Just Babies (10 page)

If we were always kind to one another, the issue of punishment would never arise. But, as the anthropologist Robert Ardrey once remarked,
“We are born of risen apes, not fallen angels.” Some of us are tempted to cheat and kill and succumb to selfish impulses, and for the rest of us to survive in the presence of these individuals, we need to make this bad behavior costly. Indeed, some scholars, such as the philosopher Jesse Prinz,
view outrage as more important to morality than empathy and compassion, those sweeter sentiments we discussed in the last chapter.

Let us start with revenge—the personal form of punishment,
directed against those who have wronged us personally or who have harmed our family or friends. Revenge has certain distinctive features.
Adam Smith describes our feelings toward a man who has murdered someone we love: “Resentment would prompt us to desire, not only that he should be punished, but that he should be punished by our means, and upon account of that particular injury which he had done to us. Resentment cannot be fully gratified, unless the offender is not only made to grieve in his turn, but to grieve for that particular wrong which we have suffered from him.”

Inigo Montoya, the character in
The Princess Bride
who seeks to avenge his father’s death, echoes this sentiment. Montoya tells the man in black his plan: he will approach the murderer and say, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father.
Prepare to die!” The killer must know precisely why he is being punished and by whom. Then, and only then, can Montoya kill him. (And when he does, it is deeply satisfying.)

These requirements make sense once we appreciate the link between revenge and status. As the philosopher Pamela Hieronymi says,
“A past wrong against you, standing in your history without apology, atonement, retribution, punishment, restitution, condemnation, or anything else that might recognize it as a
wrong
, makes a claim. It says, in effect, that you can be treated in this way, and that such treatment is acceptable.” This is one purpose of apologies—to repair the victim’s status. If you knock me over and say nothing, you are taking away my dignity. A simple “I’m
sorry” can do wonders, because you are showing respect for me as a person; you are acknowledging to me, and possibly others, that it is unacceptable to harm me without cause. If you say nothing, you are sending a quite different message. Without an apology, I might be tempted to recover my status through retaliation. If you knock me over and then I knock you over in response, I’ve shown you that I am a man to be reckoned with, which will make you less likely to harm me in the future. But this works only if you know who knocked you over and why. (If you think that someone else did it, or that I did it by mistake, then I have failed.)

In our modern Western societies, first-person revenge plays a less prominent role than it does in the so-called
cultures of honor—the Bedouin, criminal subcultures such as the Mafia, and the cowboy culture of the American West, for example. Individuals living in such cultures cannot rely on external authority to mete out justice, so it’s up to each individual to defend himself and those he cares about. A reputation for violence matters in these societies; this is what deters others from attacking or abusing you. Consistent with this theory, psychologists find that individuals in such societies tend to be disapproving of acts of disrespect and forgiving of acts of retribution.

The psychologist
Steven Pinker argues that one reason for the drop in violence over history is the decline of such cultures. We’ve managed, in many parts of the world, to check our appetite for personal retribution. First-party revenge has been largely replaced with third-party punishment, enforced by the government. When my car window was smashed and
my belongings were stolen a few months ago, I felt a flash of anger, but really, the problem was best addressed through a police report and a helpful insurance company. If Inigo Montoya were around now, he wouldn’t need to storm the castle to bring his father’s murderer to justice; the police would do it for him, and fewer people would have to die.

Still, some appetite for revenge exists within most of us. There are all sorts of interactions that the law doesn’t help out with—if only nasty gossip or snarky e-mails—so we benefit from some inclination toward payback, some impulse to make those who disrespect us suffer to the appropriate degree. And while we might lack the stomach for enacting our own violent vengeance, we get pleasure from experiencing it in the imagination.
The theme of payback shows up over and over in fiction, from classic works such as
Hamlet
and
The Iliad
, to schlocky films like
An Eye for an Eye
and
Death Wish
, to television series like the aptly named
Revenge.

P
UNISHMENT
of third parties who haven’t personally wronged us is not the same thing as revenge and doesn’t have as simple an explanation. Certainly we do have an appetite for third-party punishment. One example is the recent emergence in China of
renrou sousuo yinqing
, or
“human flesh search engines”—a phenomenon in which people use the Internet to crowd-source the identity of wrongdoers: adulterers, unpatriotic citizens, amateur pornographic actors, and so on. These self-appointed avengers try to motivate physical and social attacks against these
individuals and often succeed in getting them to leave town or lose their jobs. Or remember the cases we discussed earlier, such as the public reaction against Mary Bale after she put a cat into a garbage bin, or against David Cash Jr., who watched the murder of a child and did nothing—both were stalked and threatened by morally outraged strangers.

One can explore this punitive impulse through another game thought up by behavioral economists—
the Public Goods Game, which explores the extent to which people will sacrifice for a greater good. There are several variants of this game, but here’s an example: There are four players, each unknown to the others (typically they are playing on separate computer terminals), each starting with $20. The game is played as a series of rounds, and at the start of each round the players put money in the middle. This money is doubled and distributed evenly back to the players. Then each player gets a report about how much money he or she now has and what each of the other players did.

Imagine playing such a game. Here are some ways it can turn out.

1.  
Nobody puts any money into the middle:
Everyone keeps his or her $20.

2.  
Everyone puts in all of his or her money:
The $80 in the pot is multiplied by 2, and then split four ways, so that everyone gets back $40.

3.  
You hold back, the other three put in their money:
Your three co-players put in $20 each. Now there is $60 in the pot. It doubles: $120.
Now it’s split four ways, and everyone, including you, gets back $30. Since you didn’t contribute, you now have $50.

4.  
You put in, the others hold back:
Your $20 is doubled to $40, and split four ways, so that everyone gets back $10. The others didn’t pay anything, so each of them has his or her original $20 plus $10, for a total of $30. You are left just with $10.

The best overall solution is for everyone to put in money. If each individual contributes, everyone will double his or her money on each round. But at the same time, any individual would make more by not putting in anything. For instance, if everyone else puts in money, an individual is better off opting out—$50 versus $40. And if nobody else puts in money, an individual is still better off opting out—$20 versus $10.

This calculus matches up nicely with situations in everyday life in which engaging in an unpleasant or time-consuming activity leads to an improvement for everyone, but selfish individuals can sit back and reap the benefits without paying the costs. For example, I want a world where people pay taxes—I benefit from roads, the fire department, the police, and so on—but the world I would most prefer from a selfish standpoint is the one where everyone pays taxes but me. The same goes for recycling, voting, organizing our local block party, serving in the military—or my roommate situation in graduate school, where we faced the following options for cleaning the house:

1.  
Nobody does anything:
The apartment is filthy, but nobody has to work. We are all mildly unhappy.

2.  
Everyone cleans:
The apartment is clean, and we all do a little bit of work. This is the best overall situation.

3.  
I do nothing; everyone else cleans:
This is the best solution for me. I have a clean apartment and do no work.

4.  
I clean; the others do nothing:
I have a clean apartment but do far more work than everyone else, and I’m miserable.

In public goods games played in the laboratory, people tend to start off playing nice, but
inevitably some participants succumb to temptation and opt out to make extra money. Others observe this, and then they too defect. As more people defect, one feels increasingly like a patsy for staying in. And so, while there might remain some stalwart contributors, the situation gradually goes to hell. This is what happened in my roommate situation: it descended into a Hobbesian battle of all against all, and we lived, unhappily, in squalor.

This looks grim. But in the course of history humans were somehow able to overcome the temptations of defection and free-riding—otherwise, practices such as warfare, big-game hunting, and shared child care could never have come into existence.

And this brings us back to punishment. If the government stopped punishing tax cheats, more people would
cheat on their taxes; if evading the draft weren’t illegal, more people would evade the draft. The threat of fines and imprisonment helps deter free riders. Now, appealing to state-sponsored sanctions is little help from an evolutionary perspective, since we formed cooperative groups long before there were governments and police. But it hints at a solution to the problem of free riders, which is that
individuals
are motivated to punish one another and that punishment, and fear of punishment, motivate better behavior.

Ernst Fehr and the economist Simon Gächter explored this idea using a modified public goods game. As in the usual game, participants got to see what everyone else did (again, just as a series of numbers; they didn’t actually know who any of the other players were). But now a participant could spend his or her money to take away money from another person. In particular, a person who noticed that someone hadn’t contributed in the last round could then pay his or her own money to lower the sum that the offender ended up with in the current round—a form of third-party punishment.

This punishment, crucially, was
altruistic:
a participant who chose to punish knew that he was giving up something to promote a good outcome (perhaps better behavior by the free rider in the future, or perhaps the simple enforcement of justice). The money taken from the punishee disappeared; it didn’t go to any participant, and the punisher didn’t continue to play with the punishee, and so if this did improve the punishee’s behavior, it wouldn’t help the punisher personally.

Even so, 80 percent of participants punished at least once. And this punishment, which tended to be directed at those who contributed less than average, solved the problem of defection. Soon enough, just about everyone was contributing. Such punishment makes cooperation possible.

B
UT
is an appetite for altruistic punishment really an evolved instinct? One problem with this proposal is that
it’s vexingly hard to explain how such behavior could evolve through natural selection. Even if our society works better when free riders are brought into line through punishment, still, someone has to do the punishing, and if it is costly, as it is in the lab games, then we have the free-rider problem all over again. What’s keeping an individual from hanging back when he or she sees wrongdoing and benefiting from the altruistic punishment of others—in other words, being a free rider when it comes to punishing free riders? Now, we might be motivated to punish those who shirk from punishing free riders—but then are we also motivated to punish those who shirk from punishing those who shirk from punishing free riders?

Perhaps altruistic punishment could have evolved through some sort of group selection (groups that contain these punishers do better than groups that don’t), or
perhaps punishers thrive because other individuals like them and prefer to interact with them. But an alternative is that there is no evolved propensity for altruistic punishment in the first place.

In support of this idea, in a recent review of the literature
from sociology and anthropology, the philosopher Francesco Guala finds that
altruistic punishment is rare—or even nonexistent—in the small-scale societies of the real world. Now, as we saw earlier, there are plenty of direct and indirect ways to make wrongdoers, including free riders, suffer. But such real-world punishment tends to be done in ways that are not costly to the punisher, either because they don’t involve confrontation (for example, gossip), or because the group as a whole does it, so that no single individual takes a hit.

Furthermore, although humans everywhere do punish free riders, it turns out that people from different societies react to this punishment in different ways. When free riders from countries such as Switzerland, the United States, and Australia are punished, they shape up and get nicer. But in certain other societies, such as Greece and Saudi Arabia, people who have been punished for free riding don’t feel ashamed; they get mad and try to get even. They go looking for those who most likely did the punishment and punish them back, something dubbed
“antisocial punishment.” This response, as you would expect, makes things worse, and the situation collapses into chaos. (Not surprisingly, antisocial punishment tends to occur in countries with, as the authors of the cross-cultural study put it, “weak norms of civic cooperation.”) This suggests that third-party punishment could not have evolved as a solution to the problem of free riding.