Duty, Fear, and Tax Compliance: The Heuristic Basis of Citizenship Behavior

Theory: The costs imposed by income tax and other citizenship duties provide powerful incentives to free ride, yet the likelihood of getting caught-the primary self-interested deterrent to free-riding-is unlikely to be known with much accuracy by most citizens. Thus the duty heuristic provides not only a direct motivation to comply, but also influences behavior through cognitive processes that bias self-interested beliefs about the advantages of free-riding. Hypothesis: Citizens' beliefs about their duty to obey laws of the state bias their information processing and judgements about the fear of getting caught and punished for disobedience, so citizens reporting greater commitment to obey tax laws systematically overestimate the expected penalty for noncompliance. Methods: Regression analysis of survey and tax-return data for 445 taxpayers. Results: Subjective risk of getting caught is more closely related to duty than to objective risk factors. Objective audit probabilities affect only taxpayers with greater temptation to cheat, but duty influences tempted taxpayers as much as ordinary taxpayers.

[1]  Robert A. Kagan.  3. On the Visibility of Income Tax Law Violations , 1989 .

[2]  Paul M. Sniderman,et al.  Reasoning and Choice: The principle–policy puzzle: the paradox of American racial attitudes , 1991 .

[3]  Dennis F. Kinsey,et al.  The Reasoning Voter: Communication and Persuasion in Presidential Campaigns , 1993 .

[4]  Kathleen M. McGraw,et al.  An Impression-Driven Model of Candidate Evaluation , 1989, American Political Science Review.

[5]  M. Weatherford,et al.  Measuring Political Legitimacy , 1992, American Political Science Review.

[6]  R. Frank.  Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions , 1990 .

[7]  L. Festinger,et al.  A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance , 2017 .

[8]  John T. Scholz,et al.  Beyond deterrence: Behavioral decision theory and tax compliance. , 1991 .

[9]  T. Tyler,et al.  Self-Interest vs. Symbolic Politics in Policy Attitudes and Presidential Voting , 1980, American Political Science Review.

[10]  P. Lazarsfeld,et al.  The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign , 1968 .

[11]  R. Hogarth,et al.  Ambiguity and Uncertainty in Probabilistic Inference. , 1985 .

[12]  Morris P. Fiorina,et al.  Retrospective voting in American national elections , 1981 .

[13]  Wilbur J. Scott,et al.  Tax evasion and mechanisms of social control: A comparison with grand and petty theft , 1982 .

[14]  Margaret Levi,et al.  Of Rule and Revenue , 1991 .

[15]  Richard A. Brody,et al.  Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology , 1991 .

[16]  D. O. Sears,et al.  Self-interest in Americans' political opinions. , 1990 .

[17]  G. A. Miller,et al.  Book Review Nisbett, R. , & Ross, L.Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment.Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980. , 1982 .

[18]  Anthony G. Greenwald,et al.  The cognitive representation of attitudes. , 1989 .

[19]  W. Gaertner,et al.  Cheating the Government: The Economics of Evasion. , 1992 .

[20]  Henry E. Brady,et al.  Attitude Attribution: A Group Basis for Political Reasoning , 1985, American Political Science Review.

[21]  S. Feldman,et al.  A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences , 1992 .

[22]  J. Citrin,et al.  Tax Revolt: Something for Nothing in California , 1982 .

[23]  A. Tversky,et al.  Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , 1974, Science.

[24]  John E. Jackson,et al.  The Individual Political Economy of Federal Tax Policy , 1987, American Political Science Review.

[25]  Christopher H. Achen.  The Statistical Analysis of Quasi-Experiments , 2023 .

[26]  John T. Scholz,et al.  Will taxpayers ever like taxes?: Responses to the U.S. Tax Reform Act of 1986☆ , 1992 .

[27]  L. Stalans,et al.  When Do We Think About Detection? Structural Opportunity and Taxpaying Behavior , 1989 .

[28]  K. Pinkau,et al.  Annual Report 1990 , 1991 .

[29]  A. Tversky,et al.  Contrasting Rational and Psychological Analyses of Political Choice , 1988, American Political Science Review.

[30]  R. Putnam,et al.  Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. , 1994 .

[31]  Wilbur J. Scott,et al.  Deterrence and Income Tax Cheating: Testing Interaction Hypotheses in Utilitarian Theories , 1981 .

[32]  John T. Scholz,et al.  Boundary effects of vague risk information on taxpayer decisions , 1991 .

[33]  A. Downs.  An Economic Theory of Democracy , 1957 .

[34]  M. Rokeach,et al.  The Nature Of Human Values , 1974 .

[35]  R. Fazio.  How do attitudes guide behavior , 1986 .

[36]  Eric J. Johnson,et al.  The adaptive decision maker , 1993 .