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Self-Presentation and Legal Socialization in Society: Available Messages about Personal Tax Audits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Loretta J. Stalans  and
Karyl A. Kinsey
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Abstract

Research has shown that direct experience of legal authorities' unfairness or rudeness lowers unfairly treated individuals' support for legal authorities in general and fosters noncompliance with laws. Many people, however, get information about legal authorities and institutions indirectly through conversations with others. To highlight the possible ripple effects of specific enforcement contacts on the general population's support for authorities, we compare what taxpayers said happened in their tax audit interviews with what they tell other members of their social network. Because people are most concerned about others' image of them, this motivation for communication often weakens a bias toward negative messages. Our findings demonstrate that messages about fairness of decisionmaking, favorability of outcomes, and dignity more closely approximate the distribution of the sample of audited taxpayers' perceptions. We found support, however, for a bias toward negative messages in two situations: messages about instrumental quality and in the rare circumstance when taxpayers received undignified treatment and favorable outcomes. In this circumstance, the message does not have connotations for one's own image. We discuss the implications for legal socialization and the reservoir of societal support for legal authorities and institutions.

Type
Sharing Legal Knowledge: Taxpayers' Tales
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 28 , Issue 4 , 1994 , pp. 859 - 895
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by The Law and Society Association.

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Footnotes

The order of authorship indicates level of contribution: the first author proposed the hypotheses, analyzed the data, and wrote the paper, and the second author helped refine and clarify all aspects of the analysis and writing. We thank three anonymous reviewers for helpful and insightful comments on an earlier drafts, which improved our work. We thank Bob Mason and Kent Smith for their invaluable contribution to the interview schedule. We thank Mark Johnson who reliably coded the open-ended data on what taxpayers told other taxpayers about their audit experience.

The first author presented an earlier version of this paper at the Internal Revenue Service Research Conference, November 1992. The American Bar Foundation provided financial support to collect these data. The writing was funded in part by a grant from the Fund for Research on Dispute Resolution.

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