Unfair

by Adam Benforado

  When seventeen-year-old Trayvon: Cindy Adams, “Trayvon Martin Killing to Be Investigated by Federal Authorities,” Examiner.com, March 19, 2012, http://www.examiner.com/​article/​trayvon-martin-killing-to-be-investigated-by-federal-authorities; Suzanne Gamboa and Sonya Ross, “Prosecutor in FL Shooting Known as Victim Advocate,” Foxnews.com, April 12, 2012, http://www.foxnews.com/​us/2012/​04/12/prosecutor-in-fl-shooting-known-as-victim-advocate/.

  It seemed to be: Gamboa and Ross, “Prosecutor in FL.”

  But the special prosecutor: Corey was specifically responding to the claim that it was only the unexpected public furor that led to a charge of second-degree murder against Zimmerman. Susan Green, “George Zimmerman Makes First Court Appearance at Bond Hearing,” Examiner.com, April 12, 2012, http://www.examiner.com/​article/​george-zimmerman-makes-first-court-appearance-at-bond-hearing.

  When his nametag read: King, “The Death of David Rosenbaum.”

  The police, for their part: Duggan, “Report Scolds D.C. Agencies”; Willoughby, Summary of Special Report, 8.

  The headphones that were found: Willoughby, Summary of Special Report, 25; Clarence Williams and Allan Lengel, “Report Faults Response to Assault,” Washington Post, June 16, 2006, http://www.washingtonpost.com/​wp-dyn/content/article/​2006/06/16/AR2006061600009.html.

  When the lead officer was asked: Willoughby, Summary of Special Report, 5, 34.

  Once “the drunk” was identified: King, “The Death of David Rosenbaum.”

  When the media and the police: Janofsky, “Official Washington Pays Tribute.” David served as the chief Congressional correspondent and chief domestic policy correspondent, earning a George Polk Award for national reporting. Purdum, “David Rosenbaum.”

  Indeed, with David: Leslie Milk and Ellen Ryan, “Washingtonians of the Year 2007: The Rosenbaums,” Washingtonian, January 1, 2008, http://www.washingtonian.com/​articles/people/washingtonians-of-the-year-2007-the-rosenbaums/.

  And prosecutors, now under great pressure: Accuracy Project, “David Rosenbaum,” last modified January 1, 2012, http://www.accuracyproject.org/​cbe-Rosenbaum,David.html.

  Hamlin was sentenced: Accuracy Project, “David Rosenbaum.”

  The problem is not: David Mamet, Faustus (New York: Dramatists Play Service, Inc. 2007), 18.

  Recent research in psychology: Duggan, “Report Scolds D.C. Agencies.”

  In the words of the D.C. inspector: Duggan, “Report Scolds D.C. Agencies.”

  What propelled responders: Willoughby, Summary of Special Report, 67.

  In fact, we are not: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 86.

  The automatic processes in our brain: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 85–86; Simone Schnall, Jonathan Haidt, Gerald L. Clore, and Alexander H. Jordan, “Disgust as Embodied Moral Judgment,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 1096–97.

  Ambiguity and doubt are: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 80, 87–88.

  In certain circumstances: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 80, 85–86.

  The less we know: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 87.

  The unfortunate result: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 87–88.

  When the exact same student: In the actual experiment, participants were also given a brief written background about the girl, which described her parents’ levels of educational and occupations (in the negative-expectancy condition, they had high school educations and blue-collar jobs; in the positive-expectancy condition, they were college-educated professionals). John M. Darley and Paget H. Gross, “A Hypothesis-Confirming Bias in Labeling Effects,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44, no. 1 (1983): 20, 23–25.

  Finding him lying: Willoughby, Summary of Special Report, 18.

  Yet, three hours later: Willoughby, Summary of Special Report, 59; Marc Fisher, “Doctor’s Deposition Details Fatal Night at Howard ER,” Washington Post, April 6, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/​wp-dyn/content/article​/2008/04/05​/AR2008040502056.html.

  The patrol service area: Wilber and Wilgoren, “Medical Condition Suspected.”

  Although there were more: Wilber and Wilgoren, “Medical Condition Suspected.”

  When interviewed after the fact: Willoughby, Summary of Special Report.

  And it seems to have had: Disgust—the repulsion we feel toward certain substances, entities, and behaviors—is one of the automatic gut responses that provide information about how we should understand and evaluate what we are seeing. Schnall et al., “Disgust Embodied as Moral Judgment,” 1096–97; Yoel Inbar and David Pizarro, “Grime and Punishment: How Disgust Influences Moral, Social, and Legal Judgments,” Jury Expert 21, no. 2 (March 2009), 13; Erik D’Amato, “Mystery of Disgust,” Psychology Today, January 1, 1998, http://www.psychologytoday.com/​articles/200909​/mystery-disgust.

  Disgust guides our lives: James Gorman, “Survival’s Ick Factor,” New York Times, January 23, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/​2012/01/24​/science/disgusts-evolutionary-role-is-irresistible-to-researchers.html?hp.

  While different people experience disgust: Inbar and Pizarro, “Grime and Punishment,” 13, 15.

  Disgust a Kazakh: Dan Jones, “The Depths of Disgust,” Nature 447, no. 14 (June 2007): 768.

  Disgust responses appear: Sam McNerney, “A Nauseating Corner of Psychology: Disgust,” Big Think, December 9, 2012, http://bigthink.com/​insights-of-genius​/a-nauseating-corner-of-psychology-disgust; Inbar and Pizarro, “Grime and Punishment,” 13.

  In experiments, a two-year-old: Paul Rozin et al., “The Child’s Conception of Food: Differentiation of Categories of Rejected Substances in the 16 Months to 5 Year Age Range,” Appetite 7 (1986), 146; McNerney, “A Nauseating Corner of Psychology.”

  We cringe at the thought: Dan Vergano, “Jamestown Cannibalism Confirmed by Skull from ‘Jane,’ ” USA Today, May 1, 2013, http://www.usatoday.com/​story/news​/nation/2013​/05/01​/jamestown-cannibalism/2126421/.

  Many scientists believe that disgust: Schnall et al., “Disgust Embodied as Moral Judgment,” 1097.

  But it also proved useful: Schnall et al., “Disgust Embodied as Moral Judgment,” 1097.

  As a result, today we see: Jones, “The Depths of Disgust,” 769.

  Both help us stay: Jones, “The Depths of Disgust,” 770. When something is disgusting, we seek to avoid it lest we be contaminated. This is true even when the item in question cannot actually taint us. Andrea C. Morales and Gavan J. Fitzsimons, “Product Contagion: Changing Consumer Evaluations Through Physical Contact with ‘Disgusting’ Products,” Journal of Marketing Research 44, no. 2, (May 2007): 275–78; Michael D. Lemonick, “Why We Get Disgusted,” Time, May 24, 2007, http://content.time.com/​time/magazine/article​/0,9171,1625167,00.html. In one study, researchers looked at how people reacted to food that happened to be placed in a basket with things that are considered disgusting, like tampons and kitty litter. Morales and Fitzsimons, “Product Contagion,” 275–78; Lemonick, “Why We Get Disgusted.” What they found was that even when a package of cookies was unopened and did not actually touch the kitty litter, people would not eat them.

  And moral disgust appears to operate in the same way: in a compelling demonstration, people were asked to consider wearing the sweater of someone they viewed to personify evil (e.g., Adolf Hitler). Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin, “The Contagion Concept in Adult Thinking in the United States: Transmission of Germs and Interpersonal Influence,” Ethos 22, no. 2 (1994): 164, 166; Jones, “The Depths of Disgust,” 769. Although it was specified that the garment had just been laundered and no one would observe the wearing, the vast majority of people were nonetheless repulsed by the idea. Nemeroff and Rozin, “The Contagion Concept,” 169–70; Jones, “The Depths of Disgust,” 769. For a broader discussion of these contagion dynamics, see Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rozin, “The Makings of the Magical Mind: The Nature and Function of Sympathetic Magical Thinking,” in Karl S. Rosengren,
Carl N. Johnson, and Paul L. Harris, Imagining the Impossible: Magical, Scientific and Religious Thinking in Children (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1–34; Paul Rozin and Carol Nemeroff, “The Laws of Sympathetic Magic: A Psychological Analysis of Similarity and Contagion,” in Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, edited by James W. Stigler, Richard A. Shweder, and Gilbert Herdt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 205–33; Paul Rozin, Maureen Markwith, and Clark McCauley, “Sensitivity to Indirect Contacts With Other Persons: AIDS Aversion as a Composite of Aversion to Strangers, Infection, Moral Taint and Misfortune,” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 103 (1994): 495–504.

  But because the same areas: Jones, “The Depths of Disgust,” 769–70; Inbar and Pizarro, “Grime and Punishment,” 14–15; Gary D. Sherman, Jonathan Haidt, and Gerald L. Clore, “The Faintest Speck of Dirt: Disgust Enhances the Detection of Impurity,” Psychological Science 23 (2012): 7.

  Imagine walking into: Schnall et al., “Disgust Embodied as Moral Judgment,” 1100–01, 1107–08.

  The desk you are asked: Schnall et al., “Disgust Embodied as Moral Judgment,” 1101.

  Dirty tissues and greasy pizza: Schnall et al., “Disgust Embodied as Moral Judgment,” 1101.

  Yet when scientists conducted: Schnall et al., “Disgust Embodied as Moral Judgment,” 1096.

  Disgust at the lab conditions: Schnall et al., “Disgust Embodied as Moral Judgment,” 1105–07.

  The disgust that people felt: Willoughby, Summary of Special Report, 35, 57.

  The physical disgust they felt: Willoughby, Summary of Special Report, 4.

  It matters every step: Data gleaned from police and court records suggests that different victims receive different justice (and, in some cases, injustice), depending on key identifiers like age, gender, and race. Marc Riedel, “Homicide Arrest Clearances: A Review of the Literature,” Sociology Compass 2, no. 4 (2008): 1150–59; Steven Briggs and Tara Opsal, “The Influence of Victim Ethnicity on Arrest in Violent Crimes,” Criminal Justice Studies: A Critical Journal of Crime, Law and Society 25, no. 2 (2012): 185–89; Aki Roberts, “The Influences of Incident and Contextual Characteristics on Crime Clearance of Nonlethal Violence: A Multilevel Event History Analysis,” Journal of Criminal Justice 36 (2008): 65–69; Amanda L. Robinson and Meghan S. Chandek, “Differential Police Response to Black Battered Women,” Women and Criminal Justice 12 (2000): 43–55; Douglas A. Smith, Christy A. Visher, and Laura A. Davidson, “Equity and Discretionary Justice: The Influence of Race on Police Arrest Decisions,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 75, no.1 (1984): 234, 246–49.

  Despite what we say: Goodwin and Landy, “Valuing Different Human Lives,” 778.

  A ten-year-old is: Goodwin and Landy, “Valuing Different Human Lives,” 796, 799.

  Privileging the young: Goodwin and Landy, “Valuing Different Human Lives,” 780.

  But clearly there is a limit: Goodwin and Landy, “Valuing Different Human Lives,” 778, 789.

  When an older man: Goodwin and Landy, “Valuing Different Human Lives,” 783, 785. A number of studies show that when an older person is killed, we do not feel the same sense of injustice as when a young person is killed. Mitchell J. Callan, Rael J. Dawtry, and James M. Olson, “Justice Motive Effects in Ageism: The Effects of a Victim’s Age on Observer Perceptions of Injustice and Punishment Judgments,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48 (2012): 1343–44. For instance, when researchers looked into how members of the public felt about an accident in which a drunk driver ran a red light and hit an innocent victim, they found that people perceived less injustice when a seventy-four-year-old was the victim than when an eighteen-year-old was the victim. And they recommended lower sentences for the guilty driver who hit the older person. This enhanced indifference may affect our response, even when we face no tragic tradeoff, when there is just one victim on the ground and plenty of opportunity to help save his life and catch his attacker. Callan, Dawtry, and Olson, “Justice Motive Effects in Ageism,” 1343.

  When researchers had people: Pamela A. Dooley, “Perceptions of the Onset Controllability of AIDS and Helping Judgments: An Attributional Analysis,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology 25, no. 10 (1995): 862–63; Sam Sommers, Situations Matter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2011), 79. In the real world, addicts tend to receive neither sympathy nor respect. It seems revealing that in Ambulance 18’s official logbook, the EMTs describe another patient they picked up as “drunk and stupid.” Willoughby, Summary of Special Report, 50. People don’t feel any need to hide their disdain for alcoholics and drug addicts, and this powerful aversion is strong enough to overcome official protocol. Howard’s Emergency Department Triage Manual, for instance, explicitly states that an alcoholic who exhibits abnormal vital signs and altered mental state or is non-ambulatory must go to the main Emergency Department where staff members are advised to “urgently proceed.” Willoughby, Summary of Special Report, 16.

  This is often the case: Inbar and Pizarro, “Grime and Punishment,” 16–17; McNerney, “A Nauseating Corner of Psychology.”

  Such associations can be: Lasana T. Harris and Susan T. Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low: Neuroimaging Responses to Extreme Out-Groups,” Psychological Science 17, no. 10 (2006): 847.

  In one demonstration: Harris and Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low,” 848–49, 852.

  More interesting, though, was: Harris and Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low,” 848–52.

  It lit up when: Harris and Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low,” 848–52.

  But for those viewed: Harris and Fiske, “Dehumanizing the Lowest of the Low,” 848–52.

  Passing a homeless drunk: Jones, “The Depths of Disgust,” 769–70.

  The dehumanization is all the easier: David’s outgroup label was ultimately removed, but for many victims there is no opportuniuty to become “one of us.” Most are who they appear to be: a transgender prostitute stabbed by a pimp; an untouchable woman robbed and beaten. There is no veil to pull back that will make them worthy of our justice.

  In one classic experiment: Cathaleene Jones and Elliot Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim as a Function of Respectability of the Victim,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 26, no. 3 (1973): 415–19.

  Take a moment to ponder: Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 417–18.

  To unlock the mystery: Callan, Dawtry, and Olson, “Justice Motive Effects in Ageism,” 1343–44. Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19.

  When confronted with: Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19.

  And we eliminate that discomfort: Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19.

  We trick ourselves: Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19.

  She must have done something: Jones and Aronson, “Attribution of Fault to a Rape Victim,” 418–19. The easier it is for us to see the implicated harm as resulting from the victim’s free choice, the easier it is for us to blame her for what happened and maintain our belief in a just world. Looking into why certain tragedies, like the tsunami of 2004, spark significant charitable giving, while others, like the crisis in Darfur, do not, a group of scientists had participants read about a fake famine and then asked them if they would like to make a donation to the victims. Hanna Zagefka et al., “Donating to Disaster Victims: Responses to Natural and Humanly Caused Events,” European Journal of Social Psychology 41 (2011): 358, doi: 10.1002/ejsp.781; Situationist Staff, “The Situation of Donations,” Situationist, May 29, 2011, http://thesituationist.wordpress.com/​2011/05/29​/the-situation-of-donations/. Some participants were told that the famine had arisen from “drought,” while others were told that it had been sparked by “armed conflict.” Could that small background fact make a difference? The answer was a clear yes: those who were starving because of a drought recei
ved significantly more donations, which the authors suggested arose because these people were seen as less implicated in causing their own suffering. Zagefka et al., “Donating to Disaster Victims,” 358–59; Situationist Staff, “The Situation of Donations.” Again, we want to believe that the world is a just place where individuals get their righteous deserts. Zagefka et al., “Donating to Disaster Victims,” 361; Situationist Staff, “The Situation of Donations”; Callan, Dawtry, and Olson, “Justice Motive Effects in Ageism,” 1343–44. Participants could maintain such a belief by assuming that those suffering as a result of an “armed conflict” must have been partially to blame—something they couldn’t do when a natural disaster was behind the famine. Zagefka et al., “Donating to Disaster Victims,” 361; Situationist Staff, “The Situation of Donations.”

  A former co-worker: “Suspect in Northern Liberties Shooting ID’d,” 6ABC.com, November 18, 2011, http://abclocal.go.com/​wpvi/story​?section=news/crime&id=8437751.

  Penn State students rioted: Eric Randall, “Bullies Force an Alleged Sandusky Victim to Leave His High School, Wire, November 21, 2011, http://www.theatlanticwire.com/​national/2011/​11/bullies-forced-alleged-sandusky-victim-leave-his-high-school/45267/.

  Another victim, who courageously came forward: Pennsylvania Attorney General, “Child Sex Charges Filed Against Jerry Sandusky; Two Top Penn State University Officials Charged with Perjury and Failure to Report Suspected Child Abuse,” news release, November 5, 2011, http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/​press.aspx?id=6270; Randall, “Bullies Force an Alleged Sandusky Victim to Leave”; Sara Ganim, “Alleged Jerry Sandusky Victim Leaves School Because of Bullying, Counselor Says,” Patriot-News, November 20, 2011, http://www.pennlive.com/​midstate/index.ssf​/2011/11/alleged_jerry_sandusky_victim.html.