Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Violating regulations often prompts a punitive reaction from enforcement authorities, but not always. We examine three potential contributors to how enforcement officers might make such choices: epistemic expectations (whether the violator should have known about the regulation), mentalistic inference (whether the violator acted in bad faith), and institutional pressures (top-down directives to enforce the regulation). The first two of these factors have attracted considerable attention through research on norms and causation; however, how role-based demands on enforcers shape their enforcement decisions remains under-explored. To bridge this gap, we conducted two experiments examining how institutional pressures interact with epistemic expectations and mentalistic inference. Manipulating perceived legality, prevalence, and enforcement demands, we find that institutional pressures increase enforcement but do not distort judgments about violators' knowledge or intentions. We thus identify institutional pressure as a separable source of enforcement motivation: it shapes regulatory decisions without contaminating the underlying moral evaluations of non-compliance.