Conclusions and limitations

62 Table 11 - Themes composing the SRs of Disobedience

Themes Italy Austria U.S.

Lacks of norms respect X X X

Autonomy X X X

Types of orders X X X

Awareness X X X

Punishment X X X

Institutional authority X X

Civil disobedience X X

Hierarchy X

No personal respect X

Failure X

Evaluation Pos/Neg Pos/Neg Negative

In sum, several similarities can be found between the two European countries (Italy and Austria), both differing from the U.S. social representations for some relevant themes.

Thus, these cross-cultural comparison results support and corroborate the hypothesis of the connection between contextual influence, post-materialist values and social

representations of obedience and disobedience. Indeed, both Italian and Austrian participants included the components Civil disobedience and Institutional authority in the representation, considering opposition to the authorities as reasonable in specific cases of authorities

misbehavior. U.S. results instead indicated less flexibility in accepting disobedience and evaluate it as negative.

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political world, it had to be investigated according to a constructivist approach (Gelo, 2012), such as social representation theory. This choice stems from the need to define the social objects with a mixed-method and according to a constructivist approach (Gelo, 2012). The constructivist approach uses methodologies that contrast with the conventional experimental studies traditionally chosen by social psychology to investigate the obedient and disobedient behaviour.

Contrary to the qualitative studies on the authority relationship (Morselli & Passini, 2012b; Passini & Morselli, 2010c), the present study adopted a mixed-method bottom-up approach aimed at defining obedience and disobedience on the basis of the verbalizations of the participants.

Furthermore, this study followed the recent reflections assuming the strict bond between social knowledge and political behavior (Morselli & Passini, 2011; Staerklé, 2009). The fundamental premise is the citizens’ inclusion in a specific political culture, permeated by a system of beliefs, ideologies and social values that are shared and that contribute to shape social behavior. As well highlighted by Elcherot and colleagues (2011):

“The key contribution of social representations approach lies in exploring the processes by which people come to a shared understanding of the social world and how this relates to their possibilities for action within the world. From such a perspective political action depends upon the socio psychological processes by which our understanding of the world is produced, while, conversely, psychological understandings always involve a political dimension in the sense of being

embedded in a wider understanding of how social relations are organized in the world. In short, a social representations approach overcomes the duality between psychology and politics” (pag. 730).

Summing up, if these two phenomena define the relationship with the authority and if the relationship with the authority is a central theme in one’s adequate social life, it is relevant to explore what are the meanings attributed to these social objects. This process will enable to enrich and enlarge the opportunity to reason upon the possible dynamics elicited by the relationship with the authority, whether this is an individual, as presented by the participants of this study, or an institution.(Morselli & Passini, 2012b)

The present study can well responds to the claim of Elcherot et al. (2011) to start the study of social interactions (such as social movements) through the use of social

representations methods.

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Authority relationship resulted to be a central theme in the study of civic participation (Mannarini et al., 2009; Morselli & Passini, 2012a), a type of social action that political psychologists need to study from a societal point of view. If it is true that the protests and movements are representative of good citizenship, then it is possible to look at one of the component of protest, disobedience, as important. That is, if pro-social disobedience (Passini

& Morselli, 2009) can be understood and hypothesized as positive and possible antecedent of democracy - as it becomes a component of a protest movement in favor of “outgroups”

(Thomas et al., 2011) - then knowing that a group consider it only as negative, can help in develop awareness in democratic movement founded on pro-social protest.

Many scholars ask the question “is reactionary civic involvement better than no involvement”

(Banaji, 2008, p.557), then it is impossible to disregard the meaning attributed to the

“reactionary’ in terms of obedience and disobedience.

Through protest actions aimed at expanding the boundaries of moral rights to the whole society, disobedient stands as: (a) the defender of democratic values that should characterize our society; and (b) a civic guard avoiding the degeneration of the relationship between the individual and the authority. A pro-social disobeyer can be considered an active and engaged citizen (Haste, 2004; Marta, Marzana, & Pozzi, 2012; Vecina, Chacon, Marzana, & Marta, 2013) that can contribute to the transition from a local to a universal civic identity (Marzana, Marta, & Pozzi, 2012; Marzana, Pozzi, Mercuri, Fasanelli, & Fattori, under review), in order not to exclude any social group from social change. In accordance with Passini and Morselli (2009):

“It becomes relevant to strengthen norms that prescribe disobedience when people deal with orders and demands which they deem to be illegitimate, mainly on the grounds of a moral judgment. In that sense, disobedience becomes not just a right of the citizen that a democratic system should provide but also a duty of

citizenship” (p. 100).

Prosocial disobeyers include in their actions a criterion of moral inclusiveness and no social groups are damaged or excluded from the social change (Morselli & Passini, 2012b).

Thus, promoting the development of civic engagement at an individual and a community level seems a prerequisite for the maintenance of the substrate that supports the democratic western world. The importance of studying the meaning and the links between disobedience and active citizenship is justified by the growing interest within European politics to understand and resolve diverse phenomenon including, for example, corruption and crimes especially

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during the actual economic crisis. Based on this point of view, a great importance is assumed by the phenomenon of whistle-blowing (Bocchiaro et al., 2012; Fraschini, Parisi, & Rinoldi, 2011). Whistle blowing is a particular type of disobedience, that is, to report “irregularities or even illegal criminal acts within one's own work setting” (Fraschini et al., 2011, p. 10). This passage, from reflections on the banality of evil, analyzed with Milgram and his successors, to the study of variables related to the ordinariness of good (Modigliani & Rochat, 1995), opens the way for a new paradigm within the current social psychology: the psychology of heroism (Zimbardo, 2007).

Possible limitations of this study could be the use of a single technique, including both open ended questions and free associations, to unveil the social representations of the

authority relationship. The open-ended question should ideally replace, in a short and parsimonious form, the semi-structured interview that is often adopted to uncover the representation content (Fasanelli et al., 2005). Despite numerous existing techniques to retrieve social representations according to the structural approach (Abric, 2003b), this instrument allowed the researcher to reach a broad sample and is an efficient alternative for conducting a rigorous, reliable and economical study.

In addition, although the selection of participants was carried out according to sampling criteria that refer to the paradigm of social representations (which involves the identification of a specific social group within which to investigate the social representations of interest), it would be appropriate and interesting to compare the results obtained by selecting other participants belonging to the same reference population, in order to verify the redundancy of the results for a comprehensive definition of the investigated constructs.

The study presented in these pages does not exhaust the reflections on the descriptive aspects related to the construct relationship with the authority, but rather sets a benchmark for future research that will investigate the psychosocial dimensions unexplored thus far.

The present study also provides a number of indications to social researchers who might be interested in developing a scale (e.g. see Study 2) capable of individuating the different dimensions of obedience and disobedience. In this sense, it would be interesting to explore not only the explicit attitudes people have about these connected social phenomena but also their implicit beliefs and the interconnections with other social objects which might be similar to obedience and disobedience.

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