Liars and Outliers (21 page)

This all might seem unrelated to this book; however, it's anything but.
Misunderstanding the defector
is a common way societal pressures fail, something we'll talk about more in Chapter 15. Think of the risk trade-off as a balance. When Alice is deciding whether to cooperate or defect, she's weighing the costs and benefits of each side. Societal pressures are how the group puts its thumb on the scales and tries to make cooperating the more attractive option. If you think Alice is defecting because she's selfish (she's in it for the money) or concerned about her ego (she wants to look cool in front of her friends) when she actually has a competing moral interest, you're going to get societal pressures wrong. The details are different for every dilemma, but they're almost always important.

There's another important reason to understand the competing interests: you might get a different type of defection, depending on the competing interest. To illustrate this, let's use a more subtle societal dilemma: whether Alice should cooperate with the police.
7
This is important, because whether and to what extent members of society report crime and assist the police greatly influences how well laws against those crimes work. In the absence of 100% automated burglar alarms connected to the police station, a monitored security camera in every niche and nook, or police patrols tailing every citizen 24/7, the likelihood that a burglar is going to get caught depends mostly on the willingness of bystanders to take action: either by calling the police, or by tackling the burglar and then calling the police. The more people who report illegal activity—both crimes in progress and crimes after the fact—the better institutional pressure works.

That's the group interest. Competing interests for not reporting include:

• Selfish self-interest
  . Alice might simply not care enough about society to cooperate. She might be too busy with other things in her life, and not have the time to get involved. She might have concluded in a risk–reward calculation that her time and the hassle of reporting a theft outweighs her benefit from reporting it.
  
• Self-preservation interest
  . Alice might be scared to cooperate with the police for any of several reasons. 1) She might be a criminal herself, and would rather not have anything to do with the police. And even though the police often give protection to lesser criminals who help prosecute their more powerful bosses, that protection is irregularly applied, and
  there's no guarantee
  a particular criminal witness will be adequately protected. 2) The police might be a danger to her. It's not universally true that the police are benevolent and helpful. There are people who won't willingly interact with the police out of legitimate fear. 3) She might fear retaliation from the criminals or the criminals' compatriots. Criminal organizations stoke this fear of retribution to allow themselves to commit crimes in a community with relative impunity. There was even a “
  Stop Snitching” campaign
  , including a DVD produced by the Baltimore underworld, designed to intimidate people into not reporting crimes.
  
• Ego-preserving interest
  . She might be invested in a self-image that emphasizes keeping one's head down and not borrowing trouble. She might, as a victim, be embarrassed and not want to admit it.
  
• Other psychological motivation
  . She might have an irrational fear of authority figures, severe anxiety, or pathological shyness.
  
• Relational interest
  . She might know the criminal in question, and would rather protect that person than assist the police.
  
• Group interest of another group
  . She might be part of, or sympathetic to, the group committing the crime, and decide to cooperate with the group rather than society as a whole.
  8
  For instance, she might notice her employer committing a crime and decide not to report it. Or she might be a cop watching another cop abusing a prisoner, and she feels loyalty to her fellow officers trumps her moral obligation to report crime.
  
• Competing moral interest
  . She might not believe in the law. Many people in our society would never even think of calling the police when they see an illegal alien (“that law is immoral”), or discover that someone downloads copyrighted music off the Internet (“that law is ridiculous”). She might think the police behave immorally, or that the victim of the crime deserved it.
  

Even when someone is the victim of a crime, he might choose not to report it. Examples include crimes like rape (which can be demeaning to the victim to prosecute), some kinds of fraud (which carry a social stigma with them), small-scale crimes where it is unlikely that the police can help, and instances where the victim has reason to fear the police. Would a prostitute call the police after being raped? When my wife's pocket was picked on the Budapest subway a decade ago, we didn't bother reporting it to the police because we didn't think they could do anything. Internet crimes can fall into this category, too. Quite a bit of credit card fraud isn't reported to the police because the amount is too small for the police to worry about. In fact, a fraudster can make a good living stealing small amounts of money from large numbers of people because it's not worth anyone's effort to pursue him.

As a side note, people have lots of reasons for not reporting crime. Sometimes crimes are simply too hard to report. International crimes, made easier by globalization and the Internet, fall into this category. Internet scam victims fleeced by criminals in Nigeria probably have no idea whom to call—and the unfortunate realization that no one can help.
Con artists try
to ensure that their victims don't call the police, because they thought they themselves did something illegal or because they're too embarrassed at being suckered.

Not being aware of the crime is a problem with a lot of Internet fraud.
Fake anti-virus software
scams trick users into believing they have a virus, and charge them $25, or $50, or more for software to “remove” it. It's a multi-million-dollar industry, and most of the victims never realize they were scammed. There are
Internet money laundering
schemes that work the same way.

Competing interests are normal, and our society recognizes that people have them. Sometimes we even have mechanisms for dealing with these conflicts of interest. Judges are supposed to recuse themselves from cases in which they have a potential competing interest. Many governments exempt conscientious objectors from compulsory military service. Newspaper columnists, academic researchers, and others are supposed to declare any competing interests so their readers can understand their biases. Certain laws have religious exemptions.

Mostly, we're all better off because of these mechanisms: recusal makes it less likely that judges will issue decisions that reflect a personal bias; conscientious objector status makes it less likely that soldiers will have to rely on unwilling comrades to defend them in battle. But public health is
not
better off because there are religious exemptions to vaccination laws.

We even recognize the validity of certain competing interests in the law through the
doctrine of necessity
. Something as straightforward as prohibitions against murder have exceptions for things like self-defense, a self-preservation competing interest. But note that the onus is on the person to demonstrate the validity of that competing interest. If Alice shoots and kills Bob, the presumption—and by this I mean social presumption, not legal presumption—will be that she committed murder, unless she can demonstrate otherwise.

Another point: morals are complicated, and societal dilemmas can disappear because people don't recognize a particular moral claim and corresponding competing interest. Overfishing is not a societal dilemma if you're unconcerned about the long-term sustainability of the seas. You might not even notice as fishers deplete the oceans, because there will probably still be fish in the grocery store as long as you're alive.
9
Slavery isn't a problem if you don't believe the slave class has the same rights as the rest of the community. Even genocide isn't a societal dilemma if you have sufficiently dehumanized those you are slaughtering.

Of course, there's a lot more here that other books cover, and I recommend reading the literature on competing morals for some insights into how people should make trade-offs among a variety of
competing interests
. For our purposes, it's enough to recognize that people have many competing interests, the details of which affect the efficacy of societal pressures as well as the means of defection. And for societal pressures to work, we need mechanisms that address the motivation for defection as well as the means.

We're all members of many formal and informal groups. These are the societies in our societal dilemmas. For most people, humanity is the largest one. Society as a whole—whether we define it as our town, our country, or all of humanity—is a group. The company we work for is a group. Our political party is a group. Our city of residence is a group. These groups might have subgroups: the particular department in our company, the particular local political organization of the national party, our neighborhood in our city. Extended families can also be considered groups, and they have lots of different subgroups. Large corporations have many levels of subgroups; so do militaries and some religious groups.

These groups and subgroups often come into conflict with each other. We regularly have to make risk trade-offs in societal dilemmas where the interest of one group is in opposition with the interest of another group, and where cooperating with one group means defecting from the other, and vice versa. The rest of this chapter and the next three chapters discuss group interests and competing group allegiances. This is essential to understand how cooperation and defection work in the real world.

Recall our prisoner, in a societal dilemma with the rest of his criminal organization. That's a fine story, but real life is more complicated.

For the early years of his life, Sean O'Callaghan was a domestic terrorist. He joined the Provisional IRA when he was fifteen, and over the next five years, participated in nearly seventy attacks against the British, including two murders. In 1976, he had a change of heart. For the next ten years, he was a police informant intent on sabotaging the IRA. He thwarted several bombing attempts, including one against the Prince and Princess of Wales, and disrupted the delivery of tons of weapons and explosives. He also
publicly confessed
to his own crimes, and testified against many other IRA members.

Defecting from the IRA
was a very dangerous thing to do. He did so—and risked retribution—because of a competing moral interest, and also because of another group interest: that of his community. “I realised that there was only one way in which I could help damage the ruthless killing capacity of the IRA: by handing myself up to the RUC [Royal Ulster Constabulary] and giving evidence against as many people as possible.” He was just as much cooperating with the larger group as he was defecting from the smaller group.

O'Callaghan faced a pair of societal dilemmas, both of which we've gone over in detail: criminals either cooperating with or defecting from their criminal organization and citizens assisting the police. These two societal dilemmas were in conflict. O'Callaghan had to make a choice: cooperate with the IRA and defect from society as a whole, or cooperate with society as a whole and defect from the IRA. The table below just lists the two competing societies and ignores the various other competing interests from previous tables.