Police rely on tips from ordinary people — witnesses, victims and whistleblowers — to investigate 95 percent of crimes. Sometimes, the decision to speak up is easily made, but in other cases, people elect to stay silent, leaving countless infractions unpunished. About half of violent crimes go unreported, according to estimates by the US Department of Justice.

And yet at certain historical moments, such as in the United States in the early 1950s, when fear of communism led to many false reports against individuals working in entertainment and public service, societies can become places where people readily denounce one another — often falsely, or for petty reasons.

Tattling, whistleblowing, snitching, call it what you will: Patrick Bergemann has spent the past 15 years studying the many ways that people tell on one another, examining everything from Afghan villagers’ reports of illegal Taliban activity to informers’ charges of treason in 17th century Russia. In a recent article in the Annual Review of Sociology, he explores the social pressures that influence people’s decisions to expose, or conceal, wrongdoing.

The choice to report reflects not just the infraction but a person’s loyalties and whether they expect to receive rewards or retaliation from authorities and peers, says Bergemann, a sociologist at the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Judge Thy Neighbor: Denunciations in the Spanish Inquisition, Romanov Russia and Nazi Germany.

Bergemann talked with Knowable Magazine about why and when people report crimes and bad behavior, and how, for repressive governments, encouraging people to rat on neighbours and coworkers can be a potent form of social control.

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

The urge to tell on someone is so familiar. It goes back to childhood, when kids tattle on classmates or siblings.

It’s fascinating to see how fundamentally human this behaviour is. There have been a few studies of young children showing that by the age of between 2 and 4, when children talk to adults, the primary thing they’re communicating about other children is the bad things they do. They’re not saying, “Oh I had so much fun playing with little Jimmy on the playground.” One study of preschoolers found that tattling represented more than 90 percent of communication about other children’s behaviour.

What first interested you, as a sociologist, in studying this phenomenon?

When I was looking for what to research for my dissertation, I stumbled onto the topic of reporting, and I realised a lot of the work that’s been done has been by psychologists and people thinking about the decision to report as a moral question. And it struck me that it’s also such a social decision. You’re potentially bringing harm to another person — I mean, they might deserve it completely, but still, it’s an act of potentially bringing someone to the attention of authorities that can investigate them. There are also broader relationships: How will people think about you and what you’ve done, and will they approve that you reported? So there are social consequences.

There are so many words for this kind of behaviour. Why did you choose the term “reporting”?

Some people say whistleblowing. Some people say snitching. Snitching suggests you’re doing something wrong. You’re betraying people. Whistleblowing suggests a heroic act to help society. To me, “reporting” is the most value-neutral word I could come up with. It doesn’t suggest whether it’s right or wrong. It’s more descriptive of the act.

What are some of the main categories of reporting, as you see it?

Reporting can be categorised by the person reporting (for example, victim or bystander), the person reported on (acquaintance or stranger), the alleged behaviour (violence, theft, fraud, etc.) and the authority reported to.

There’s crime reporting, when you’re alleging that someone broke a law. There’s also reporting on behaviour that isn’t illegal but breaks policies within organisations. Some things are violations of both, and in those cases, individuals must decide whether to report internally, to organisational authorities, or externally, to government officials: The whole controversy in the Catholic Church about sexual abuse — a lot of that was actually reported internally but not to the police. And in my opinion, that’s part of the reason it was able to stay hidden for so long.

People have a strong interest in stopping bad behaviour, but sometimes they don’t want to embarrass the organisation within which it occurs. Reporting internally can potentially accomplish both goals, but only if organisational authorities take the reports seriously and seek to fix the problem.

Research has found that most people who report externally, such as to the police or the FBI, only do so after first reporting internally and not getting a positive response. I can't speak directly to the motivations of the parents of victims in the case of the Catholic Church, but I would imagine that people trusted the church to handle things, especially if they saw offending priests disappearing.

How do you find the data you use in your work?

A lot of times there aren’t a lot of records, or interest in sharing those records. For example, organisations don’t necessarily want to give me all the data about employees being reported for problems, because it might reflect poorly on them.

I would say I’m opportunistic. I try to find where information is actually available, and then go from there, which can be frustrating when you have situations you want to look into. It’s hard to study something you can’t gain access to.

Can you share a time when you serendipitously came across a treasure trove of data?

There are lots of records from the Spanish Inquisition, but most of them are summaries of trials, and that’s not reporting.

But I was digging through all my old notes and I realised there was this citation that I hadn’t followed up. This paper analysed actual denunciations as reported to Inquisition officials. I got excited and I said, “Where did that come from?”

Turns out there was a book published in the 1980s by someone who actually went to the archives and transcribed this corpus of denunciations. I could order the book and see the literal texts, 400 and something of these, in the old 15th century Spanish, where the scribe was writing as the people came and reported — this person appeared on this day, from this village. It’s their summary of what the accusers were saying. That was an exciting one.

In your book, you explore how ordinary people turned each other in during the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi Germany and Romanov Russia – accusing colleagues, business owners, teachers and neighbours. What did you learn from that history?

I identified similar patterns in how denunciations change, depending on circumstances. At the start of the Inquisition, people were told that if they denounced the supposed heretics they knew, they would be protected from harm. But then that rule changed and reporting no longer offered personal protection.

The Russia case was a different historical period and context, of course, but I found a similar contrast between a set of people who had something to gain — they were in prison and thought they could help free themselves by denouncing others — versus a set of people who weren’t in prison and did not have that motivation.

In both cases you had the same three core actors: the denouncer, the person denounced and the authority. But people’s actions differed, depending on whether they felt that reporting would better their situation. In those cases, they tended to name people they thought would be most appealing to the authorities.

When they didn’t have those incentives, people instead tried to use reporting to harm their rivals — whether those were professional rivals, romantic rivals or political rivals.

You’ve also studied more recent examples of people telling on each other, including whistleblowers in the federal government. What have you learned?

My colleague and I did a study using data from a US agency that administers surveys to tens of thousands of federal employees every three to four years. The 2010 version had a module asking about people’s experience observing wrongdoing in the workplace and how did they respond. Out of about 40,000 returned surveys, nearly 3,000 indicated knowledge of wrongdoing by a colleague.

What I was interested in was, how do social dynamics influence people’s willingness to report? The survey contained one item that spoke to this. People had to rate how much they agreed with the statement: “A spirit of cooperation and teamwork exists in my work unit.”

Our first finding was what most people would expect: The more cohesive your work group is, the less likely you are to report someone in your group. People feel loyal to their peers. They might tell the person to stop, but they don’t want to get them in trouble.

But what I think is particularly interesting is that if someone from outside the work group engages in wrongdoing, people on a cohesive team are more likely to report. It’s probably because you know your team members are going to support you and say, “You should listen to this person. You can’t retaliate against this person.”

Those dynamics speak to the complex social processes that go into whistleblowing decisions. It’s not that moral considerations don’t play a role, but they’re definitely not the whole story.

How else can group dynamics influence decisions about reporting? For example, you’ve noted that when someone is offended by a sexist joke but no one else in the room reacts negatively, the offended person is less likely to view the behaviour as sexual harassment and less likely to report it. Why is that?

Reporting is a two-stage process. The decision to report is the second stage. The first stage is simply realising that something has happened that is worthy of being reported. We’re influenced by others at both stages.

You need to interpret something as misconduct or wrongdoing or illegal behaviour in order to report it. There’s something called the bystander effect, where oftentimes we look around and see what other people are doing, even strangers. If they’re acting like nothing’s happening, then you might think, “Oh, I’m misinterpreting the situation.”

What factors enable false reporting to proliferate in a society?

A culture of false reporting is really only attainable if due process is not very strong. Because if the government is investigating everything very carefully, false reporting isn’t going to be very effective. I mean, there still might be some hardship on the person accused, but they’re going to find, “This was just spiteful, we’re not going to prosecute.”

When there’s strong due process, oftentimes you have penalties for false accusers as well. So I think a lot of the opportunities to falsely accuse emerge once the people accused start getting punished with little investigation, with little consideration of guilt or innocence.

Recently new laws and directives have emerged in the US that urge people to expose others, like the 2021 Texas law that offers a reward for turning in anyone who helped someone obtain an abortion, and a recent presidential directive requiring federal employees to expose colleagues who continue to promote diversity initiatives. Is this a new trend?

I would start by saying the government has a long history of trying to get people to report undesired behaviour to the authorities. There are qui tam laws that allow people who report on others for cheating the government to get some of the money that’s recuperated. After 9/11, we had the “See something, say something” campaigns. And during the Covid-19 pandemic, New York City officials encouraged people to report when someone was not social distancing or wearing a face mask. According to a research paper I just finished, thousands of people reported their neighbors in a span of a couple of months.

Recently the Trump administration has encouraged people to call the ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) tip line to report people for all sorts of things, including if you think they are undocumented. What is going on now is actually similar to the McCarthy era during the 1950s, when conservative members of the US government encouraged citizens to denounce each other for involvement in left-wing activities.

What are your thoughts on seeing this “turn in your neighbour” strategy expanding?

I think it serves a few purposes for government. One, it’s trying to recruit more people to your side, to make them participants in whatever it is you’re trying to do. It also helps to uncover what can be difficult to uncover through formal policing mechanisms. If it’s hard to identify who is undocumented or who is getting an abortion, then getting people to come forward with that makes sense.

And also, the more that people use reporting systems, the more it becomes normalised that these things should be dealt with by the authorities — not among neighbours, or ignored.

Encouraging reporting is also a way of inspiring more fear. If you start to worry that you’re going to get turned in and you don’t know who would do it, you start to trust your neighbours less.

There’s a really interesting paper that looked at social relationships in East Germany before and after the fall of communism. It found that in East Germany, people kept most of their social circle at arm’s length. They had a few very trusted contacts, oftentimes family members. This differed from the much broader social networks you’d see in West Germany, where people didn’t live under this regime of fear and denunciation.

Would you say that repressive governments are exploiting the natural human tendency to tattle for their own purposes?

I think that’s fair to say. Reporting really is a fundamental thing that we do from a very young age in many different types of forums and venues and across societies. Not that it’s always a resounding success when governments engage in these tactics.

In Nazi Germany, there was a lot of back and forth between government officials about what to do about all these petty reports they were getting. The authorities would have to deal with thousands and thousands of these, and they’d investigate them and realise it was something that, according to their rules, wasn’t worth dealing with. Hitler himself complained about this. I include a quote of his at the beginning of my book because it’s so surprising coming from someone who perpetrated so much cruelty. He said: “We are living at present in a sea of denunciations and human meanness.”

On the other hand, it was still worth their while. The Nazis didn’t change their system.

Are there historical examples where people refused to turn each other in?

During the Spanish Inquisition, inquisitors would come to villages and say, “Tell us about all the people who are committing heretical behaviour against the church so we can punish them.” According to historian Henry Kamen, who wrote a book about the period, when ordinary people refused to cooperate, “the tribunal was impotent.” Without informers, the process can shut down. And when you have tight-knit groups where people are interconnected, you typically see more of this protective behaviour.

Like … in the Mafia?

Oh absolutely. Within crime syndicates, anti-snitching norms are incredibly strong. But then you can imagine other settings where maybe we would think more positively about not reporting, where people are showing solidarity — standing up, in a sense, to a repressive government.