How Many People Would Break the Law for Their Loved One?

Majority believe it is morally justifiable to contravene a law under certain conditions. Meetville.com (dating app to find the right person) revealed the fact in a poll, conducted between 6/9/14 and 10/7/14.

The poll posed the following question: “Would you break the law to save a loved one?” An overwhelming 67% didn’t hesitate to choose relationships with people over orderliness.

Should we blame parents for trying to protect their children? Before the 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick's commited suicide in Florida last fall, she was viciously attacked online by other adolescent girls. After Sedwick jumped to her death from an abandoned silo, a shocking post appeared on the Facebook page of one of her harassers. "Yes IK [I know] I bullied REBECCA and she killed herself but IDGAF [I don't give a (expletive)]. When the local sheriff arrested the 14-year-old author of the post, the girl's parents quickly came forward to insist that their daughter's Facebook account must have been hacked.

Robert M. Sapolsky, a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University, comments: “The legal system is ambivalent about whether a person must choose criminal justice over a family member. In most states, a person cannot be compelled to testify against a spouse for example, but can be if the case involves any other relative.”

Geography of 81,970 respondents was as follows: USA - 87%, Canada - 2%, Britain - 3%, Australia - 3% and other countries - 5%. Statistics also indicate that men (56%) are more likely to commit such crimes than women (44%).

Alex Cusper, Meetville service analyst, remarks: “The perception of the problem differs from culture to culture. Yet in every single community without an exception, men commit an overwhelming majority of all crimes and acts of violence. That may be due to the difference in the ways men and women are socialized, as well as due to the fact that men are genetically disposed to be aggressive.”

Meetville, a leading mobile dating service, regularly conducts research among its users. Millions of people from the U.S., Canada, Britain and Australia answer hundreds of questions every month. You can find the results of the poll here. If you are interested in research on a particular topic, please contact us. Any reprint of the material should be followed by clickable links to the survey.