Liars and Outliers (11 page)

Some of our moral pressure is very strong.
Kin aversion
, the particular disgust we have for the idea of mating with people we grew up with, works without any prompting or ancillary security.
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So does our tendency to feel
protective impulses
towards children, which can extend to
small animals
and
even dolls
. This makes sense. We avoided incest and looked after our offspring for millions of years before we became human. These strong moral inclinations can be deliberately tapped. Think of evocations of kin relationships to foster cooperation: blood brothers, brothers in Christ, and so on. Or how cartoon animals are so often drawn with the big-head-big-eyes look of babies in an attempt to make them more universally likeable.

A lot of our morals are cultural. For example, while fairness is a universal human trait,
notions of fairness
differ among groups, based on variables like community size and religious participation. Psychologist Joseph Henrich used a cooperation game to study notions of fairness, altruism, and trust among the Machiguenga tribesmen deep in the Peruvian Amazon. While Westerners tended to share a lucky find with someone else, the tribesmen were more likely to keep it to themselves. In both instances, the actions were perceived as fair by others of the same culture.
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Think back to the various societal dilemmas we've discussed so far. Many of them have a moral component that encourages people to cooperate. We're taught—or conditioned, depending on what social science theory you believe—that stealing and fraud are wrong, although different cultures have different definitions of property. We're taught that taking more than our fair share is wrong: whatever “fair” means in our culture. We're taught that sitting idly by while others do all the work is wrong, although no one accuses the incapacitated, the infirm, the elderly, or infants of being immoral. Even criminals have moral codes that prohibit ratting on each other.

Of course, the effectiveness of these rules depends largely on individual circumstances, and some of them—such as “honor among thieves,” or the politeness rule against taking the last item on a communal plate of food—are notoriously weak. But there would be even less honor among thieves if the phrase didn't exist to remind them of their moral obligation to the group.

Moral pressure can do better, though. In addition to general admonitions to cooperative behavior, other measures specifically remind people of their moral obligations to the group, such as the obligation to vote. For example, think about the signs in restaurant bathrooms that read, “Employees must wash hands before returning to work.”
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Another example are the signs that remind people not to litter. My favorite is “
Don't mess with Texas
,” one of the best advertising slogans ever.

Of course, signs warning “No shoplifting,” or “Shoplifting is a crime,” primarily remind shoplifters that they run the risk of getting caught and going to jail; more about that in a couple of chapters. These reminders nonetheless have an unmistakable moral component. And, more precisely, public service announcements that deliberately invoke people's feelings of guilt and shame have been shown to be
effective in changing
behavior.

One afternoon at a historic monument in Rome, I saw a sign advising visitors: “This is your history. Please don't graffiti it.” That sign was an artifact of a societal dilemma: it's fun to carve one's name into the rock wall, but if everyone does that, historic monuments will soon look ugly. The difference between selfish interest and group interest is small in this case; for some people, a simple reminder is enough to tip the scales in favor of the group.

Group norms are themselves a form of moral societal pressure. Voting turnout rates range from as high as 92% in Austria to as low as 48% in the United States. Yes, some countries make voting mandatory and use other categories of social pressure to get people to vote, and we'll talk about those in the next chapter; but these are rates in countries where voting is entirely optional.

The “Don't mess with Texas” slogan is so good because it doesn't just remind people not to litter. It reinforces the group identity of Texans both as people who don't leave messes and who are not to be messed with.

We not only absorb our moral codes and definitions of right and wrong from the group; the group also transmits cues about cooperation and defection and what it means to act in a trustworthy manner. People are more likely to suppress their self-interest in favor of the group interest if they feel that others are doing so as well, and they're less likely to do so if they feel that others are
taking advantage
of them. The psychological mechanism for this is unclear, but certainly it is related to our innate sense of fairness. We generally don't mind sacrificing for the group, as long as we're all sacrificing fairly. But if we feel like we're being taken advantage of by others who are defecting, we're more likely to defect as well.

If you see your neighbor watering his lawn during a drought restriction and getting away with it, your sense of fairness is offended. To restore fairness, you have two options: you can turn him in, or you can take the same benefit for yourself. You have to live with your neighbor, so defecting is easier. (Recall the phrase “if you can't beat ‘em, join ‘em.”)

Psychologist
Andrew Colman
called this the Bad Apple Effect.
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Any large group is likely to contain a few bad apples who will defect at the expense of the group interest and inspire others to do likewise. If someone is speeding, or littering, or watering his lawn in spite of water-use restrictions, others around him are more likely to do the same.

This can occasionally create a positive-feedback loop, driven by individual differences in
how people evaluate
their risk trade-off. The first defectors provide a small additional incentive for everyone else to defect. Because there are always some people who are predisposed to cooperate, but just barely, that incentive may push them over to the defecting side. This, in turn, can result in an even greater incentive for everyone else to defect —a cascade that can sometimes lead to mass defection and even a mob mentality.

Both experiment and observation bear this out. Littering is a societal dilemma: it is in everyone's self-interest to drop his or her own trash on the ground—carrying it to a can is bothersome—but if everyone did that, the streets would be a mess. People are more likely to litter if there is a small amount of litter already on the ground, and two or three times
more likely to litter
if there is a lot. Just seeing a single person litter, or
seeing someone
pick up litter, modifies behavior. In a recent book, James B. Stewart points to the current epidemic of lying by public figures, and blames it for the
general breakdown
of ethics in America: when lying is believed to be normal, more people lie. In psychological experiments, a single
unpunished free rider
in a group can cause the entire group to spiral towards less and less cooperation. These patterns reflect the human tendency to adhere not only to social norms, but to moral norms.
In Islam
, announcing that you've sinned is itself a sin.
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This effect can motivate cooperation, too. For years, society has tried to encourage people to conserve energy. It's another societal dilemma: we're better off collectively if we conserve our natural resources, but each of us individually is better off if we use as much as we want. Even more selfishly, if I use as much as I want and everyone else conserves, I get all the benefits of conservation without actually having to do anything. Awareness campaigns have worked somewhat to mitigate this problem, but not enough.

Every month, included in my electric bill, is a chart comparing my electricity usage to my neighbors' average usage. It tells me if I'm using more, or less, electricity than average. On the face of it, why should I care? Electricity isn't free. The more I use, the more I pay. And aside from the savings from lower bills—which exist even without the chart—I get no personal benefit for conserving, and incur no penalty for not conserving.

But the chart works. People use less energy when they can compare their energy usage with that of their neighbors.
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That's because there actually is a benefit and a penalty, albeit entirely inside the heads of those receiving the bill: their competitive nature, their desire to conform to group norms, and so on.

Similarly, people are more likely to pay their taxes if they think others are paying their taxes as well. People are more likely to vote, less likely to overfish, more likely to get immunized, and less likely to defraud their customers if they think these practices are the group norm. This isn't peer pressure; in these cases, the risk trade-off is made in secret. Of course, this sort of thing works even better when the group knows whether or not you've cooperated or defected, but that's the subject of the next chapter.

Morals can be influenced by a powerful ruler, or a ruling class, or a priestly class. Especially if you can manipulate people's in-group/out-group designations, some awful things can be done in the name of morality: slavery and genocide are two examples.
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Interestingly, genocide is often precipitated by
propaganda campaigns
that paint the victims as vermin or otherwise less than human: undeserving of the moral predispositions people have towards other people.

Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen maintains that in psychopaths, cruelty and evil stem from a
failure or absence
of empathy. Extending this notion into our model, a person is more inclined to cooperate if he feels empathy with the other people in the group, and is more inclined to defect if he doesn't feel that empathy. Both general moral rules and specific moral reminders serve to enhance empathy to the group, by reminding people of both their moral principles and the group interest.
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For more than ten years, economist Paul Feldman brought bagels into his workplace and sold them on the honor system. He posted prices that people were expected to pay, securing the system by nothing more than the bagel-eaters' morals.
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Although it was easy to take a bagel without paying, Feldman succeeded in collecting about 90% of the posted price, resulting in much more profit than if he had to pay someone to sell the bagels and guard the money. He eventually turned this into a full-time business, selling
food on the honor
system to 140 companies in the Washington, DC, area.

Societal pressure based on morals largely succeeds because of who we are as human beings. When we meet someone for the first time, we tend to cooperate. We act trustworthy because we know it's right, and we similarly extend some amount of trust. We tip in restaurants. We pay for our bagels. We
follow social norms
simply because they
are
social norms. This is all contextual, of course, and we're not stupid about it. But it is our nature.

Philosopher
Emmanuel Levinas
said that morality is grounded in face-to-face interactions. In general, moral pressure works best at close range. It works best with family, friends, and other intimate groups: people whose intentions we can trust. It works well when the groups are close in both space and time. It works well when it's immediate: in crises and other times of stress. It works well with groups whose members are like each other, whether ethnically, in sharing an interest, or some other trait. Even having a common enemy works in this regard.

Think about the chart that shows my energy use compared to my neighbors'. It doesn't compare me to the rest of the world, or even to my country. It compares me to my neighbors, the people most like me.

Morals sometimes work at long range. After the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan,
people turned in
thousands of wallets and safes found in the rubble, filled with $78 million in cash. People regularly protest working conditions at factories, or give to relief efforts, or fight social injustices, in other countries halfway across the planet. People have moral beliefs that encompass all of humanity, or all animals, or all living creatures. We are a species that is capable of profound morality.