational psychology (Quattlebaum & Tyler, 2020).

Making policy changes

Existing force-based policies and practices are unlikely to be reexamined in the absence of compelling evidence in favor of an alternative model, so it is crucial for psychological research to provide theories that are different and evidence that they work. As is often noted, people are not persuaded to change by critiques of the status quo unless they are shown an alternative that is better. The situation today is that there are problems in policing and psychology has evidence-informed alternatives that, if adopted, could address many of those problems.

Today, police officers are generally trained in only one skill set, the use of force to compel compliance, and seek to solve all the problems they encounter using that skill set. They project force and carry the tools to make it work, up to and including firearms. The challenges posed by changes in society are: (a) declining crime rates make the need for people who can use force to compel behavior less important and (b) the police are increasingly tasked with social-work problems, for example, dealing with mentally ill people. Their toolkit does not include the skills for constructively addressing these problems. In fact, the skills they do have often make the situation worse by raising tensions, motivating resistance, and provoking conflict.

The problem with force-based approaches is that they define situations as involving compliance with or resistance to dominance. This ignores the possibility of appealing to other social motivations which might yield less conflict and more cooperation. Once a situation has been defined as compliance with or resistance to dominance, a mutual escalation of levels of conflict typically ensues. Police focus on signs of defiance, not recognizing that their own approach to the situation directs the interaction down this path. People, especially minorities, frequently report feeling stigmatized, disrespected, and humiliated (Voigt et al., 2017). While often presented by police officers as a need to maintain control, forced-based actions by the police are often observed even when civilians are not resisting police authority (Stoughton et al., 2020). Such feelings lead to a lack of trust in the police and the law, which heightens not only resistance at the moment but also criminal behavior in the long term.

The irony is that the police assume that force is their only tool and therefore approach situations from that perspective, ensuring that in fact force becomes their only tool. Because they approach situations in this way, they do not have the experience of using other approaches and seeing that they are also effective (Kelley & Stahelski, 1970). Having restricted their universe of ways to exercise authority to displays of force undermines the potential for cooperation and leads to the use of even greater levels of force to be the only path forward in the face of defiance, verbal or physical. And surveillance undermines the possibility of concluding that people are trustworthy since the explanation for compliance is that people are under surveillance (Strickland, 1958). This is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Officers expect hostility and get it, without realizing that they are creating the dynamics through which it occurs.

A further problem with policing culture is the pernicious dynamics of deterrence. Resource limits around the capacity to deploy force undermine deterrence as a social control strategy. Surveillance costs typically limit sanction-based models because it is costly to create and maintain high levels of perceived risk. It is also costly to maintain courts and corrections system to dispense sanctions.

Deterrence in action typically fails to deliver the crime control benefits that people expect from it, even when it does influence crime. Because the authorities have defined their relationship with the community as one of risk versus gain, the public is not motivated to help the police and cooperation is minimal, leading to low rates for solving crimes because of a lack of witnesses. As a result, there is constant political pressure to expand the level of policing and increase the frequency and severity of punishment. This is a failing approach since severe sanctions are found to be ineffective, and are also costly, so resource-based pressures on a community intensify in a continual move toward spending more to gain compliance.

As noted, the criminal legal arena is one in which social/organizational psychological theories and research have traditionally played little role. Policies and practices have not typically been based upon empirical research, resting instead on intuitions and ideas garnered from practical real-world experience (Tyler, 2022). This is unfortunate because the problem outlined would lessen if departments shifted toward a model of legitimacy-based policing.

There are reasons to be hopeful. References to psychology and the use of other types of social science evidence, in particular criminology findings, to inform policy have more recently become more prominent (Diamond, 2018; Rachlinski, 2011). My theme in this article is that this trend is desirable since there are a series of insights from social/organizational psychology whose incorporation into the criminal legal system would improve its capacity to deliver justice and promote reform.

If social/organizational psychology is to play a larger role in policing, there are several issues that psychologists need to confront. One is that organizational research is often conducted without an effort to frame the design or findings in terms of the concerns of legal actors. This has been particularly true of social psychology. As a first point, while laboratory studies and vignettes can enhance internal validity, they lead to findings that many policymakers view with skepticism. One obvious solution is to build credibility by conducting field experiments (randomized control trials). This can be a problem because field experiments require the willing cooperation of existing authorities who may not be open to testing new ideas, something that requires a more research-based culture.

It is equally important to explicitly address policy issues when studies are written for publication or presented at conferences. Many psychological articles lack a final section on concrete policy implications, something many psychology journals do not think should be included in a scholarly discussion (Wells, 2020). A clear contrast is with economists who are much more focused on policy implications and are also more impactful in the field of law.

Having data is not enough. As this review indicates, psychological theories and the results of empirical research findings relevant to law already exist. The issue is how to interface with legal authorities in ways that lead relevant information to facilitate change. This involves identifying win-win situations. For example, those advocating for policing changes will benefit when they can show that their approaches control immediate crime. The police are seldom interested in long-term solutions unless they address their immediate need to be accountable for the crime rate. Absent such a promise, police leaders anticipate (probably correctly) that they will lose their jobs by supporting change.

In addition, policing is a career and officers have mixed feelings about reforms such as reducing the number of police which undermine their employment prospects. Proposals that involve repurposing and potentially retraining officers are likely to receive more support.

Change can be challenging since the police generally have one skill set—deploying force to gain compliance—and as noted this skill set is decreasingly relevant to societies’ problems. But, politically speaking, the police are a powerful political group; reform is unlikely to occur unless their career concerns are addressed in some manner. This is not something unique to the police. Prison guard unions oppose closing prisons, court personnel dislike private mediation, and so on. In the case of the police, change is especially difficult because there are limited opportunities for taking officers off patrol for retraining.

Conclusion

Social/organizational psychology has a lot to offer to the field of policing. Given the dominance of legal writing that is rooted in philosophy and jurisprudence, it is not surprising that much of the discussion about policing is centered around ideas like reasonableness, justification, and just deserts. As this article indicates, the criminal legal system is also a set of institutions and authorities and therefore is a prime candidate for a social/organizational analysis. This article notes some of the many ways that such an analysis would serve as the basis for providing greater justice in communities, thereby contributing to individual well-being and community vitality.