Liars and Outliers (31 page)

It turns out that a lot of those score increases were faked. In addition to teaching students,
teachers cheated on
their students' tests by changing wrong answers to correct ones.

There's a societal dilemma at work here. Teachers were always able to manipulate their students' test scores, but before the No Child Left Behind law, the competing interests were weak. People become teachers to teach, not to cheat…until their jobs depended on it. When the competing interests became stronger, the school districts should have increased societal pressures, probably security systems, to restore balance.
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There's a rule at work here. When you start measuring something and then judge people based on that measurement, you encourage people to game the measurement instead of doing whatever it is you wanted in the first place. If a company penalizes customer-support people for having long phone calls, they have an incentive to hang up on callers. If you reward software programmers for fixing bugs, they have an incentive to create buggy software to have bugs to fix instead of getting it right the first time.
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If you pay CEOs
based on stock price, they have an incentive to inflate the stock price at the expense of the company's long-term interest.

The incentive to defect can also be increased when the reason a thing is attacked changes. Driver's licenses are a great example. Originally, they were nothing more than proof that a person is legally allowed to drive a car. As such, there wasn't much of an incentive to forge them, and security around the licenses was minimal: they were made of paper, they didn't have photos, and so on. In the U.S., at least, it was only when they started being used for a completely different purpose—age verification as a condition of buying alcohol—that forgeries started being a problem. In response, state governments changed their licenses to include a variety of anti-forgery features: photographs, watermarks and holograms, microprinting, and the like. Recently, their use has changed again. Since 9/11, they have been increasingly used as proof that a person isn't on a terrorist watch list. And now the government wants even more security features associated with them, like computer chips and enhanced security around their issuance.

We saw this with pair-bonding. Informal pair-bonding was enough to deal with Deacon's Paradox with respect to infidelity, but when inheritance became an issue, more formal mechanisms were required. Another example is joyriding; because joyriders never intended to keep the cars they stole, they couldn't be charged with theft—so before specific joyriding laws were enacted, they got off relatively lightly.

The market can also increase the incentive to defect. When the price of glass eels—immature eels that are a delicacy in Japan and Europe—started rising, more people began to fish for them. The result was a Tragedy of the Commons: illegal overfishing and poaching in England, France, and the northeastern U.S. resulted in reduced yields, which resulted in higher prices. This resulted in
even more overfishing
, even further reduced yields, and even higher prices that rose from $25 to $950 per pound. Enforcement just couldn't keep up, and poachers have devastated the eel population. A technological advance might solve this societal dilemma; researchers are trying to breed and
farm these eels
, which will increase supply and reduce the incentive to overfish.

Technological advances can magnify societal dilemmas as well. We'll talk about this in the next chapter, but for now, think of the difference between banking in person and banking online, manual door locks and electronic locks, or paper ballots and touch-screen voting machines. In all cases, the addition of technology makes some attacks easier.

A final way the incentive to defect can increase is when the scale of the societal dilemma changes. We saw this in the difference between a single sandwich seller in a market and a large sandwich-producing corporation, and between Fisherman Bob and the Robert Fish Corporation. Large organizations can gain more, and inflict more damage on the group, by defecting. As organizations grow in size and power, societal pressures that might have worked in the past won't necessarily work as well any longer.

Misunderstanding how different societal dilemmas interact.
Societal dilemmas don't exist in isolation, and societal pressures designed to decrease the scope of defection in one societal dilemma can, as a side effect, increase the scope of defection in another.

For example, we recognize that the police force is both a solution and a problem. It is our agent in institutional pressures against criminals in general, but as an institution with its own self-interests, it has to be dissuaded from defecting. So we have all sorts of societal pressures protecting society from the police: rules limiting search and seizure, rules against self-incrimination, rules about interrogation, rules about evidence, and so on. These necessarily affect the defection rate of criminals by making the police's job harder and more onerous, but we have them because—on balance—the result is a better police force and a better society. Recently, this has been changing. In our efforts to protect ourselves against terrorism, we have been dismantling many of the societal pressures we've put in place to protect ourselves from abuse by the police.

Similarly, over the past couple of decades we have dismantled a variety of financial regulations that limited the behavior of banks and other financial institutions.
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Yes, those regulations made it harder for institutions to make money, but they also served to protect society from the effects of widespread bank defection.

Ignoring changing social norms.
Sometimes societal norms change, and societal dilemmas start shifting to reflect the change. This often results in conflicting societal dilemmas as the new norms work their way through society, and in conflicts between subgroups within society who are either clinging to the old norms or embracing the new ones.

My favorite example is historical.
In ancient Rome
, it was important to worship the gods. It was also important that everyone in the community worship the gods. The gods were angered if some people shirked their religious responsibilities, like participating in festivals. This is one reason the Romans didn't like the early Christians. It's not that they worshipped their Christian god, it's that they didn't
also
worship the Roman gods. This was not simply a disagreement with Christians' personal choice; it was seen as a danger to the whole community.

Eventually, social norms changed. Christians became a larger and larger minority. They were increasingly tolerated. Sometime in the early 300s AD, Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity. And slowly, what had been defection became cooperation.

Whether and when societal pressure failed depends on your point of view. If you believed in the Roman gods, then societal pressure failed when it didn't prevent Christians from offending the Roman gods. If you were an early Christian, then societal pressure failed when it didn't protect freedom of religion.

Another example is sexual harassment in the workplace. As long as those in power in the organization didn't enforce prohibitions against men harassing subordinate women, unwanted advances were relatively common and taken for granted. It wasn't until a larger society started enforcing sexual harassment rules that occurrences began to decline.

A similar dynamic is playing out with respect to gay marriage. It's a fundamentalist Christian belief that gay marriage isn't just a bad individual choice, but that its very existence threatens the traditional family: just like the Romans talking about Christianity. As such, it's a societal dilemma.

Other people, though, don't see the dilemma. They don't accept that group defection would result in the social calamity the fundamentalists do. Not only do they defect, they don't even accept the dilemma as real.
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Norms can change quickly
due to external threats. People are more willing to implement societal pressures—both the kinds that reward cooperators and the kinds that punish defectors—in times of war.

Most of the time, though, social norms change slowly. We've repeatedly talked about Deacon's Paradox, and how pair-bonding is a societal pressure. Enforcement of that has changed. There was a time when you could be stoned to death for adultery, or for fornication out of wedlock. Now, in most of the world, that doesn't happen. There are even parts of the world where it isn't even frowned upon very heavily. And on the technological side, defecting from pair-bonds has become safer. The “wages of sin” used to include pregnancy, which came with it significant health and financial risks, and venereal disease. Cheap and effective birth control changed that, so much so that the current societal dilemma for women is a very different risk trade-off. More recently, unsafe sex practices brought with them a different set of health risks, ones that could be effectively mitigated with technological security measures like condoms.

Our evolving definitions of “society” show how societal norms evolve. As Barbara Jordan famously noted, the original definition of “we the people” in the U.S. didn't include
women or slaves
. Over the centuries, our definitions of who is within the bounds of society have gradually become more inclusive.

You can see this evolution in the societal dilemma surrounding the current tone and integrity of
political debates
in the United States. The goal of politics—elections, policy debates, laws—is to govern the country by enacting the best policies for society and implementing the best laws to solve societal dilemmas. But there's a competing interest of getting laws passed that benefit us in particular. We're all better off if national policy debates are factual, honest, and civil, but it's easy to resort to spin, distortions, smears, and lies. But if enough people do that, you get the circus that characterizes far too much of current American politics.
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It's not clear that the level of dishonesty is new, but it seems to be carried out on a much broader scale today. Moral and reputational pressures used to work, but they are failing as the country bifurcates into two different groups with completely separate systems of values. Legal controls that impinge on free speech are a dangerous option. One solution is to stop gerrymandering safe legislative seats. By forcing these seats to be decided in the general election, as opposed to party-specific primaries or caucuses, candidates would have to appeal to swing centrist voters rather than their base. But potential legal societal pressures would be viewed as partisan, and untenable for that reason.