Social Monitoring Matters for Deterring Social Deviance in Stable but Not Mobile Socio-Ecological Contexts

Previous research suggests that reputational concerns can incentivize cooperation and deter socially deviant behavior. The current research showed that social monitoring of information that has the potential to damage one’s reputation has differential effects on deviant behavior in social-ecological environments that vary in level of mobility. Study 1 showed that residentially stable cities that employed more journalists—who can be regarded as social monitoring agents in a community—tended to have lower rates of violent crime than residentially stable cities that employed fewer journalists; by contrast, in residentially mobile cities, violent crime rates did not vary as a function of the number of journalists employed. In Study 2, we found that individual differences in perceptions of relational mobility moderated the effects of social monitoring on cheating in a die-under-cup game. Specifically, social monitoring cues reduced the likelihood of cheating but only among participants who perceived their immediate social environment to be low in relational mobility. The same results were replicated in Study 3, an experiment in which participants’ perception of relational mobility was manipulated before completing an online maze game that allowed them to earn extra cash. In the low mobility condition, the percentage of participants who continued working on the mazes after reaching the time limit decreased as a function of social monitoring; however, this pattern was not observed in the high mobility condition. Together, our findings suggest that socioecological context matters for understanding effective mechanisms of social control.