How Perceived Unequal Protection Shapes Legitimacy, Loyalty, and Collective Stability
Executive Summary
Human beings form collectives because organized cooperation can provide more security, opportunity, and stability than isolated action. Governments, political parties, corporations, alliances, religious institutions, social movements, and families all ask their members to accept obligations in exchange for some form of protection. Yet collective protection is rarely distributed equally, and unequal distribution does not always produce the same political or social response. Some differences are accepted as necessary, while others are interpreted as evidence that the collective values certain members more than others. The [Differential Protection Principle](https://thebrooksbrief.com/2026/07/29/the-differential-protection-principle/) explains how those judgments influence institutional trust, political loyalty, and collective stability. It proposes that the durability of a collective depends not only on the amount of protection it produces, but also on whether its members consider the distribution of that protection legitimate.
The principle can be stated formally: within any collective that provides or promises protection, increases in the perceived illegitimate disparity between the protection received by a member and that received by comparable members will tend to reduce trust, identification, cooperation, and loyalty. As those bonds weaken, the probability of complaint, protest, resistance, withdrawal, defection, or alternative collective formation increases. This is a probabilistic relationship rather than a claim that every person will react identically under every condition. Members may remain inside an unfair institution because they lack alternatives, fear punishment, depend on its resources, or retain emotional loyalty to it. Their continued membership, however, does not necessarily demonstrate continuing trust. A collective can preserve outward compliance long after it has lost the internal allegiance of the people it governs.
The Herd Cohesion Principle begins from the proposition that individuals often accept limits on autonomy because collective membership provides security, stability, and opportunity.
The Differential Protection Principle is intended as a bridge across the social arts, meaning the disciplines and practices concerned with organizing collective life. It connects questions traditionally studied in political science, sociology, economics, law, psychology, organizational leadership, public administration, and international relations. Existing research on procedural justice, organizational fairness, relative deprivation, institutional legitimacy, and exit behavior supports several parts of the proposed causal relationship. The distinctive contribution of this principle is to place protection at the center of the analysis and to connect individual comparisons with the long-term resilience of the collective providing that protection. It also complements the [Herd Cohesion Principle] (https://thebrooksbrief.com/2026/06/14/the-herd-cohesion-principle/) which explains why individuals accept some limits on autonomy in return for the benefits of collective membership. Together, the two principles offer a broader account of how collectives form, maintain cooperation, lose legitimacy, and eventually reform or fragment.
The Social Arts and the Search for General Principles
Modern societies often describe politics, economics, sociology, public administration, and related fields as social sciences. Earlier intellectual traditions also treated governing, diplomacy, persuasion, law, and institution building as social arts because they require judgment as well as knowledge. The two descriptions need not conflict, since the same field can study social behavior systematically while also applying that knowledge to practical problems. The harder question is whether these fields share any principles broad enough to operate across their institutional boundaries. A general social principle should describe a recurring relationship that can be observed in different cultures, organizations, and levels of political authority. It should also generate claims that can be tested, challenged, refined, or rejected through evidence.
The social sciences do not need a single exceptionless law in order to qualify as sciences. Human beings interpret events, learn from experience, conceal preferences, and alter their behavior when institutions change, which makes social outcomes less mechanically predictable than many physical processes. Social research therefore often produces conditional and probabilistic findings rather than universal equations with identical results in every case. This limitation does not make general principles impossible, but it does require precision about the conditions under which they operate. A useful principle must identify a recurring cause, an observable mechanism, an expected outcome, and the factors that strengthen or weaken the relationship. The Differential Protection Principle is best understood as a candidate for this kind of law-like social regularity.
Protection is a promising organizing concept because nearly every durable collective performs some protective function. A state protects territory and legal rights, a company protects wages and working conditions, an alliance protects members from external attack, and a family protects physical and emotional welfare. Even groups formed primarily for production, belief, or political advocacy must protect members sufficiently to retain their participation. Members therefore evaluate not only what the collective accomplishes, but also whether it will stand behind them when they become vulnerable. That evaluation links institutional performance to identity, loyalty, and legitimacy across many different social settings. A theory centered on protection may consequently illuminate relationships that disciplinary boundaries often examine separately.
Defining Differential Protection
A collective is any organized group that coordinates behavior, establishes expectations, and distributes benefits or burdens among members. Protection refers to action that reduces a member’s exposure to danger, arbitrary power, legal vulnerability, economic loss, political exclusion, institutional retaliation, or social abandonment. The term is broader than physical security, but it should not become a synonym for every desirable social benefit. Economic opportunity qualifies as protection when institutions prevent discriminatory exclusion or catastrophic deprivation, not simply whenever one person receives a better outcome than another. Political representation qualifies when it gives members a meaningful defense against decisions made without their interests or participation. Clear boundaries are necessary if the principle is to remain measurable rather than becoming a general statement that all unfairness causes dissatisfaction.
A protection differential exists when comparable members receive different levels, forms, or reliability of protection from the same collective. The comparison may involve individuals, communities, social classes, racial or religious groups, political factions, corporate departments, or states inside an alliance. Some differentials are objectively measurable through budgets, response times, legal outcomes, insurance coverage, military commitments, or access to decision makers. Other differentials exist primarily in public perception, which may be shaped by personal experience, media narratives, political rhetoric, or historical memory. Objective and perceived differences can reinforce each other, but they should not be treated as identical. Institutions must understand both because objective equality cannot preserve legitimacy when members sincerely believe that protection remains unequal.
The updated Differential Protection Principle states that perceived illegitimate disparities in protection tend to weaken the relationship between a member and the collective responsible for that protection.
The principle concerns illegitimate differential protection rather than inequality by itself. A hospital may legitimately direct more resources toward critically ill patients, and a disaster agency may prioritize communities facing the greatest immediate danger. Members are more likely to accept unequal protection when the reasons are transparent, consistent, relevant, and open to review. They are more likely to reject it when differences appear arbitrary, discriminatory, corrupt, politically selective, or inconsistent with the collective’s stated obligations. Fairness therefore does not require identical treatment under every circumstance. It requires a defensible relationship between different treatment and a legitimate difference in need, risk, responsibility, or agreed rules.
The Formal Principle and Its Causal Mechanism
The updated Differential Protection Principle states that perceived illegitimate disparities in protection tend to weaken the relationship between a member and the collective responsible for that protection. The process begins with an expectation established by law, custom, membership, contribution, identity, or an explicit institutional promise. Members then compare the protection they receive with the protection provided to people they consider similarly situated. If the difference appears justified, cohesion may remain intact even when outcomes are unequal. If it appears unjustified, members begin to question whether the collective recognizes their status as full and valued participants. That judgment converts a distributive difference into a crisis of legitimacy.
The next stage is psychological and political rather than merely material. Members who perceive illegitimate differential protection may conclude that institutional rules are unreliable, leadership is biased, or continued cooperation will not be reciprocated. Trust declines because the member can no longer confidently predict that the collective will honor its obligations. Identification declines because unequal protection communicates that some members belong more completely than others. Loyalty weakens because sacrifice for the collective appears irrational when protection is distributed selectively. The member’s response then depends on available choices, personal resources, attachment to the group, and the expected cost of opposition.
Possible responses include silence, complaint, reform efforts, protest, covert obstruction, reduced participation, defection, physical departure, or the creation of an alternative collective. These responses are not mutually exclusive and may develop sequentially. This sequence extends [Albert Hirschman’s exit, voice, and loyalty framework](https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10967494.2021.1878314) by treating unequal protection as a trigger for those choices. A citizen may first complain, later join a protest movement, and eventually migrate or transfer political allegiance. An employee may remain at work while reducing effort, withholding ideas, searching for another position, and encouraging colleagues to organize. A state may stay inside an alliance while building independent military capacity and developing relationships with rival powers. The common mechanism is a declining belief that existing membership provides protection on legitimate terms.
Relationship to the Herd Cohesion Principle
The Herd Cohesion Principle begins from the proposition that individuals often accept limits on autonomy because collective membership provides security, stability, and opportunity. Coordinated groups can pool information, share risk, defend territory, establish norms, and produce resources that isolated individuals cannot easily obtain. Membership therefore involves an exchange in which individuals contribute obedience, labor, loyalty, taxes, conformity, or other forms of cooperation. In return, the collective offers protection and access to shared benefits. This exchange helps explain why people join institutions even when membership imposes real constraints. It also explains why authority can remain legitimate without relying exclusively on force.
The Differential Protection Principle examines what happens after that exchange has been established. Members do not evaluate protection only by comparing collective membership with total isolation. They also compare their treatment with the treatment of other people inside the same collective. A person may still receive some benefit from membership while believing that others receive stronger protection for similar obligations. This relative comparison can weaken loyalty even when the collective remains materially useful. The question changes from whether the group provides protection to whether the group recognizes the member as equally deserving of legitimate concern.
Together, the two principles describe a cycle of collective formation and erosion. Collectives attract members when the expected protection and opportunity exceed the perceived costs of participation. They maintain cohesion when members believe that the exchange remains effective and reasonably fair. They begin to weaken when protection becomes unreliable, when obligations become excessive, or when benefits are distributed according to illegitimate distinctions. Leaders may respond through reform, explanation, compensation, coercion, or denial. The long-term direction of the collective depends on whether those responses restore confidence or deepen the original protection gap.
Protection, Legitimacy, and Institutional Trust
Legitimacy is the belief that an institution has a rightful claim to exercise authority and that its decisions deserve some degree of acceptance. Force can produce obedience, but legitimacy reduces the amount of force required to sustain cooperation. People are more willing to follow rules, share information, pay costs, and tolerate unfavorable decisions when they regard the institution as broadly fair. Research on procedural justice has repeatedly connected fair treatment with confidence in legal authorities and willingness to cooperate. In their [study of public support for policing](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-society-review/article/role-of-procedural-justice-and-legitimacy-in-shaping-public-support-for-policing/3EB985ACD855B32B3C10EDAAD0B0EA57), Jason Sunshine and Tom Tyler found that legitimacy and procedural fairness were central to public cooperation, not merely perceptions of police performance. That research supports the broader proposition that the manner in which protection is administered can matter as much as the amount delivered.
Institutional trust concerns whether people expect an organization and its representatives to act competently, consistently, and with acceptable motives. Differential protection damages each component of that expectation. Selective enforcement raises doubts about consistency, repeated neglect raises doubts about competence, and favoritism raises doubts about institutional motives. Once distrust becomes established, even neutral decisions may be interpreted through the memory of earlier disparities. This creates a feedback loop in which weak trust magnifies perceptions of unfairness and those perceptions further weaken trust. Repair consequently becomes harder the longer an institution dismisses or conceals credible grievances.
Organizational research provides a parallel pattern in workplaces and other formal institutions. [Studies of organizational justice](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4562203/) associate perceived fairness with identification, commitment, trust, and willingness to contribute beyond minimum requirements. The Differential Protection Principle builds on that insight by asking which institutional function is being distributed and how the distribution affects collective durability. Protection is especially important because it becomes visible when members face danger, accusation, retaliation, exclusion, or loss. A collective reveals its hierarchy of concern most clearly when it decides whose vulnerability deserves action. Those decisions can become lasting symbols of membership, abandonment, or unequal worth.
Applications Across the Social Arts
Democratic government offers the most direct application because the state claims authority over people while promising equal protection under law. Citizens compare police response, courtroom treatment, disaster assistance, infrastructure investment, public health protection, voting access, and government attention across communities. Persistent disparities can convince disadvantaged citizens that formal citizenship does not produce equal membership in practice. That conclusion may lead to lower participation, outsider candidacies, civil disobedience, constitutional reform movements, or rejection of established parties. Privileged groups can also perceive differential protection when they believe institutions impose unequal burdens or selectively disregard their concerns. The political consequences depend less on which group is objectively correct than on whether institutions can demonstrate a legitimate and consistent basis for their actions.
Corporations, universities, unions, political parties, and social movements display similar dynamics on a smaller institutional scale. Employees notice whose mistakes are excused, whose complaints receive investigation, whose careers survive controversy, and whose safety receives investment. Party members observe which candidates receive money, endorsements, legal assistance, committee assignments, or public defense from leadership. Movement participants evaluate whether organizers protect vulnerable members or treat some constituencies as expendable for strategic advantage. Unequal support may initially appear efficient because leaders can reward the most useful or loyal actors. Over time, however, permanent exclusion can reduce morale, participation, innovation, fundraising, and organizational unity.
International institutions extend the principle from individuals to states. Alliances promise collective defense, but members may doubt whether the promise applies equally to large and small countries or to strategically central and peripheral regions. International organizations may adopt universal rules while enforcing them selectively against weaker states. Development institutions may impose strict conditions on some governments while accommodating others with greater geopolitical influence. When states perceive an illegitimate protection differential, they may hedge by increasing armaments, restricting cooperation, forming regional blocs, or courting rival powers. Formal membership can therefore persist while the practical cohesion of the institution deteriorates.
Perception, Comparison, and Political Communication
Objective disparities matter because they shape lived experience, but human beings respond to interpreted reality rather than administrative data alone. Members must first recognize a difference, identify a comparison group, and decide whether the difference violates a legitimate expectation. Political entrepreneurs can intensify this process by selecting emotionally powerful examples and presenting them as proof of systematic abandonment. Institutions can also minimize authentic disparities by publishing averages that conceal unequal local experiences. Neither perception nor measurement should automatically be treated as superior. A serious analysis must investigate how objective conditions, personal experiences, institutional explanations, and public narratives interact.
The choice of comparison group is especially important. People do not compare themselves equally with every other member of a society or organization. They tend to focus on those they consider similarly situated by contribution, need, status, geography, identity, or institutional promise. A rural community may compare disaster response with another rural community rather than with a major city, while a junior employee may compare treatment with colleagues hired at the same level. Leaders sometimes respond to grievances with irrelevant comparisons that show the dissatisfied group is better protected than some distant population. Such answers often fail because they do not address the comparison that produced the perceived injustice.
Communication influences legitimacy, but communication cannot permanently substitute for material correction. Transparent explanations can preserve trust when unequal protection reflects genuine differences in danger, cost, or responsibility. Consistent procedures can also reassure members that unfavorable outcomes did not result from hostility or exclusion. By contrast, public relations campaigns that deny visible disparities may deepen distrust and create a second grievance about institutional honesty. Effective communication must explain the rule, demonstrate its consistent application, disclose relevant evidence, and provide a credible route for appeal. The goal is not to eliminate every disagreement, but to show that members remain entitled to reasons and institutional consideration.
Testable Hypotheses and Expected Outcomes
The first hypothesis is that larger perceived illegitimate protection disparities will be associated with lower levels of institutional trust. The second is that declining trust will mediate the relationship between protection disparities and reduced loyalty, meaning the disparity weakens loyalty partly because it changes expectations about future institutional behavior. The third is that perceived disparities will sometimes predict behavior more strongly than objectively measured disparities. These propositions can be tested through surveys, experiments, administrative data, interviews, and comparisons across institutions. Researchers should measure objective distribution and subjective interpretation separately rather than assuming one represents the other. Evidence that unequal protection has no relationship with trust across diverse settings would challenge the central principle.
A second group of hypotheses concerns the form taken by dissatisfaction. Members with credible alternatives should be more likely to exit, while members without such alternatives should be more likely to complain, protest, remain silent, or engage in covert resistance. Strong prior loyalty may delay exit and encourage reform efforts because attached members prefer repairing the collective to abandoning it. Repression may reduce visible protest without restoring trust, producing an appearance of cohesion that conceals growing alienation. External threats may temporarily suppress internal conflict by increasing the immediate value of collective membership. If the threat recedes while the protection differential remains, previously suppressed grievances should return and may become more intense.
A third group of hypotheses concerns institutional response and repair. Transparent allocation standards should reduce the destabilizing effect of unequal outcomes when members regard the standards as relevant and consistently applied. Independent review and meaningful appeals should increase legitimacy by giving members a peaceful mechanism for challenging error or bias. Acknowledgment of institutional failure should restore more trust than denial when evidence of the disparity is already widely accepted. Material correction should be more effective when paired with explanation, accountability, and safeguards against repetition. Symbolic inclusion without changed protective behavior should produce only temporary improvement. These hypotheses allow the principle to evaluate remedies rather than merely diagnose decline.
Boundary Conditions, Objections, and Limits
The most obvious objection is that many people remain loyal to collectives that treat them unequally. Continued membership can occur because departure is costly, alternatives are dangerous, identity is deeply rooted, or members hope the institution will improve. Some people also accept hierarchy as legitimate and do not expect identical protection across ranks or roles. These cases do not automatically disprove the principle because it predicts a tendency whose expression depends on surrounding conditions. Researchers must nevertheless avoid explaining every contrary case as hidden resentment, since a theory that cannot be disproved is not scientifically useful. Direct measures of trust, legitimacy, identification, and behavior are necessary to determine whether the predicted erosion actually exists.
A second objection is that institutions possess finite resources and must prioritize. The principle accepts this reality and does not demand equal spending, equal attention, or identical outcomes for every member. Scarcity becomes politically destabilizing when allocation rules are opaque, inconsistent, exclusionary, or unrelated to legitimate differences in need and responsibility. In some cases, equal distribution would itself constitute differential protection because highly vulnerable groups require additional resources to obtain comparable security. The relevant question is therefore whether unequal treatment can be publicly justified to those subject to the institution’s authority. This standard is demanding, but it is more realistic than mechanical equality.
A third limitation concerns the breadth of protection as a concept. If protection includes every benefit, preference, and opportunity, the principle risks collapsing into the general observation that unfairness causes dissatisfaction. The theory should therefore focus on institutional actions that reduce exposure to threat, loss, exclusion, retaliation, or arbitrary power. Researchers should specify the protected interest, the responsible collective, the comparison population, and the expected obligation before testing a claim. They should also distinguish failures of capacity from intentional favoritism, even though both may weaken confidence. Greater conceptual discipline will make it possible to determine when differential protection adds explanatory power beyond existing theories of justice and inequality.
Institutional Repair and Democratic Resilience
Institutions can reduce destructive protection differentials by establishing transparent standards before crises occur. Allocation rules should identify relevant differences in need, risk, responsibility, and contribution while rejecting distinctions unrelated to legitimate institutional purposes. Decision makers should publish enough information for members to understand how priorities were established and whether similar cases received similar treatment. Independent review can help separate unavoidable scarcity from bias, corruption, or administrative convenience. Appeals must be accessible to people with limited money, time, expertise, or political influence. A procedure that exists only on paper cannot provide credible protection.
Repair also requires institutions to treat recognition as part of protection. Communities often interpret silence as evidence that leaders either do not understand their vulnerability or do not consider it important. Acknowledging a failure does not by itself replace lost resources, legal rights, employment, safety, or political voice. It can, however, signal that the collective recognizes the injured members as legitimate claimants rather than disposable obstacles. Effective repair combines acknowledgment with material correction, accountability, and institutional safeguards against recurrence. The sequence matters because compensation offered without recognition may appear transactional, while apology without correction may appear empty.
Democratic resilience depends on the capacity to correct protection gaps without requiring members to abandon the political system. Elections, courts, legislative oversight, independent journalism, public records, unions, inspectors general, and peaceful protest all provide channels for converting grievance into reform. Leaders weaken those channels when they treat criticism as disloyalty or protect supporters from standards imposed on opponents. A democracy may survive intense disagreement if citizens continue to believe that peaceful action can alter institutional behavior. It becomes more fragile when communities conclude that protection depends permanently on identity, wealth, geography, or partisan alignment. Equal citizenship therefore requires more than formal rights because it also requires credible access to the institutions that make those rights effective.
A Research Agenda for Political Science
The next stage of the Differential Protection Principle should be empirical development across different political and cultural settings. Researchers could construct a protection differential index comparing expected protection, observed protection, and the treatment of relevant reference groups. Surveys could measure whether citizens regard the disparity as justified and how those judgments relate to trust, participation, protest, or intended exit. Administrative records could test whether perceived differences correspond with response times, legal outcomes, public investment, or access to institutional remedies. Longitudinal studies would be especially valuable because the principle describes a process that develops over time. Repeated measurements could reveal whether distrust precedes withdrawal or whether declining participation changes perceptions of institutional protection.
Comparative research should examine democracies, authoritarian systems, corporations, alliances, universities, religious organizations, and voluntary associations. This variation would show whether the same mechanism operates when membership is voluntary, partly constrained, or effectively compulsory. Experiments could present participants with identical protection disparities accompanied by different explanations, procedures, and opportunities for appeal. Historical studies could revisit episodes of party realignment, separatism, organizational collapse, mutiny, migration, or alliance fragmentation through the protection framework. Qualitative interviews could reveal which comparison groups people use and when unequal treatment becomes interpreted as abandonment. No single method will establish the principle, but convergence across methods would strengthen confidence in its generality.
The research program should also examine competing explanations. Economic decline, ideological disagreement, leadership failure, identity conflict, foreign intervention, and technological disruption can all weaken collectives without beginning in differential protection. In many cases, these forces may interact with the principle by determining which members receive protection from the resulting costs. Researchers should test whether differential protection independently predicts trust and loyalty after accounting for these alternative causes. They should publish negative findings and identify cases where unequal protection does not produce the expected response. A mature principle becomes stronger through defined limitations, not through claims that it explains every form of social instability.
Toward a General Principle of Collective Stability
The Differential Protection Principle offers a common analytical language for problems that appear in different social disciplines. Political scientists study legitimacy, sociologists study belonging, economists study incentives, legal scholars study equal protection, psychologists study fairness, and organizational researchers study commitment. Each field examines part of the relationship between institutional treatment and collective cooperation. A protection-centered framework can connect those findings without erasing the important distinctions among them. Its value depends on whether it produces clearer predictions and better comparisons than existing concepts alone. The principle should therefore be offered as an invitation to research rather than a declaration that debate has ended.
If supported, the principle would identify a recurring tension at the heart of organized life. Collectives need discretion because threats, needs, and resources are unequal. Members need assurance that this discretion will not become a license for abandonment, favoritism, or arbitrary exclusion. Institutions must therefore distribute protection unequally in some circumstances while maintaining a shared belief that every member remains worthy of protection. This is not simply an administrative problem because allocation communicates status and belonging. A decision about protection is also a decision about whose vulnerability the collective recognizes as its responsibility.
This framework also clarifies why powerful institutions can become unstable even when their material capabilities remain impressive. A government may possess wealth, armed forces, advanced technology, and administrative reach while losing the confidence of communities that feel selectively exposed. A corporation may remain profitable while employees quietly withdraw commitment, and an alliance may retain formal treaties while members prepare to act alone. Material strength can postpone the consequences of declining legitimacy, but it cannot automatically reverse them. Durable cohesion requires both effective protection and a defensible distribution of that protection. Power preserves a collective most reliably when members believe that its strength can be claimed on legitimate terms.
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Conclusion
Human beings surrender portions of their independence because collective organization can protect them more effectively than isolation. That exchange is foundational to governments, markets, alliances, organizations, communities, and families. Yet the existence of protection does not guarantee cohesion when members believe that protection is selectively distributed. Illegitimate disparities weaken trust by making institutional behavior appear unreliable and membership appear unequal. The resulting response may take the form of voice, protest, reduced cooperation, psychological withdrawal, physical exit, or alternative collective formation. The specific outcome varies, but the underlying relationship connects protection, legitimacy, and loyalty.
The principle does not claim that every unequal outcome is unjust or that every dissatisfied member will leave. It recognizes scarcity, hierarchy, different levels of need, and the practical necessity of institutional prioritization. Its central claim is narrower and more testable: when comparable members perceive a protection disparity as illegitimate, cohesion tends to decline. Dependence, repression, identity, external danger, and available alternatives determine how quickly that decline becomes visible. Institutions can interrupt the process through transparent standards, consistent procedures, meaningful appeals, acknowledgment, and material correction. They cannot reliably repair it through coercion, symbolism, or public relations alone.
The Differential Protection Principle ultimately asks institutions to confront a question deeper than whether they possess enough power to protect their members. It asks whether members believe they are recognized as people for whom that power will be used. A collective begins to weaken when protection becomes a privilege of favored membership rather than a credible obligation owed on legitimate terms. At that point, obedience may continue while allegiance disappears. The long-term survival of the collective depends on whether it can restore the connection between authority, responsibility, and equal human worth. People do not judge a collective only by the strength it possesses, but by whether that strength will stand beside them when protection matters most.
References
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Corresponding in-text citations
- Differential Protection Principle: (Brooks, 2026a)
- Herd Cohesion Principle: (Brooks, 2026b)
- Equity theory: (Adams, 1965)
- Organizational justice and commitment: (Chen et al., 2015; Colquitt et al., 2001)
- Exit, voice, and loyalty: (Hirschman, 1970; James & John, 2021)
- Relative deprivation: (Runciman, 1966)
- Procedural justice and legitimacy: (Sunshine & Tyler, 2003; Tyler, 1990)