British Journal of Social Psychology (1985).

24, 161-168 Printed in Great Britain 161

0 1985 The British Psychological Society

Delinquent behaviour and attitudes to formal authority

Stephen Reicher and Nicholas Emler

A scale was developed to assess attitudes towards formal authority in the school and in the public
domain (police and law). Data derived from a sample of young adolescents (13 years) indicated that
attitudes towards authority in these two domains were highly rated ( r = 0.57, P < 0401). Factor
analysis yielded four interpretable factorsalienation from the institutional system, belief in the
absolute priority of rules, perception of the bias vs. impartiality of authorities, and personal relationship
to school life-accounting for 47.6, 13-9, 9.3 and 8.0 per cent of common variance respectively. Both
overall attitude scores and factor scores were significantly related to self-reported delinquencies. Finally,
covariance analysis of the results indicated that the attitude variable accounted for a substantial
proportion of the sex difference in delinquency.

Psychological interpretations of juvenile delinquency characteristically posit some form of

deficit in the individual t o account for delinquent behaviour. This deficit has been variously
identified in terms of incapacity t o experience remorse (McCord & McCord, 1964), a failure
todevelop conditioned anxiety (Eysenck, 1970), retarded moral reasoning (Kohlberg, 1976)
and, more recently, poor social skills (Spence, 1981). In contrast to these ‘deficit’ models, we
propose that juvenile delinquency may be regarded as the reflection of a negative
relationship between the young person and the system of social regulation that Weber (1946)
called ‘legal-rational authority’, or, more simply, between the young person and formal
authority. We assume that the negative quality of this relationship is expressed both
behaviourally and verbally. The behavioural expression takes the form of involvement in
activities proscribed by formal authorities (breaches of laws and regulations). Verbally it
takes the form of negative attitudes towards those manifestations of formal authority that are
particularly salient t o young people. The school and the police are likely to figure
prominently among these.
Our interpretation has three empirical consequences. Firstly, insofar as attitudes to formal
authority fall on a single dimension, there should be a strong correlation between measures
of attitudes t o school-especially school rules and the authority of school staff-and attitudes
to the police and the law. Secondly, there should be a strong association between attitudes
and measures of involvement in delinquency. Thirdly, known demographic correlates of
delinquency should reflect differences in relationship to authority, and thus differences in
attitudes. Perhaps the clearest and most reliable demographic correlate of delinquency is sex.
It is well established that males admit to many more misdemeanours than females (Smith &
Visher, 1980; Hindelang et al., 1981). Contrary to the expectations of ‘deficit’ theorists,
however, no similar sex differences exist in the various psychological deficits held to account
for delinquency. According to our approach a sex difference in delinquent participation
should reflect a sex difference in orientation to authority: that is to say, males should hold
more negative attitudes to authority than females.
There does of course remain a major theoretical issue concerning the origins of a negative
relation between some young people and formal authorities. Does it for instance reflect the
breakdown of a previously positive relationship as ‘strain theorists’ have implied (e.g. Cohen,
1955; Cloward & Ohlin, 1960), o r a failure to form a positive relationship in the first place as
control theorists argue (e.g. Hirschi, 1969; Box, 1981)?
162 Stephen Reicher and Nicholas Emler

While recognizing the basic nature of such theoretical questions, the first step must be to
establish that the predicted empirical relationships exist. Indeed, one factor favouring the rise
of the ‘deficit’ explanation of delinquent behaviour was a failure of earlier attempts to
establish empirically the existence of a clear and consistent link between attitudes and
behaviour. We suspect that one major reason why past research often pointed to a weak or
non-existent relationship between social attitudes and aspects of behaviour such as
delinquency and honesty is that researchers had not always followed good psychometric
practice in the construction of their measures, employing weak measures of either the
attitude or behaviour variables or both. As Fishbein & Ajzen (1974) pointed out, some of
the problems plaguing research on attitude-behaviour relations in social psychology (cf.
Wicker, 1969) can be overcome by use of appropriately selected ‘multiple indicators’ or
aggregated measures of the variables concerned. Indeed, the relevance of aggregation to
psychological measurement generally is now beginning to be more widely recognized (e.g.
Cheek, 1982; Rushton et al., 1983). As regards behavioural measures, self-report inventories
of delinquency meet the multiple-indicator criterion and are also likely to be able to meet the
criteria of Likert scaling that Fishbein & Ajzen (1974) identify as the most appropriate for
such measures (Emler, 1984). In much criminological research, however, it is the attitude
rather than the behavioural measures which constitute the weak point. Often analysis has
been based on individual attitude items so that the attitude-behaviour relationships reported
have themselves frequently been weak (e.g. Hirschi, 1969; Jensen, 1972; Hindelang, 1973;
West & Farrington, 1973; Mawby, 1980).
It is also the case, however, that other investigators have, not unnaturally, given their
differing theoretical and empirical interests, sampled attitudes and beliefs that do not
correspond precisely to the cluster identified as relevant here. Thus they have sampled
attitudes to the police (e.g. Gibson, 1967). or crime (e.g. Hindelang, 1970), or school (e.g.
Hargreaves, 1967), but not to formal authority as such. Studies by Brown (1974) and by
Clark & Wenninger (1964) did involve examination of attitudes to various aspects of legal
authority, though not attitudes to school-related formal authority. In both studies positive
correlations were reported between the attitude measures and self-reported delinquency.
Unfortunately, however, the results are confounded with age effects, the samples in each
case spanning an age range from 11 to 18 years. It is known from other research that
attitudes of the kinds sampled undergo changes in this period; crime comes to be regarded
less seriously and attitudes to the law become less positive (Hess & Torney, 1967; Gallatin &
Adelson, 1971; Turiel, 1976; Mussen et al., 1977). During the same period general levels of
involvement in delinquency are likely to change (e.g. Farrington el al., 1982). Control for age
is therefore vital.
Our aims in the research reported in this paper were as follows: (1) to develop a measure
of general attitudes to formal authority; (2) to determine the dimensional structure of such
attitudes and, in particular, to examine the relationship between attitudes to formal authority
in the school context and in the public context (the police and the law); (3) to examine the
relationship between these attitudes and delinquency with age controlled; and (4) to
determine whether the relationship is consistent with sex differences in delinquency.

Construction of an attitude measure: Item generation

The two major spheres of formal authority with which young people are likely to have some
familiarity are ( a ) the law as enforced by the police, and (b) the regime of the school. The
connection between these two is of particular interest by virtue of the possible influence of
experience in school upon the young person’s attitudes towards formal authority in other
guises. Thus attitude objects relating to each sphere were identified, for ( a ) these being
 Delinquent behaviour and attitudes to authority 163
police, law and criminals, and for (b) school, teachers and school rules. Existing scales
relating to each of these attitude objects were examined. Items were found to reflect one or
more of the following aspects of attitudes towards these objects: characteristics (referring to
traits of the object), personal relationship, effectiveness (referring to how successful the
object is in fulfilling its defined role), legitimacy, primacy (referring to whether the dictates
of the object can be overruled by other concerns) and acceptance (referring to whether the
subject personally accepts the dictates of the object). An item pool was developed to cover
each distinct combination of attitude object, aspect and evaluative form (positive vs.
negative); items were either adapted from existing scales or created by the authors. Some
reduction in this pool was then achieved by eliminating items which appeared repetitious and
which could not be suitably reworded. Fifty-seven items were retained for further study, 31
relating to ( a ) and 26 to ( b ) .
This scale was then piloted with 95 boys and girls, aged 12-15 years and predominantly
from working-class and lower middle-class backgrounds. The scale was found to satisfy most
of the conditions we had set for it. Scores on ( a ) and ( b ) were strongly correlated. The boys
endorsed more negative attitudes than the girls both on each subscale and overall. Finally,
scores on the scale were strongly associated with scores on a self-report measure of
involvement in delinquent and antisocial activities among both the boys and girls.
In this initial form, however, the attitude measure remained somewhat cumbersome,
completion taking up to 50 minutes. Moreover, several items overlapped and several had low
part-whole correlations thus failing Likert scaling requirements. Items were selected for the
final version of the scale on the basis of four criteria: (i) a part-whole correlation on the
initial scale in excess of 0.50; (ii) a rotated factor loading in excess of 0.50 (an analysis of
responses to the initial scale was made by the principal components method and Kaiser’s
varimax procedure, and three rotated factors were identified); (iii) no repetitiveness or
overlap between items; and (iv) an equal division of items between the public and school
domains. This led to the creation of a 24-item scale, with 12 items relating to each domain.

Method
Subjects
Subjects were selected from a city high school drawing pupils from a working-class catchment area; the
family backgrounds were almost entirely social classes 3 and 4 on the Registrar-General’s five-point
scale. The sample consisted of 55 boys and 52 girls, almost all of whom were 13 years old at the time of
testing.

Materials
Each boy or girl completed the 24-item attitude scale and a self-report measure of involvement in
delinquent activities. The response format for the attitude scale was of the Likert type with five
alternatives for each item: strongly agree, agree, undecided, disagree, strongly disagree. The self-report
measure consisted of 22 items describing various delinquent activities together with four buffer items at
the beginning of the inventory describing non-delinquent activities. This measure was derived in two
stages. In the first a 40-item scale was compiled which distinguished between institutionalized young
offenders and controls (see Emler er al., 1978). Principal components analysis revealed a general factor
(accounting for 33-1 per cent of the total variance) and 26 of the items were selected which had high
loadings on this general factor. In the second stage, these items were used to provide the behavioural
measure used in piloting the attitude scale. A further reduction of items was made at this stage (from 26
to 22) on the basis of the part-whole correlations obtained from the pilot sample’s responses. The final
measure included items covering a wide range of delinquent and antisocial activities including various
forms of theft, aggression and vandalism, and rule violation.
 164 Stephen Reicher and Nicholas Emler

Procedure
Children were tested in small groups in their own classroom. Sessions were run by an experimenter not
known to the subjects and teachers were excluded from the room. The children involved were assured
of the complete confidentiality of their replies and identified themselves on the measures only by means
of a code. In all cases the attitude measure was completed prior to the self-report measure.

Results
Attitudes
Responses were scored from 1 to 5 on each item with lower scores indicating a more negative
attitude. Alpha score of internal reliability was 0.93; Guttman split-half coefficient was 0.88.
Table 1 shows the means for the ( a ) and (b) subscales and the overall means for boys and
girls. Male attitudes were more negative than those of females on both subscales and the
overall scale. Moreover, ( a ) and (b) were significantly correlated both within sex (males:
r = 0.65, P < 0.001; females: r = 0.34, P < 0-Ol), and within the total sample (r = 0.57,
P < O*OOol).
Responses to the attitude inventory were then analysed by the principal components
method. The first principal component accounted for 28.7 per cent of the total variance, and
the following three accounting for 9.6, 6.6 and 6.3 per cent respectively. The factor matrix
was rotated by Kaiser’s varimax procedure with acceptance of all principal components with
an eigenvalue in excess of unity. The eight eigenvectors thus retained accounted for 71.1 per
cent of the total variance. Their final eigenvalues ranged from 6.50 to 0.55, accounting for
47.6 to 4.1 per cent of the common variance of the reduced variance space. Only the first
four factors, those with eigenvalues exceeding unity, were interpreted. Table 2 gives the
items loading at 0.40 or more on these factors.
Factor 1 appears to reflect alienation from the institutional system. Factor 2 is defined by
items concerning the absolute priority of the obedience to rules or authorities. The third
factor reflects views that authorities and rules do not operate for everyone’s benefit. The final
factor is defined only by items relating to the school context and seems to be a more specific
personal alienation from authority in school.

Attitude-behaviour relations
Each boy and girl was given a score on the self-report inventory out of 22. Mean score for
the males was 9.45 (SD = 4.96) and for the females 3.62 (SD = 3.80); this difference was
significant ( P < 0.001), on a two-tailed I test. Pearson product moment correlations were
computed between self-report scores and attitude scores (for the sample as a whole,
r = -0.79, P < O.OOO1; for males, r = -0.68, P < O.OOO1; and for females, r = -0.76,
P < 0-OOol). Correlations between attitude factor scores and self-report were factor 1, -0.55
( P < O.OOO1); factor 2 , -0.33, ( P < 0.001); factor 3, -0.50 ( P < 0-OOO1); and factor 4,
-0.34 ( P < 0.001).

Table 1. Mean scores on attitude scales for males and females

( a ) Public (b) School Combined

n x SD 2 SD x SD
~ ~~

Males 55 2.94 0.38 3-00 0.63 2.98 0.45

Females 52 3.14 0.33 3-50 0-50 3.32 0.34
P <0*001 c0.005 <0.001
 Delinquent behaviour and attitudes to authority 165

Table 2. Rotated factors and factor loadings for attitudes to authority items ( n = 105)

Item No. Item Loading

Factor I . Alienation from the institutional system (47.6 per cent)”

11 You should not worry about doing things against school rules if you can get
away with it 0.765
5 It is all right to do something against the law, like stealing, if you can get
away with it 0.710
10 The police pick on me and give me a bad time 0.638
15 Missing school is all right if you can get away with it 0-616
18 School is a waste of time for me 0.606
24 Trying hard at school is not going to get you anywhere in life 0.524
8 Breaking a bad school rule is OK 0.510
2 The police are often unnecessarily brutal to people 0.446

Factor 2. Absolute priority of rules and authorities (13.9 percent)

1 It can be OK to do something which is against the law if it is to help a
friend 0.733
13 You should always do what a police officer tells you 0.598
14 You should never break the law 0.583

Facror 3. Bias vs. impartiality of authorities (8.3 per cent)

19 A lot of laws are not to help ordinary people but purely to restrict their
freedom 0.651
17 A lot of teachers care more about an easy life than about what happens to
their pupils 0.645
6 Teachers have got more time for you if you have got a posh accent 0.618

Factor 4. Relationship to school rules and authority (8.0 per cent)

9 School would be a much worse place for me if there were no school rules 0.653
4 Teachers pick on me 0.572
7 Most school rules are stupid or petty 0.492

Percentages in parentheses indicate common variance accounted for.

Finally, an analysis of covariance-xamining sex differences in self-report with attitude

scores as the covariate-was performed. Though a partialling out of attitudes greatly
diminished the effect of sex it remained significant (F = 9.97, d.f. = 1,104, P < 0.01).
However, multiple classification analysis showed that, in taking account of attitude
differences, the proportion of total variance accounted for by sex fell from 27 to 4 per cent.

Discussion
These results indicate that the scale satisfies the considerations outlined in the introduction.
Firstly, it is capable of recording attitude-behaviour relationships. Secondly, the scale
includes items relating equally t o the ‘public’ and ‘school’ domains. Thirdly, the scores are
consistently related t o sex differences in delinquency. Finally, the revised scale, in this
shortened form, is a convenient tool and together with the self-report scale can be
administered in a period of 2&30 minutes.
166 Stephen Reicher and Nicholas Emler

The findings from this stcdy also lend clear support to our substantive predictions. Thus it
appears that attitudes to authority in the two domains, the public and the school, are related
to each other and to self-reported delinquency. Moreover, sex differences in attitudes do
account substantially for sex differences in delinquency.
This last finding is particularly notable given the problems that sex has posed for theories
of delinquency (Box, 1981; Emler, 1984). It is now well established, as the extensive review
by Smith & Visher (1980) revealed, that adolescent girls have on average ccnsiderably lower
levels of involvement in delinquency than boys. The problem is that many of the social and
psychological characteristics that supposedly differentiate delinquents from non-delinquents
have been found to be unrelated to sex (e.g. Jensen & Eve, 1976). One such psychological
characteristic is level of moral reasoning (cf. Kohlberg, 1976). There are no sex differences in
level of moral reasoning of a kind which could account for the greater involvement of males
in delinquency (e.g. Turiel, 1976). This particular example is relevant because Kohlberg’s
analysis of moral reasoning in terms of structural complexity also offers a way of
conceptualizing young people’s orientations to authority. The results from the present study
confirm, therefore, that the content and not just the structural complexity of socio-moral
attitudes may be significant factors in conduct. One should, however, be cautious in assuming
that attitudes can in some way ‘explain’ behaviour for reasons we develop below.
It might be objected that no direct relation between attitudes and behaviour has been
demonstrated here, only a relation between attitudes and self-reports of behaviour or
between one kind of verbal response and another. In our defence, we would make the
following points. First, there is now good evidence that self-report measures of the kind used
here can provide reliable and valid indicators of degree of actual legal compliance (see
reviews by Singh, 1979; Hindelang el al., 1981). At the same time, there are no strong
grounds for supposing that alternative methods of assessing behavioural differences in this
area, such as official records or experimental measures of transgression, can provide
indicators of comparable reliability or validity.
Second, criticism of the use of indirect or verbal measures often implies that item
responses have dynamics very different from those underlying ‘real’ behaviour. We do not
see why this should necessarily be so and our theory of item responses is no different from
our theory of behavioural compliance. Both are forms of relatively public and therefore
‘socially visible’ action. We suggest that in both the actor’s objective is to create a particular
impression with a given group and, in the longer run, to sustain a particular reputation; in
other words, both are forms of self-presentation. It might be argued at this point that the
breaking of rules, the violation of laws and various other forms of misdemeanour and
dishonesty, are precisely those behaviours most likely to be concealed from others, and least
likely to be public. We would only say that the available evidence suggests that the great
majority of delinquencies are committed in the company of others and frequently because of
the company of others (Emler, 1984).
Lastly, it is possible that the common variance which accounts for the link between
attitude scale and self-report scale scores is not the same as that which underlies the
relationship between self-report measures and behaviour. Hence the attitude-behaviour
relation found here may be stronger than that which would obtain between attitudes and
actual behaviour. Clearly this possibility must be acknowledged and research will need to
establish whether the attitude-behaviour relationships can be replicated when other kinds of
behavioural measure are used.
Our theoretical approach has important implications for our conceptualization of the
nature of the attitude-behaviour relationship. We are not proposing a causal link in which
the attitudes somehow generate the behaviour. The implication of a self-presentational
 Delinquent behaviour and attitudes to authority 167

perspective is that, at least in the domain of delinquency, both attitudes and behaviour will
be mediated by the self-image which a person wishes to project. We take the correlation
between attitudes and self-reported conduct to indicate that both are expressions of the same
social identity-an identity that is essentially defined in this case in terms of either a positive
or a negative relation with formal authority. Moreover, we would expect, as Turner (1982)
has argued, that, to the extent that a given social identity is salient, both attitudes and
behaviour will express this identity. Consistent with this view, Reicher (1984a,b) has shown
that increasing salience of social identity increases the incidence of attitudes and behaviours
consistent with that identity. What is more, Brown (1974) reported that the relation between
self-reported delinquency and attitudes to law varies as a function of the salience of law to
the individual. ‘Salience of law’ could be interpreted as indicating the salience to the
individual of his or her social identity in relation to the law.
An implication of this argument is that the attitude measure must be so designed as to be
capable of reflecting the major dimensions of meaning which adolescents intend through
delinquent acts. We have argued that these dimensions relate to the individual’s relationship
with formal authority in general. This contention is supported by several features of the
results.
In the first place, attitudes to formal authority are generalized; attitudes to rules and
authorities within the school are highly related to attitudes in the public domain. This is
reflected in the results of the factor analysis where factors are not on the whole differentiated
in terms of distinct domains of authority. Likewise, delinquency is equally strongly correlated
with attitudes to authority in both domains and shows no tendency to be related to one
particular factor, as the correlations with factor scores indicate. These results suggest that we
are justified in regarding orientation to formal authority as a single dimension, of which
attitudes to authority and involvement in delinquency are but different facets.
Finally, it should be recognized that we have examined here only orientations towards
formal or legal-rational authority. It remains to be seen whether attitudes in this area are
indeed distinct from attitudes to other more personal forms of authority such as the authority
of parents. Johnson et al. (1981) have recently provided empirical support for this distinction,
though Clark & Wenninger (1964) suggested that they form parts of the same syndrome, and
certain analyses of legal and political socialization assume that attitudes to impersonal
authorities have their origins in attitudes to authority figures within the family (Hess &
Torney, 1967; Easton & Dennis, 1969). The cognitive-developmental approach (Kohlberg,
1976) also assumes a continuity between these two spheres of authority, supposing that at
earlier levels of development formal and informal bases of authority are undifferentiated.
We suggest that attitudes to formal authority as such are in fact quite distinctive in terms
of content, consequences and origins, but it will require further research to determine
whether this is so. Thus it will be necessary to show that attitudes to formal authority
constitute a distinct cluster, more closely related to one another than to attitudes to other
kinds of authority. It will then be necessary to show that their relationship with behaviour is
also distinctive, in effect that they predict legal compliance better than other attitudes, and
finally it will be necessary to identify the historical conditions of their development and the
ways in which they are articulated in the present. Our suspicion is that the formative
conditions for the development of attitudes to formal authority are to be found in the child’s
experience of school and educational career, particularly during the secondary school period.

Acknowledgement
The research described in this paper was supported by SSRC grant HG 11/24/11.
168 Stephen Reicher and Nicholas Emler

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Received 1 June 1984; revised version received 13 September 1984.
Requests for reprints should be addressed to Nicholas Emler, Department of Psychology, The University, Dundee
DD14HN, UK.
Stephen Reicher is at the Department of Psychology, University of Exeter.