by Robin Hanson
Currying Favor
When a high-status person chooses someone as a mate, friend, or teammate, it’s often seen as an endorsement of this associate, raising that person’s status. This (among other things) creates an incentive to win the affections of people with high status.
But there are acceptable and unacceptable ways to do this. It’s perfectly acceptable just to “be yourself,” for example. If you’re naturally impressive or likable, then it seems right and proper for others to like and respect you as well. What’s not acceptable is sycophancy: brown-nosing, bootlicking, groveling, toadying, and sucking up. Nor is it acceptable to “buy” high-status associates via cash, flattery, or sexual favors. These tactics are frowned on or otherwise considered illegitimate, in part because they ruin the association signal for everyone else. We prefer celebrities to endorse products because they actually like those products, not because they just want cash. We think bosses should promote workers who do a good job, not workers who just sleep with the boss.
Nevertheless, these temptations exist.
Subgroup Politics
Like the norms against bragging and currying favor, the norm against subgroup politics is routinely violated. There are large areas of modern life where people are actively, aggressively political, such as in Washington, D.C. But the taboo against politics is typically strong in small-group settings. In most workplaces, for example, it’s considered bad form, even a danger to the group, for someone to be openly “political.” Warring factions can tear a group apart, or at least keep it from achieving its full potential.
Of course, as with bragging, there are gains to be had by individuals from acting politically; that’s why the norm exists. But it also means we should expect to find the norm routinely violated, especially covertly.
Selfish Motives
Perhaps the most comprehensive norm of all—a catch-all that includes bragging, currying favor, and political behavior, but extends to everything else that we’re supposed to do for prosocial reasons—is the norm against selfish motives. It’s also the linchpin of our thesis. Consider how awkward it is to answer certain questions by appealing to selfish motives. Why did you break up with your girlfriend? “I’m hoping to find someone better.” Why do you want to be a doctor? “It’s a prestigious job with great pay.” Why do you draw cartoons for the school paper? “I want people to like me.”
There’s truth in all these answers, but we systematically avoid giving them, preferring instead to accentuate our higher, purer motives.
GETTING OUR BEARINGS
In Chapter 2, we discussed how humans, like all animals, are competitive and selfish, and argued that competition was an important driving force in the evolution of our big brains. Then, in this chapter, we discussed how humans, unlike other animals, learned to limit wasteful intra-species competition by the use of norms.
Careful readers will have noticed the tension between these two facts. Specifically, if norms succeed at restricting competition, it reduces the incentive to be a clever competitor. For example, suppose our ancestors were successful in enforcing their “no politics” norm, nipping every political act right in the bud. In such a climate, there’s little value in lugging around a big, politically savvy brain. In fact, big brains are extremely expensive; ours, for example, eats up one-fifth of our resting energy. So successful norm-enforcement should have caused human brains to shrink.
But of course our brains didn’t shrink—they ballooned. And this wasn’t in spite of our norms, but because of them. To find out why, we turn to the topic of cheating.
4
Cheating
Everybody cheats.
Let’s just get that out up front; there’s no use denying it. Yes, some people cheat less than others, and we ought to admire them for it. But no one makes it through life without cutting a few corners. There are simply too many rules and norms, and to follow them all would be inhuman.
Most of us honor the big, important rules, like those prohibiting robbery, arson, rape, and murder. But we routinely violate small and middling norms. We lie, jaywalk, take office supplies from work, fudge numbers on our tax returns, make illegal U-turns, suck up to our bosses, have extramarital affairs, and use recreational drugs. Your two coauthors, for example, will both confess to having committed more than half of these minor crimes.1
Why do we cheat? It’s simple: cheating lets us reap benefits without incurring the typical costs. “Nearly 100% of elite competitive swimmers pee in the pool,” says Carly Geehr, a member of the U.S. National Swim Team. “Some deny it, some proudly embrace it, but everyone does.”2 Why? Because it’s too inconvenient to take bathroom breaks in the middle of practice.
Our ancestors did a lot of cheating. How do we know? One source of evidence is the fact that our brains have special-purpose adaptations for detecting cheaters.3 When abstract logic puzzles are framed as cheating scenarios, for example, we’re a lot better at solving them. This is one of the more robust findings in evolutionary psychology, popularized by the wife-and-husband team Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.4
But of course, if our ancestors needed to evolve brains that were good at cheater-detection, it’s because their peers were routinely trying to cheat them—and those peers were also our ancestors. Thus early humans (and protohumans) were locked in an evolutionary arms race, pitting the skills of some at cheating against the skills of others at detecting cheating.
Human brains also have adaptations that help us cheat and evade norms. The most basic way to get away with something—whether you’re stealing, cheating on your spouse, or just picking your nose—is simply to avoid being seen. One of our norm-evasion adaptations, then, is to be highly attuned to the gaze of others, especially when it’s directed at us. Eyes that are looking straight at us jump out from a crowd.5 Across dozens of experiments, participants who were being watched—even just by cartoon eyes—were less likely to cheat.6 People also cheat less in full (vs. dim) light,7 or when the concept of God, the all-seeing watcher, is activated in their minds.8
Perhaps more important is the emotion of shame and the behaviors that attend to it. Shame is the anguish we feel at being seen by others in degrading circumstances.9 When we feel shame, like when we’re the subject of scandal, we cover our faces, hang our heads, or avoid social contact altogether. And it’s our fear of shame that prompts us either to refrain from cheating, or else to cover our tracks so others don’t find out.
But we need to be careful here. If we focus too much on how cheaters avoid detection, it will distract us from a much more interesting type of cheating: doing it out in the open.
Consider these two very different norm-evasion scenarios:
1.Cheating on a test. When taking the test, you slip out to the bathroom to look up answers on your phone.
2.Drinking in public. In most parts of the United States, drinking alcohol in public is illegal. But there’s a time-honored solution, which is to wrap your bottle in a brown paper bag.
In the first case—cheating on a test—your goal is simple: don’t let the professor find out. The professor has a strong interest in keeping things fair, so in order to get away with cheating, you need to be as discreet and furtive as possible.
The incentives that govern drinking in public, however, are considerably more subtle. Crucially, it doesn’t really fool anyone when you hide your booze in a paper bag—least of all the police. If the police want to cite you for public drinking, they can just waltz over, catch the smell of alcohol on your breath, and arrest you or issue a citation. But they usually won’t bother.
Why not?
That’s the puzzle we’re going to study in this chapter—how we can often get away with cheating using only a modest amount of discretion. Again, this isn’t true of all forms of cheating; people don’t look the other way when they find a dead body. But there are many cases where the thinnest of pretexts, the most modest of fig leaves, can tip the scales of justice.
A QUICK CAVEAT
As
we discuss cheating in the rest of this chapter (and the rest of the book), it’s important not to get distracted by the urge to moralize about how wrong it is. There’s a time and place for discussing how we should behave; in fact, we’re so keen to moralize that we take almost every time and place as an opportunity to do so. But we need this book to be a judgment-free zone where we can admit to our bad tendencies and motives without worrying that we’re falling short of our ideals. We need here to see ourselves as we are, not as we’d like to be.
Note also that, depending on your moral compass, some of these norm violations won’t be considered “wrong.” Recreational drug use is an oft-cited example. But regardless of whether it’s wrong to do drugs, much of society still treats it as a form of cheating; drug users still have to take evasive maneuvers. So again, we’ll be taking an amoral stance. We need to stay focused on how people break and skirt the rules, not whether their behavior is good or bad or whether the rules are just or unjust.
COMMON KNOWLEDGE
In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” an emperor is swindled when two con men come to town offering to weave him an expensive new outfit. In fact, the “outfit” they weave is nothing more than thin air, but they tell the emperor that the clothes are invisible only to people who are stupid and incompetent. Anxious about his own intelligence, the emperor plays along, and so do all his subjects. “What fine, beautiful clothes!” they all say. Finally, during a procession through town, a small child blurts out the truth: “The emperor is naked!” And suddenly the spell is broken. Everyone decides that if an innocent child can’t see the clothes, then there is nothing to see. They’ve all been duped.
The key to understanding this fairy tale, and much of what we’re going to discuss in this book, is the concept of common knowledge.10 For a piece of information to be “common knowledge” within a group of people, it’s not enough simply for everyone to know it. Everyone must also know that everyone else knows it, and know that they know that they know it, and so on. It could as easily be called “open” or “conspicuous knowledge.”
In his book Rational Ritual, the political scientist Michael Chwe illustrates common knowledge using email.11 If you invite your friends to a party using the “To” and “Cc” fields, the party will be common knowledge—because every recipient can see every other recipient. But if you invite your guests using the “Bcc” field, even though each recipient individually will know about the party, it won’t be common knowledge. We might refer to information distributed this way, in the “Bcc” style, as closeted rather than common.
Whether information is common or closeted can make a world of difference. In “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the whole town knew that the king was being swindled by the con men, but this fact was crucially not common knowledge. Everyone saw the king was naked, but at the same time, everyone was worried that other people might believe the con men—so no adult was willing to speak up and risk looking like a fool. And yet, once the innocent child said what everyone was thinking, it broke the conspiracy of silence. And then, like water from a bursting dam, knowledge flooded out from the closets and into the commons.
Common knowledge is the difference between privately telling an individual and making a big public announcement; between a lesbian who’s still in the closet (although everyone suspects her of being a lesbian), and one who’s fully open about her sexuality; between an awkward moment that everyone tries to pretend didn’t happen and one that everyone acknowledges (and can hopefully laugh about). Common knowledge is information that’s fully “on the record,” available for everyone to see and discuss openly.
Here’s another way to think about it. We typically treat discretion or secret-keeping as an activity that has only one important dimension: how widely a piece of information is known. But actually there are two dimensions to keeping a secret: how widely it’s known and how openly12 or commonly it’s known. And a secret can be widely known without being openly known—the closeted lesbian’s sexuality, for example, or the fact that the emperor is naked.
Cheating is largely an exercise in discretion; in order to get away with something, you need to keep others from finding out about it. Sometimes only one dimension of secrecy is relevant. When you cheat on a test, for example, all that matters is whether one particular person—the professor—finds out. Conversely, when you drink alcohol on the street, it matters very little which particular people, or even how many of them, realize what you’re doing; what matters more is how openly it’s known. And this is where a thin brown bag can make all the difference.
If you brazenly flaunt an open beer bottle, the police are likely to give you trouble. This is because when you drink openly, it’s clear not only to the police that you’re breaking the law, but also to every passing citizen, including the most prudish members of the morality brigade (as well as impressionable children and their concerned parents). A police officer who turns a blind eye to conspicuous public drinking is open to a lot more criticism, from everyone involved, than an officer who ignores discreet public drinking. In this case, the brown paper bag doesn’t fool the police officers themselves, but it provides them with just enough cover to avoid taking flak from their constituents.
WHEN A LITTLE DISCRETION GOES A LONG WAY
“Tickets! I need tickets! Anyone selling their tickets?!”
Scalping—the unauthorized reselling of tickets, typically at the entrance to concerts and sporting events—is illegal in roughly half of the states in the United States.13 That’s why you’ll often hear scalpers hawking their goods with the counterintuitive (yet perfectly legal) request to buy tickets. Like wrapping alcohol in a paper bag, this practice doesn’t fool the people who are charged with stopping it; the police and venue security personnel know exactly what’s going on. And yet scalpers find it overwhelmingly in their interests to keep up the charade. This is another illustration of how even modest acts of discretion can thwart attempts at enforcing norms and laws.
Note that professional norm enforcers, such as police, teachers, and human resource managers, have a strong incentive to enforce norms: it’s their job. Even so, they’re often overworked or subject to lax oversight, and therefore tempted to cut corners. Sometimes the threat of mere paperwork can be enough to keep police from enforcing minor infractions.14
Meanwhile, the rest of us—nonprofessionals—have even weaker incentives to enforce norms (as we discussed in Chapter 3). We may have to stand up against our peers or even our superiors, and we have to do it without any formal authority, so our cost–benefit calculation is already teetering on the edge of profitability, perched between red and black. All it takes is a gentle nudge to send it definitively into the red.
It’s also important to remember that norm enforcement typically involves more than simply detecting that a norm violation has occurred. It also requires successfully prosecuting the violation, which means getting other members of the community to agree that a crime has taken place. Federal investigators might be arbitrarily certain that Tony Soprano is a Mafioso, for example, without having enough evidence to convict him in a court of law. Similarly, when your boss steals credit for your ideas at work, you can be certain of it—but good luck convincing your boss’s boss. In general, it’s much easier for firsthand witnesses to detect a crime than to convince others who are far removed.
The takeaway for the would-be cheater is that anything that hampers enforcement (or prosecution) will improve the odds of getting away with a crime. This is where discretion comes in. Such discretion can take many forms:
•Pretexts. These function as ready-made excuses or alibis.
•Discreet communication. Keeping things on the down-low.
•Skirting a norm instead of violating it outright.
•Subtlety. In honor cultures, an open insult is considered ample provocation for violence. In contrast, an insult that’s subtle enough not to land “on the record” will often get a pass.
&
nbsp; All of these techniques work by the same mechanism, in that they prevent a norm violation from becoming full common knowledge, which makes it more difficult to prosecute.
Let’s look at a few of these techniques in greater detail.
PRETEXTS: READY-MADE EXCUSES
In 1527, King Henry VIII’s marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon seemed unlikely to give him the son he desperately needed, and at 38 years old, he was running out of options. Everyone at court knew that Henry wanted a younger woman—Anne Boleyn—as his wife. Unfortunately, his marriage to Catherine had been blessed by the previous pope, and the current pope was in no mood to grant an annulment.
What the king needed was a pretext, a false but plausible justification to distract from his real reason. So, nearly 20 years into his marriage to Catherine, the king suddenly “discovered” that she hadn’t been a virgin on their wedding night, and that therefore their marriage was illegitimate.
As pretexts go, this was pretty ham-handed. But kings don’t need their excuses to be particularly subtle or airtight; their power is enough of an incentive for most people to go along. In Henry’s case, his pretext was enough to let him break from Roman Catholicism (thereby launching the English Reformation) and secure his annulment from the head of the new Anglican Church.15
Pretexts are a broad and useful tool for getting away with norm violations. They make prosecution more difficult by having a ready explanation for your innocence. This makes it harder for others to accuse and prosecute you. And as we’ve seen, a pretext doesn’t need to fool everyone—it simply needs to be plausible enough to make people worry that other people might believe it.
