The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,329

his ill-gotten gains to support a lavish lifestyle would seem to deserve a harsher punishment than one who redirected them to the company’s underpaid workers in the developing world. Deterrence, in contrast, is sensitive to the incentive structure of the punishment regime. Assuming that malefactors reckon the utility of a misdeed as the probability they will get caught multiplied by the penalty they will incur if they do get caught, then a crime that is hard to detect should get a harsher punishment than one that is easy to detect. For similar reasons, a crime that gets a lot of publicity should be punished more harshly than one that is unpublicized, because the publicized one will leverage the value of the punishment as a general deterrent. When people are asked to mete out sentences to fictitious malefactors in these scenarios, their decisions are affected only by just deserts, not by deterrence. Evil motives draw harsher sentences, but difficult-to-detect or highly publicized infractions do not.

The reforms advocated by the utilitarian economist Cesare Beccaria during the Humanitarian Revolution, which led to the abolition of cruel punishments, were designed to reorient criminal justice away from the raw impulse to make a bad person suffer and toward the practical goal of deterrence. The Carlsmith experiment suggests that people today have not gone all the way into thinking of criminal justice in purely utilitarian terms. But in The Blank Slate I argued that even the elements of our judicial practices that seem to be motivated by just deserts may ultimately serve a deterrent function, because if a system ever became too narrowly utilitarian, malefactors would learn to game it. Just deserts can close off that option.206

Even the fairest system of criminal justice cannot monitor its citizens wherever they may be and around the clock. It has to count on them internalizing norms of fairness and damping their vengeance before it escalates. In chapter 3 we saw how the ranchers and farmers of Shasta County resolved their grievances without tattling to the police, thanks to reciprocity, gossip, occasional vandalism, and for minor harms, “lumping it.”207 Why do the people in some societies lump it while others experience a glow in their eyes, a flame in their cheeks, and a pounding in their temples? Norbert Elias’s theory of the Civilizing Process suggests that government-administered justice can have knock-on effects that lead its citizens to internalize norms of self-restraint and quash their impulses for retribution rather than act on them. We saw many examples in chapters 2 and 3 of how pacification by a government has a whopping effect on lethal vengeance, and in the next chapter we will review experiments showing that self-control in one context can spread into others.

Chapter 3 also introduced the finding that the sheer presence of government brings rates of violence down only so far—from the hundreds of homicides per 100,000 people per year to the tens. A further drop into the single digits may depend on something hazier, such as people’s acceptance of the legitimacy of the government and social contract. A recent experiment may have caught a wisp of this phenomenon in the lab. The economists Benedikt Herrmann, Christian Thöni, and Simon Gächter had university students in sixteen countries play Public Goods games (the game in which players contribute money to a pot which is then doubled and redistributed among them), with and without the possibility of punishing one another.208 The researchers discovered to their horror that in some countries many players punished generous contributors to the common good rather than stingy ones. These acts of spite had predictably terrible effects on the group’s welfare, because they only reinforced every player’s worst instinct to free-ride on the contributions of the others. The contributions soon petered out, and everyone lost. The antisocial punishers seem to have been motivated by an excess of revenge. When they themselves had been punished for a low contribution, rather than being chastened and increasing their contribution on the next round (which is what participants in the original studies conducted in the United States and Western Europe had done), they punished their punishers, who tended to be the altruistic contributors.

What distinguishes the countries in which the targets of punishment repent, such as the United States, Australia, China, and those of Western Europe, from those in which they spitefully retaliate, like Russia, Ukraine, Greece, Saudi Arabia, and Oman? The investigators ran a set of multiple regressions using a dozen traits of the different countries, taken from economic statistics and