Journal of Economic Psychology 13 (1902) 187-190

North-Holland

187

Book review

P. Webley, H. Robben, H. Elffers and D. Hessing, Tax Evasion: An Experimental Approach. European Monographs in Social Psychology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 1991. pp. xv + 158. Hardback f30, $49.50.

The authors are to be congratulated for this body of work and this volume. Through the use of ingenious simulation experiments the authors have (as the economist Frank Cowell puts it in a commentary published as part of the volume), ‘helped us to know something about that which might otherwise be unknowable’. What is presented is what ‘good’ science is supposed to be but rarely is; there are replications, cross-cultural comparisons (especially between the UK and the Netherlands) and a willingness shown by the team to evolve better (and more realistic) experiments in the face of criticism. Here is victory for the artisan over the artist at a time when so much published research in psychology is disconnected and dictated by researchers’ whims, fancies and by academic fashion, there is too much bad modern art about.

Chapter 1, after a preface marketing the appeal of tax evasion as a topic not only for economists but also social psychologists (the main readers of this monograph series), presents a review of tax evasion models and introduction to the authors’ own. The authors’ model (Weigel, Hessing and Elffers) is presented as an empirically testable improvement on previous efforts: in comparison economic models are depicted as reductionist, analytic and unrealistic; those of economic psychologists and assorted others as too descriptive. The WHE model is an interaction of social and psychological variables: the social includes financial strain, norms, legal constraints and opportunity; the psychological perspective, attitudes and morals. Tax evasion is couched

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as a social dilemma putting individual gain and loss against the generalized welfare of others.

Virtually all previous research has had to make do with indirect data: economic ‘guesstimates’ of evasion, self-reporting in social sur- veys and latterly, experiments. WHE’s coup d’ktut was to gain direct information from the Dutch Ministry of Finance in such a way that social and psychological variables could be regressed against both self-reported evasion and that officially documented.

Interestingly, officially documented evasion was positively corre- lated to personal instigation (self-serving attitudes and perceived unfairness of the tax system) but not personal constraints (perceived opportunity and risk). The reverse was true for self-reported evasion being positively correlated to personal constraints but unrelated to personal instigation. In chapters 1 and 2, dealing with problems of measurement, Webley et al. are just about careful enough not to make too much of these findings charting the poor relationship between official figures and self-reports and even disagreements between tax officers as to what constitutes evasion.

In chapters 2, 3 and 4 we see details of the experimental simula- tions and are witness to their increased sophistication over time. Participants are variously engaged as landscape gardens or shopkeep- crs buying information, paying for advertising costs, having their profits compared to others, and of course filing tax returns with varying tax rates and audit probabilities. In later experiments even fiscal inequities, opportunity and decision frames encompassing prospect theory (a la Kahneman and Tversky) are taken into account. The studies are rigorous and thorough, although in a later section the commentators Susan Long and Judith Swingen express their concern about the assignment of individuals to specific experimental groups. Like ideal scientists too, Webley ct al. report results which support null hypotheses (notably those concerning social comparison and inequity variables), but also as pructical scientists they feel uneasy about such results and ponder as to their significance (philosophers and sociologists of science have long identified such tendencies as the ‘file drawer problem’ where experiments which ‘go right’ i.e. support directional hypotheses, arc over-represented in published literature). The authors must be praised for going some way to countering the file drawer problem but must also accept that their interpretations of the

significance of results (and quite rightly in my view) are influenced by such ‘unscientific’ criteria as unease and incredulity.

In chapter 5 we hear from the subject; what they thought they were doing, their involvement and so on. Again this voice is one which should be heard but rarely is.

The wind is taken out of the sails of critical reviewers as, in effect, the text includes reviews by Cowell as well as Long and Swingen to which the authors thoughtfully respond. You cannot help but feeling just what jolly good chaps these people really are, but in an effort to avoid unctuousness some critical remarks are in order even though the authors are one step ahead. In the final paragraph of the text, the researchers recognise they may seem old-fashioned compared to the Zeitgeist in European social psychology concentrated on rhetoric, discourse and ideology, but there are yet a few things from the new-fangled that they should perhaps take on board. They will insist on referring to measures of attitudes and values as ‘individual differ- ences’. Participants in the simulations are still ‘subjects’, where experi- mental success is achieved when those ‘subjects’, are unaware of the manipulations of research design. This is justified because ‘subjects’ might otherwise ‘misrepresent’ themselves by putting on an honest (or some other type of) face in response. It is as if Cooley, Mead, Goffman had never existed. How can anyone ever do anything but present a ‘face’ in response to others and their environment? Even an internal conversation is a dialogue between different selves.

The experimenters belief in the existence of a ‘real’ self and ‘real’ behaviour is allied to their belief in objective fact. They see relativism as a blind alley - they say, however you frame it, rationalize it, ultimately it cannot be denied that there is a thing called tax evasion behaviour. It is there for everyone to see (which they are at pains in other sections to patiently point out that it is not). This is interesting ideologically as it partly implies that the official version of what an act entails is the ‘real’ one, that power defines reality, all other versions being suspect. I wonder whether the withholding of poll tax (commun- ity charge) payments in the UK, will be seen in the long run as tax evasion or legitimate and understandable civil disobedience?

In conclusion, this book is a milestone in economic psychology and is a refreshing change from the talk of what should and ought to be done in this field - these researchers have gone out and done it. It will be read and is of use to those interested in tax policy, social

administration and public finance. But I wonder whether social psy- chologists will notice it - let us hope so.

Alan Lewis Centre for Economic Psychology

Social Sciences UniLIersity of Bath

ClaLlerton Down Bath BA2 7AY

UK