Psychology of Loyalty: When Your Best Friend Commits a Crime

How far are you willing to go to protect your friends? Are you willing to lie for them, and if so, to what extent?

Traditionally, loyalty is associated with integrity, decency, and good morals. Being loyal means standing by your friends and committing to those that you cherish. Most would agree that these are good, ethical characteristics to have.

Ironically, these same strong feelings of loyalty for loved ones become dangerous when they compromise a person’s boundaries.

In organized crime or gang related activities, loyalty is used to instill gang members’ silence about illegal activities committed by other members. This devotion influences gang members to lie or omit the truth in order to benefit the gang as a whole — even at their own expense.

This twisted sense of allegiance is mirrored in families as well. Relatives or significant others of a criminal will take extraordinary lengths to protect said criminal. In these instances, protectors of the perpetrator still consider themselves moral. They often believe that they can hold their loved ones accountable on their own, meaning that their loved ones will not have to face court-ordained punishments or convictions.

Conversely, these same people do not offer this sympathy towards strangers or even minor acquaintances who break the law. Studies show that this trend is common across all political and personal beliefs: people are not willing to sacrifice their close relationships for the good of society, unless they do not know the perpetrator personally.

Even more disconcerting is a more recent discovery published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. According to the study, people become more protective of guilty loved ones as the severity of their crime increases.

Why? By definition, loyalty is “giving or showing firm and constant support or allegiance to a person or institution.” Unlike other well-intentioned values like honesty or integrity, the glorification of loyalty is problematic because it implies that the interests of one party take precedence over anyone or anything else. Taking loyalty to an extreme, this includes the law and any other ethical virtues.