Obedience to an Illegitimate Demand: The Effect of Perceived Democracy

Crimes of obedience in the form of illegal or immoral acts committed in response to orders from authority occur in many contexts, such as wars, political and bureaucratic organizations, corporations. In particular, under some circumstances of threats, it seems that people can easily accept restrictions upon democratic procedures. In our research we have investigated the effects of context in response to an illegitimate demand. We have analyzed people’s acceptance of obedience crime under democratic and authoritarian authorities. An experimental design has been constructed, with democratic vs. authoritarian systems as the independent variable. The results on 224 subjects confirmed the counter-intuitive hypothesis that participants are more likely to obey the authority's request under democratic conditions.