Image source "Search" Imagine that at 9:08 in the morning, a young man who squeezes the morning and evening rush hour to work every day is spelled by the door, and he pretends to look at his mobile phone to hide his embarrassment and recharge his soul. As soon as the subway door opened, 1/5 of his body automatically poured out of the car - at this moment, an old man came with his grandson in his hand, and blurted out in surprise: Oh, there are so many people in the subway!
A similar scene happened on the subway train in the city. Under the increasing pressure of work and the declining fertility rate, once the elderly who are alive and vigorous meet the overwhelmed young people, the question of "whether to give up their seats to the elderly on the subway" has become morally ambiguous. Corresponding to this ambiguity, in the widely circulated short videos, what is amplified is no longer the aging of the elderly, but the provocation or argument of the young people. Why did rules like "give up seats to the elderly", which could have maintained relative stability, begin to fail and no longer guide people's lives? Or rather, why did people ever follow those rules? Benjamin van Roy, a professor of law at the University of Amsterdam, and Adam Fein, a professor of psychology and criminology at Arizona State University, in their co-authored book Why Rules Fail, are trying to answer this question: conformity, moral sense, profit and loss considerations, and so on, to find the codes of human behavior that the law cannot control. Why do we follow the rules? How is morality different compared to other motives? What is the psychological structure behind the seemingly simple moral impulse? "Why the Rules Fail" may provide you with a possible answer.
(This article is excerpted from "Why Rules Fail", slightly abridged from the original article)
01 A wise moral appeal
A young student comes to the driving center for a driving lesson. The coach explained that there are new requirements for the driver's license test: "To get a driver's license, you have to get around the obstacles on the road while texting. ”
The student was shocked: "Holy! The coach pointed to the document and said calmly, "Look here." I didn't make it up. The student fastened his seatbelt, shook his head, and smiled disapprovingly, saying, "I dare say, a lot of people crash." So, the instructor took the student to a class on the closed road of the driving center, asked the student to pull out his mobile phone, and began instructing the student to text "I'm going to buy chips." With a steering wheel in one hand and a mobile phone in the other, students are intently staring at the phone screen and typing. The coach immediately grabbed the steering wheel and exclaimed, "Look ahead—oh my God!" "Exams went ahead and students were told to text "we'll be late tonight." As the student struggled to finish the line, the coach told him, "Be careful, and I'll correct your spelling." After checking the student's phone, the coach criticized, "Look, you misspelled 'school'." The student was very angry: "Isn't this difficult for a strong man!" "Soon, the time to come came. The coach shouted, "Stop! "The student who was busy texting drove off the road, knocked over the orange traffic cone, and then slammed the brakes, and the instructor, who was not wearing a seatbelt, slammed into the windshield and hit his head. After the coach recovered, he looked shocked and wanted to vomit. He pointed to the traffic cone that had been knocked down and said to the students, "Think about what if this was a child." "I can't do it, I can't do it!" The student said, "To be honest, I feel like an idiot who can't drive." The student shook his phone and vented his frustration. I don't even know what I'm typing! "The instructor told the student that because of this, he could not pass the driving test." But what you're asking me to do is dangerous," the student retorted, "and it's going to kill people." If that could become law as well, then I wouldn't drive. I can't use my phone while driving, it's too dangerous. Then, the screen cuts to a blank: a text message rings and a green balloon pops up with the words "We agree", followed by another balloon that reads, "It's too dangerous to text while driving." These scenarios are part of a centralized socialized public interest campaign against texting while driving. Most countries have legislated to prohibit texting while driving. The rapid proliferation of mobile phones, especially smartphones, has proven to be incredibly distracting for drivers, riders, and even pedestrians. Because this behavior is so dangerous, most countries have adopted punitive measures to deter the use of the phone while driving.
Photo source: "Drive My Car"
The Belgian authorities, on the other hand, have taken a different approach with the aforementioned social communication video. The video doesn't advertise a legal ban on texting, nor does it warn of penalties for violators, but merely shows how disastrous it would be if we forced teens to text while driving. This example shows us the other side of behavioral ciphers. Rather than relying on incentives such as fines or tort liability, it is better to effectively persuade people to do the right thing. The video is a clever moral appeal to young viewers.
02 The Moral Logic of Law-abiding In the spring of 1984, Tom Taylor, a psychologist at Yale Law School, organized a large, groundbreaking study in Chicago to understand why Chicagoans obey the law. 11 His research team conducted interviews with local residents for about half an hour each. A year later, they interviewed most of the respondents from a year earlier. In the first year, participants were asked to indicate how often they had illegal behaviors such as speeding, illegal parking, littering, drunk driving, shoplifting, etc. Taylor also assessed what influenced the respondents' illegal behavior. He found that deterrence – the fear of punishment – does not have a significant impact on people's reasons for obeying or not obeying the law; On the contrary, people's values and social norms matter. The most powerful predictor of law-abiding is whether or not people perceive the law as consistent with their own morality. The more morally a person believes that littering is wrong, the more they will comply with the non-littering statute; The more morally averse you are to drunk driving, the less likely you are to drink and drive.
Photo source "Old Fox"
These findings are unsurprising. It is completely logical for people to follow their own morals and do what they think is right and just. Conversely, it is reasonable that people who do not morally support a law are more likely to violate it. In the '60s, as shown in Mad Men, the smoking ban was sure to fail miserably in the United States, when few people considered smoking immoral; By the eighties and nineties of the twentieth century, most states in the United States had implemented smoking bans, and the effect was very good, because the moral and social situation had completely changed: people believed that smoking was harmful, and therefore morally supported the rules of the smoking ban. If the law is consistent with people's moral values, people are more likely to obey the law, even if enforcement is limited. Many of our morals are ingrained and learned at a very young age from parents, school, or directly from friends. We learn that it is not right to steal, to lie, to cheat, to hurt or to kill, etc. A large part of our legal system codifies these age-old values into formal statutes of property, theft, fraud, rape, assault and murder. But many laws are not based on entrenched or widely accepted morality. Sometimes, a certain law even tries to change existing morality, or at least existing behavior that is morally perfectly acceptable. Ethics plays a major role in the code of behavior. In order for law to improve human behavior, it must either be consistent with existing morality, or it must take on the task of shaping future morality, so that future morality is consistent with law. To understand why the law can exploit people's sense of morality but often fails, we must delve into ethics in the social sciences.
03 Six Stages of Moral DevelopmentA woman in Europe was dying of a rare form of cancer. The doctor thought that only a new radium lozenge from a pharmacist in the city could cure her. The drug is expensive to manufacture, and pharmacists sell it at 10 times the cost: pharmacists buy radium for $200 and sell a small dose for $200. The female patient's husband, Heinz, borrowed from everyone he knew and managed to scrape together about $1,000. He told the pharmacist that his wife was dying and begged him to sell it cheaper, or to allow him to pay on credit. But the pharmacist said, "No, I developed this medicine to make money." In desperation, Heinz broke into the pharmacy and stole the medicine for his wife. Question: Do you think Heinz should break into a pharmacy and steal drugs to save his wife?
Image source "I am not the God of Medicine"
Before reading on, stop and think about your decision and the reasons for it. The story is almost verbatim copied from a 1963 study led by Lawrence Kohlberg, a psychologist who teaches at the University of Chicago and Harvard. This story was one of ten stories that children aged 6, 10, 13 and 16 years old in Chicago and Boston were shown. Children read about these moral dilemmas, point out how the protagonist of the story should choose, and explain their own opinions. Each interview has about two hours of recording, so the study leaves a wealth of data. A boy (Tommy, 10) replied to the dilemma: "His wife is sick and if she doesn't get the medicine soon, she might die." Maybe his wife was an important person, running a shop, and people were going to buy from her things that they couldn't buy anywhere else. The police are likely to blame the shopkeeper for not saving the wife. It's like killing someone with a gun or a knife. Kohlberg analyzes the interviews to understand children's moral reasoning.
Photo source "Old Fox"
After digging deeper into the rich answers of the interviewees, he found that there are six stages of moral development. The following is a description of these six stages in his original paper, each with a quote from the child interviewed, used as a figurative illustration: Stage 1: Punishment vs. Obedience Orientation (it doesn't matter if you don't get caught)" It depends on who he [Heinz] knows in the police. "Stage 2: Instrumental Relativist Orientation (If You Feel Useful, You Do It)" If His Wife Is Gentle and Pretty, He Should Do It. "Stage 3: Good Child Orientation (Just Do It for Me)" He should do this because he loves his wife. "Stage 4: Law and Order Orientation (Do Your Duty)" Saving lives is more important than protecting property. "Stage 5: Social Contract Orientation (this is the consensus of people of conscience)" Society ensures that everyone has the right to live. If I let her die, I can't hold my head up in public. "Stage 6 : Universal ethical principles (what if everyone did this?) "Human life has the supreme intrinsic value. If I let her die, I can't accept myself. "Kohlberg's research shows that our morality develops in stages. In his model, human morality begins with individualism, i.e., how to avoid punishment and suffering, or how to benefit oneself. As we move through the phase, we begin to be driven by a view of our own interests and responsibilities. At the highest level, there is a moral outlook that is rooted in social and abstract universal human values. Kohlberg's work also shows that even adults don't think the same way they think about making moral decisions. Since people's reactions to legal rules are deeply rooted in morality, it is necessary to understand and even influence this response by understanding what type of moral judgments people make. The moral appeal required to make people in the second stage of moral judgment (which works by appealing to personal interests) and the fourth stage (where all is responsible) obey the law will be very different.
04 The Moral Justification—Does It Trouble Me Subsequent research has also provided new discoveries for people's moral decision-making. Consider the following scenario. One family's dog was hit and killed by a car in front of their home. When the family heard that the dog meat was delicious, they cut up the dog's carcass, cooked it, and ate it for dinner. What do you think of this guy who eats his own dog? Is it very wrong, a little wrong, or is it completely fine? Can you explain why you think so? Has anyone been harmed by this behavior? Would you be bothered if you saw this happen, or would you not care?
Photo source: "The Story of Hachiko, the Loyal Dog"
One study was conducted in the United States and Brazil and asked participants to answer these questions after reading the exact same episode. Seventy-two percent of participants said they were bothered by witnessing their family members eating their deceased pets. The study found that in this case, the biggest factor influencing people's moral judgment was whether they thought that witnessing it would cause them distress, rather than whether they thought that eating a pet would harm others. The study found similar findings on other "harmless" offenses, such as a woman cutting a flag that was no longer needed, a son not keeping a promise he made to his mother's deathbed to visit graves regularly, and siblings kissing without anyone seeing. In this study, people made moral judgments based on whether they were bothered by what was said, not whether they thought the behavior was harmful to others. "They will stutter, laugh, or express surprise at the fact that they can't find a supporting reason, but they won't change their initial judgment of condemnation," the paper concluded. The participants suffered from a "moral loss of voice." All of this suggests that one does not have clear reasoning before making moral judgments.
05 The "Fast and Slow" of Moral Judgment Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist at New York University and the lead author of these studies, concludes that Kohlberg and others who focus on moral reasoning have a fundamental oversight, studying the post-facto rationalization of moral judgments, rather than the moral intuitions that shape people's moral judgments. The point is that moral reasoning does not lead to moral judgments. On the contrary, Haight argues that moral reasoning emerges after people have made moral judgments based on their intuition about right and wrong. Therefore, it is dubious to say that moral reasoning predicts moral behavior. To understand this, we have to look back at the elephant in our heads. The system 1 that operates autonomously in the human brain, with its quick and error-prone decisions, not only influences our rational trade-offs of cost and benefit, but also shapes our morals. System 1 engages in moral intuition, described by Haidt as "a rapid, autonomous, and (usually) emotionally charged process in which evaluative feelings of good or bad or good or dislike (of another person's behavior or character) emerge in consciousness without the need to consciously search, weigh evidence, and derive conclusions." Calm, slow, and deliberate systems2 for moral reasoning are defined by Haight as "a conscious mental activity that transforms information about others and their actions to arrive at moral judgments or decisions." Does this mean that people do not make prudent moral reasoning, and that everything is based only on intuition? Definitely. System 1 and System 2 are a dual system that combines rapid automatic response and slow and prudent cognition. If people really want to, it is possible to activate only System 2 to calculate the cost benefits solidly, while suppressing the immediate response of System 1. In fact, moral reasoning is also possible if one can consciously suspend one's moral intuition.
Photo source: "Twelve Angry Men"
Human morality plays an important role in how the law should be reacted. We now know that in order to rely on this sense of morality, people rely on moral intuition and moral reasoning in different ways to deal with problems, especially when faced with a dilemma of moral dilemma. Therefore, a successful moral appeal should not only fit into the different stages of moral reasoning that people may go through, but also take into account that people often listen to their own moral instincts.