Read The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Online
Authors: Steven Pinker
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The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined (121 page)
A simple analogy to the way that misperception can lead to escalation may be found in an experiment by Sukhwinder Shergill, Paul Bays, Chris Frith, and Daniel Wolpert, in which participants placed their finger beneath a bar that could press down on it with a precise amount of force.
202
Their instruction was to press down on the finger of a second participant for three seconds with the same amount of force they were feeling. Then the second participant got the same instructions. The two took turns, each matching the amount of force he or she had just received. After eight turns the second participant was pressing down with about
eighteen times
as much force as was applied in the round that got it started. The reason for the spiral is that people underestimate how much force they apply compared to how much force they feel, so they escalated the pressure by about 40 percent with each turn. In real-world disputes the misperception comes not from an illusion of the sense of touch but from an illusion of the moral sense, but in both cases the result is a spiral of painful escalation.
202
Their instruction was to press down on the finger of a second participant for three seconds with the same amount of force they were feeling. Then the second participant got the same instructions. The two took turns, each matching the amount of force he or she had just received. After eight turns the second participant was pressing down with about
eighteen times
as much force as was applied in the round that got it started. The reason for the spiral is that people underestimate how much force they apply compared to how much force they feel, so they escalated the pressure by about 40 percent with each turn. In real-world disputes the misperception comes not from an illusion of the sense of touch but from an illusion of the moral sense, but in both cases the result is a spiral of painful escalation.
In many parts of this book I have credited the Leviathan—a government with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force—as a major reducer of violence. Feuding and anarchy go together. We can now appreciate the psychology behind the effectiveness of a Leviathan. The law may be an ass, but it is a disinterested ass, and it can weigh harms without the self-serving distortions of the perpetrator or the victim. Though it is guaranteed that one side will disagree with every decision, the government’s monopoly on force prevents the loser from doing anything about it, and it gives him less reason to
want
to do something about it, because he is not conceding weakness to his adversary and has less incentive to carry on the fight to restore his honor. The fashion accessories of Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, express the logic succinctly : (1) scales; (2) blindfold; (3) sword.
want
to do something about it, because he is not conceding weakness to his adversary and has less incentive to carry on the fight to restore his honor. The fashion accessories of Justitia, the Roman goddess of justice, express the logic succinctly : (1) scales; (2) blindfold; (3) sword.
A Leviathan that implements justice at the point of a sword is still using a sword. As we have seen, government vengeance itself can go to excess, as in the cruel punishments and profligate executions before the Humanitarian Revolution and the excessive incarceration in the United States today. Criminal punishment is often harsher than what would be needed as a finely tuned incentive designed to minimize the society’s sum of harm. Part of this is by design. The rationale for criminal punishment is not just specific deterrence, general deterrence, and incapacitation. It also embraces just deserts, which is basically citizens’ impulse for revenge.
203
Even if we were certain that the perpetrator of a heinous crime would never offend again, nor set an example for anyone else, most people would feel that “justice must be done” and that he should incur some harm to balance the harm he has caused. The psychological impulse behind just deserts is thoroughly intelligible. As Daly and Wilson observe:
203
Even if we were certain that the perpetrator of a heinous crime would never offend again, nor set an example for anyone else, most people would feel that “justice must be done” and that he should incur some harm to balance the harm he has caused. The psychological impulse behind just deserts is thoroughly intelligible. As Daly and Wilson observe:
From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, this almost mystical and seemingly irreducible sort of moral imperative is the output of a mental mechanism with a straightforward adaptive function: to reckon justice and administer punishment by a calculus which ensures that violators reap no advantage from their misdeeds. The enormous volume of mystico-religious bafflegab about atonement and penance and divine justice and the like is the attribution to higher, detached authority of what is actually a mundane, pragmatic matter: discouraging self-interested competitive acts by reducing their profitability to nil.
204
But since it
is
an irreducible imperative, whose evolutionary rationale is invisible to us when we are in the throes of it, the justice that people mete out in practice may be only loosely related to its incentive structure.
is
an irreducible imperative, whose evolutionary rationale is invisible to us when we are in the throes of it, the justice that people mete out in practice may be only loosely related to its incentive structure.
The psychologists Kevin Carlsmith, John Darley, and Paul Robinson devised hypothetical cases designed to tease apart deterrence from just deserts.
205
Just deserts is sensitive to the moral worth of the perpetrator’s motive. For instance, an embezzler who used his ill-gotten gains to support a lavish lifestyle would seem to deserve a harsher punishment than one who redirected them to the company’s underpaid workers in the developing world. Deterrence, in contrast, is sensitive to the incentive structure of the punishment regime. Assuming that malefactors reckon the utility of a misdeed as the probability they will get caught multiplied by the penalty they will incur if they do get caught, then a crime that is hard to detect should get a harsher punishment than one that is easy to detect. For similar reasons, a crime that gets a lot of publicity should be punished more harshly than one that is unpublicized, because the publicized one will leverage the value of the punishment as a general deterrent. When people are asked to mete out sentences to fictitious malefactors in these scenarios, their decisions are affected only by just deserts, not by deterrence. Evil motives draw harsher sentences, but difficult-to-detect or highly publicized infractions do not.
205
Just deserts is sensitive to the moral worth of the perpetrator’s motive. For instance, an embezzler who used his ill-gotten gains to support a lavish lifestyle would seem to deserve a harsher punishment than one who redirected them to the company’s underpaid workers in the developing world. Deterrence, in contrast, is sensitive to the incentive structure of the punishment regime. Assuming that malefactors reckon the utility of a misdeed as the probability they will get caught multiplied by the penalty they will incur if they do get caught, then a crime that is hard to detect should get a harsher punishment than one that is easy to detect. For similar reasons, a crime that gets a lot of publicity should be punished more harshly than one that is unpublicized, because the publicized one will leverage the value of the punishment as a general deterrent. When people are asked to mete out sentences to fictitious malefactors in these scenarios, their decisions are affected only by just deserts, not by deterrence. Evil motives draw harsher sentences, but difficult-to-detect or highly publicized infractions do not.
The reforms advocated by the utilitarian economist Cesare Beccaria during the Humanitarian Revolution, which led to the abolition of cruel punishments, were designed to reorient criminal justice away from the raw impulse to make a bad person suffer and toward the practical goal of deterrence. The Carlsmith experiment suggests that people today have not gone all the way into thinking of criminal justice in purely utilitarian terms. But in
The Blank Slate
I argued that even the elements of our judicial practices that seem to be motivated by just deserts may ultimately serve a deterrent function, because if a system ever became too narrowly utilitarian, malefactors would learn to game it. Just deserts can close off that option.
206
The Blank Slate
I argued that even the elements of our judicial practices that seem to be motivated by just deserts may ultimately serve a deterrent function, because if a system ever became too narrowly utilitarian, malefactors would learn to game it. Just deserts can close off that option.
206
Even the fairest system of criminal justice cannot monitor its citizens wherever they may be and around the clock. It has to count on them internalizing norms of fairness and damping their vengeance before it escalates. In chapter 3 we saw how the ranchers and farmers of Shasta County resolved their grievances without tattling to the police, thanks to reciprocity, gossip, occasional vandalism, and for minor harms, “lumping it.”
207
Why do the people in some societies lump it while others experience a glow in their eyes, a flame in their cheeks, and a pounding in their temples? Norbert Elias’s theory of the Civilizing Process suggests that government-administered justice can have knock-on effects that lead its citizens to internalize norms of self-restraint and quash their impulses for retribution rather than act on them. We saw many examples in chapters 2 and 3 of how pacification by a government has a whopping effect on lethal vengeance, and in the next chapter we will review experiments showing that self-control in one context can spread into others.
207
Why do the people in some societies lump it while others experience a glow in their eyes, a flame in their cheeks, and a pounding in their temples? Norbert Elias’s theory of the Civilizing Process suggests that government-administered justice can have knock-on effects that lead its citizens to internalize norms of self-restraint and quash their impulses for retribution rather than act on them. We saw many examples in chapters 2 and 3 of how pacification by a government has a whopping effect on lethal vengeance, and in the next chapter we will review experiments showing that self-control in one context can spread into others.
Chapter 3 also introduced the finding that the sheer presence of government brings rates of violence down only so far—from the hundreds of homicides per 100,000 people per year to the tens. A further drop into the single digits may depend on something hazier, such as people’s acceptance of the legitimacy of the government and social contract. A recent experiment may have caught a wisp of this phenomenon in the lab. The economists Benedikt Herrmann, Christian Thöni, and Simon Gächter had university students in sixteen countries play Public Goods games (the game in which players contribute money to a pot which is then doubled and redistributed among them), with and without the possibility of punishing one another.
208
The researchers discovered to their horror that in some countries many players punished
generous
contributors to the common good rather than stingy ones. These acts of spite had predictably terrible effects on the group’s welfare, because they only reinforced every player’s worst instinct to free-ride on the contributions of the others. The contributions soon petered out, and everyone lost. The antisocial punishers seem to have been motivated by an excess of revenge. When they themselves had been punished for a low contribution, rather than being chastened and increasing their contribution on the next round (which is what participants in the original studies conducted in the United States and Western Europe had done), they punished their punishers, who tended to be the altruistic contributors.
208
The researchers discovered to their horror that in some countries many players punished
generous
contributors to the common good rather than stingy ones. These acts of spite had predictably terrible effects on the group’s welfare, because they only reinforced every player’s worst instinct to free-ride on the contributions of the others. The contributions soon petered out, and everyone lost. The antisocial punishers seem to have been motivated by an excess of revenge. When they themselves had been punished for a low contribution, rather than being chastened and increasing their contribution on the next round (which is what participants in the original studies conducted in the United States and Western Europe had done), they punished their punishers, who tended to be the altruistic contributors.
What distinguishes the countries in which the targets of punishment repent, such as the United States, Australia, China, and those of Western Europe, from those in which they spitefully retaliate, like Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Saudi Arabia, and Oman? The investigators ran a set of multiple regressions using a dozen traits of the different countries, taken from economic statistics and the results of international surveys. A major predictor of excess revenge turned out to be civic norms: a measure of the degree to which people think it is all right to cheat on their income taxes, claim government benefits to which they are not entitled, and dodge fare-collectors on the subway. (Social scientists believe that civic norms make up a large part of the
social capital
of a country, which is more important to its prosperity than its physical resources.) Where might the civic norms themselves have come from? The World Bank assigns countries a score called the Rule of Law, which reflects how well private contracts can be enforced in courts, whether the legal system is perceived as being fair, the importance of the black market and organized crime, the quality of the police, and the likelihood of crime and violence. In the experiment, the Rule of Law of a country significantly predicted the degree to which its citizens indulged in antisocial revenge: the people in countries with an iffy Rule of Law were more destructively vengeful. With the usual spaghetti of variables, it’s impossible to be certain what caused what, but the results are consistent with the idea that the disinterested justice of a decent Leviathan induces citizens to curb their impulse for revenge before it spirals into a destructive cycle.
social capital
of a country, which is more important to its prosperity than its physical resources.) Where might the civic norms themselves have come from? The World Bank assigns countries a score called the Rule of Law, which reflects how well private contracts can be enforced in courts, whether the legal system is perceived as being fair, the importance of the black market and organized crime, the quality of the police, and the likelihood of crime and violence. In the experiment, the Rule of Law of a country significantly predicted the degree to which its citizens indulged in antisocial revenge: the people in countries with an iffy Rule of Law were more destructively vengeful. With the usual spaghetti of variables, it’s impossible to be certain what caused what, but the results are consistent with the idea that the disinterested justice of a decent Leviathan induces citizens to curb their impulse for revenge before it spirals into a destructive cycle.
Revenge, for all its tendency to escalate, must come with a dimmer switch. If it didn’t, the Moralization Gap would inflate every affront into an escalating feud, like the experimental subjects who mashed down on each other’s fingers harder and harder with every round. Not only does revenge not always escalate, especially in civil societies with the rule of law, but we shouldn’t expect it to. The models of the evolution of cooperation showed that the most successful agents dial back their tit-for-tatting with contrition and forgiveness, especially when trapped in the same boat with other agents.
In
Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct
, the psychologist Michael McCullough shows that we do have this dimmer switch for revenge.
209
As we have seen, several species of primate can kiss and make up after a fight, at least if their interests are bound by kinship, shared goals, or common enemies.
210
McCullough shows that the human forgiveness instinct is activated under similar circumstances.
Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct
, the psychologist Michael McCullough shows that we do have this dimmer switch for revenge.
209
As we have seen, several species of primate can kiss and make up after a fight, at least if their interests are bound by kinship, shared goals, or common enemies.
210
McCullough shows that the human forgiveness instinct is activated under similar circumstances.
The desire for revenge is most easily modulated when the perpetrator falls within our natural circle of empathy. We are apt to forgive our kin and close friends for trespasses that would be unforgivable in others. And when our circle of empathy expands (a process we will examine in the next chapter), our circle of forgivability expands with it.
A second circumstance that cranks down revenge is a relationship with the perpetrator that is too valuable to sever. We may not like them, but we’re stuck with them, so we had better learn to live with them. During the presidential primary season, rivals for a party’s nomination can spend months slinging each other with mud or worse, and their body language during televised debates makes it clear that they can’t stand each other. But when the winner is decided, they bite their lips, swallow their pride, and unite against their common adversary in the other party. In many cases the winner even invites the loser onto the ticket or into the cabinet. The power of a shared goal to induce erstwhile enemies to reconcile was dramatically demonstrated in a famous 1950s experiment in which boys at a summer camp called Robbers Cave were divided into teams and on their own initiative waged war on each other for weeks, with raids and retaliations and dangerous weapons like rocks in socks.
211
But when the psychologists arranged some “accidents” that left the boys no choice but to work together to restore the camp’s water supply and to pull a bus out of the muck, they fell into a truce, overcame their enmity, and even made some friendships across team lines.
211
But when the psychologists arranged some “accidents” that left the boys no choice but to work together to restore the camp’s water supply and to pull a bus out of the muck, they fell into a truce, overcame their enmity, and even made some friendships across team lines.
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