Safety in Numbers? How Reputation and Salience of Misconduct Change Group Size Effect on Punishment

Abstract

The present study sheds light on the role of social-control agents in punishing misconduct. We posit that social-control agents give each violator a lighter sanction when a great number of people are involved in a misconduct case. However, this relationship is attenuated by violators’ reputation and by the salience of the misconduct to stakeholders before the current case. We test our hypotheses using suspension decisions in 458 doping cases in the context of professional road cycling between 1999 and 2019. Our results indicate that, in general, social-control agents’ punishments depend on internal resource constraints, but when pressure from stakeholders is high, the concern to protect the integrity of the field and their own authority prevails and leads to greater sanctions.