Comparative Compliance: Digital Piracy, Deterrence, Social Norms, and Duty in China and the United States

• Author: Adam Fine,Yanyan Zhang,Benjamin van Rooij,Yunmei Wu
• Date: 01 January 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lapo.12071
• Published date: 01 January 2017

Comparative Compliance: Digital Piracy, Deterrence,

Social Norms, and Duty in China and the United

States

BENJAMIN VAN ROOIJ, ADAM FINE, YANYAN ZHANG, and YUNMEI WU

The study of compliance has been predominantly Western, and we do not know whether existing

theories and findings also apply elsewhere. As a first venture in developing a comparative view on

compliance, this study seeks to gain a comparative understanding of compliance decision making

among Chinese and American students. It studies their decisions in response to two scenarios

that offer an opportunity to use pirated online content. It tests how their decisions are shaped by

subjective deterrence, social norms, and perceived duty to obey the law, comparing a control

group with a group who received an explicit deterrence message from a strong campaign

targeting the use of pirated digital content. The results indicate that, regardless of the explicit

enforcement context, Chinese students’ inclination to engage in digital piracy hinges chiefly on

the perceived behavior and approval of others. This stands in contrast to US students. Within an

explicit enforcement context, both social norms and perceived enforcement affect US students’

decision making, whereas when there is no explicit enforcement context, both social norms and

perceived duty to obey the law affect decision making. This study thus provides a warning that

compliance theories and findings may not generalize well beyond the Western context. This

necessitates the development of comparative compliance studies and more cross-national

replication.

INTRODUCTION

One of the great questions in the study of law and policy is how rules shape our behavior.

This is the question of compliance. To address this question there is a rich body of litera-

ture from virtually all the social sciences, from economics to anthropology, from psychol-

ogy to criminology, and from political science to the sociology of law. While there are

many approaches in the compliance literature, we here recognize three dominant tradi-

tions. The first is the amoral rational choice approach, where the assumption is that we

comply with rules that are more beneficial for us than they are costly (Kagan and Scholz

1984). Deterrence is mostly studied with this approach, as the fear of punishment may

raise the costs of violation and keep us from breaking the law (Nagin 2013). The second

approach is based on the substantive legitimacy of the rules as embedded in their social

context. We obey the law if we think most others do so (these are descriptive social norms)

This research was made possible through generous grants from the Netherlands Organization of Scientific

Research (VENI Project number 451-09-002) and the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant

No. 12&ZD218 and 12CSH064), as well as financial support provided by the UC Irvine Long US-China

Institute.

Address correspondence to: Benjamin van Rooij, University of California, Irvine—School of Law, 401 E.

Peltason Dr Suite 4800K, Irvine, CA 92697-8000, USA. Telephone: (949) 842-0066; Email: bvanrooij@law.uci.

edu.

LAW & POLICY, Vol. 39, No. 1, January 2017 ISSN 0265–8240

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C2017 The Authors

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doi: 10.1111/lapo.12071

or if we think most others hold that we should comply (these are injunctive social norms)

(Keizer, Lindenberg, and Steg 2008, 2011; Cialdini 2007; Cialdini et al. 2006; Cialdini and

Goldstein 2004). The third approach to compliance that we highlight here is systemic

legitimacy. We obey the law simply because it is the law. We do so out of a sense of duty,

and this duty originates in the procedural legitimacy of the legislative and enforcement

systems (Tyler 1997, 2006; Tyler and Huo 2002; Tyler and Darley 2000).

This body of work has developed largely in the West, and, like so many other studies in

social science, has not been generalized much outside so-called WEIRD samples, that is,

in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries (Henrich, Heine,

and Norenzayan 2010; Jones 2010). A crucial question for the study of compliance is thus

whether these ideas about why we obey or break rules will hold in the same way outside

the predominantly Western contexts in which they have been studied. So far there has

been no explicit attempt in the compliance literature to make a direct comparison between

the results of a compliance analysis from a Western setting and those from one outside

the West (where most people in the world live and also where there are tremendous com-

pliance challenges). Do ideas from studies performed in the United States, for instance,

also apply in an emerging market like China? In contrast to the United States, China has

a short history of a mere thirty years of rebuilding legal institutions (Peerenboom 2002)

and an authoritarian form of governance with limited participation and representation

(Nathan 2003). It also suffers from weak enforcement in many regulatory domains and

persistent widespread noncompliance (Van Rooij 2012). The question is whether existing

compliance theories about the influence of deterrence, social norms, and the perceived

duty to obey the law, which have been developed largely in the United States or in coun-

tries like the United States, work in the same way in such a very different context.

This article seeks to take some first steps toward answering this question and makes an

argument for a more comparative approach in compliance studies. It does this through a

comparative study about how Chinese and American students make decisions about

opportunities for using digital pirated content. We picked this as a comparative case

because it is a widespread problem in both countries and, as we shall show with our data,

it is quite a comparable phenomenon in terms of how serious and risky Chinese and

American students judge it to be. In both settings it also presents a core compliance chal-

lenge in that in both countries enforcement of the law is very unlikely. In both countries

there is thus a need to understand compliance behavior in this situation of limited

enforcement.

Here, as in many other fields, we have an abundance of existing American studies.

These studies have followed all three broad approaches to compliance found in the gener-

al literature. They have, for instance, analyzed this issue as an amoral rational choice and

found that, though punishment can have a deterrent effect in reducing the illegal use of

digital content, this is chiefly the product of the certainty of the punishment and not its

severity (Higgins, Wilson, and Fell 2005; Peace, Galletta, and Thong 2003; Gopal and

Sanders 1997; Peace and Galletta 1996). Research in the United States has also looked at

substantive legitimacy and has pointed out that digital piracy among students also has a

strong moral component, as shame and moral beliefs predict decisions to pirate (Siponen,

Vance, and Willison 2012; Cronan and Al-Rafee 2008; Peace and Galletta 1996). More-

over, scholars show that some people will be able to neutralize such feelings of shame and

guilt, enabling them to consume more pirated content (Morris and Higgins 2008). Simi-

larly, one study highlights the fact that, for digital piracy in the form of peer-to-peer file

sharing, illegal users develop a new norm of anonymous reciprocity that strengthens the

social norm that sharing is normal, while helping to alleviate the guilt of downloading

(Strahilevitz 2003). Finally, others warn that overly stringent enforcement in crackdowns

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