A sense of obligation to obey the police is an important predictor of public cooperation and compliance with the law. Minorities tend to feel less obligated to obey the police than the majority. Previous work based on the social resistance framework shows that the experiences that shape the lives and attitudes of minorities may encourage them to actively engage in a variety of everyday resistance acts against the majority group, which may include high-risk and delinquent behaviours. The present study tests this framework for the first time concerning the self-perceived obligation to obey the police while also considering different minority groups who experience varying levels of marginalization. We use a representative sample of about 1,100 Israelis from four minority groups – Muslims, immigrants from the former Soviet Union, ultra-Orthodox Jews and Jews of Ethiopian origin – along with the Jewish majority group. The results show that Muslims feel the least obligation to obey the police, followed by Jews of Ethiopian origin. Social resistance was negatively related to the self-perceived obligation to obey the police among Muslims and ultra-Orthodox Jews while controlling for demographic characteristics and previous theoretical explanations, namely procedural justice, self-help and anger.

We assess the numeracy (age heaping) of religious minorities, particularly Jews, and other defendants of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions, and compare it with the general Iberian population. Our database includes 13,000 individuals who took part in Inquisition trials, and 17,000 individuals recorded in censuses and parish registers who serve as a control group. We thoroughly discuss the representativeness of our samples for the populations we aim to capture. Our results point at a substantial numeracy advantage of the Judaism-accused over the Catholic majority. Furthermore, Catholic priests and other groups of the religious elite who were occasional targets of the Inquisition had a similarly high level of numeracy.