Fraud

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Robin:
Good evening, Agnes.
Agnes:
Hi, Robin.
Robin:
Tonight, I'd like to start us nearer to legal phenomena and go from there, to talk about what we think about that. So one example is a classic legal case about fraud. Long ago, in the back of a magazine, there was an ad that said, "Surefire Insect Killer." And if you sent off the money that it requested, you got back in the mail two pieces of wood with instructions, place insect between woods, squish; Surefire Killer. And this was ruled as fraud. And these people were prosecuted under fraud, for having deceived their customers, even though we might think it was literally true. It was not true enough for the courts. That's one case.
My other case is a 2012 Supreme Court ruling that said that many states which had made it illegal to lie about having military medals, which was a common tactic to attract dates, you know, get people to go on a date with you and maybe even have sex because you were a military hero. People have been lying about that, states had made that illegal, criminal penalty and Supreme Court said, "No, you have a free speech right to lie about military medals. And they may not prohibit that unless it's something like the fraud statute where somebody is getting money out of you."
So we have these contrasting attitudes toward lying, where on the one hand, if it's business and some sort of money is at stake, then we are very aggressive to prevent fraud. On the other hand, if it's about romance, and not only are we not aggressive, we're going to assert your constitutional right to lie about whatever it is, even if that leads to sex or other big consequences.
So that's the contrasting cases, we can start with to ponder what this says about us. So I would see it says something about somehow we treat romance and relationships as fundamentally a different sphere than business. And we want law in dealing with business and apparently not with romance. But that's a first way of framing it. But what do you think?
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's going to depend, like, even in the romance, there were cases like people not disclosing HIV status, right? Where that could potentially harm.
Robin:
Right. So that, then health and business would be areas where we want law involved, if – health maybe. So this is also true in cases of disclosure for products. So if you have a house or a car and it has health risks, then you are required to disclose those things. But if you buy an ugly dress, they're not required to tell you it's ugly, or out of fashion. That's not a required disclosure. But you know, and so, we again, have these different spheres.
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean, I was thinking about a case I saw I think, Bryan Caplan posted on Twitter, what should be the punishment for students who disrupt a speaker, behave disruptively? Like I can't remember the exact question but sort of like, you know, suppose the students are like protesting a speaker, I guess, but they like go so far as to actually disrupt it. That's what I took, like, how that should be.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
And what should be the punishment, right? And like most people said, you know, something like warning or less, like, and then you know, there's this like expulsion went up, but I was in the club of people who are not very severe. And this is similar, right? Like how, how severe should we be – how should we deal with this case of students behaving disruptively? And I guess my thought is, in that case, in case of many – in many phenomena that verge on the disciplinary inside of education, I'm like, well, I think we should educate them instead of punishing them.
And I wonder whether our desire to use the law tracks the thought that education is not a real prospect. So like a lot of lying, a lot of contexts in which people might lie to us. We would like want them – we don't just want them not to lie to us, like our loved ones. We don't just want them not to lie to us. We want them not to lie to us for the right reasons. Like because they care about telling us the truth, right? Because they care about us.
Whereas like, when we want like a company to behave in a certain way towards us, with respect to like how it markets its products, maybe we are not caring so much about its motive, we've accepted that it's like a profit motive and they don't love us. And so there we're more willing to use the law to say, "Let's just whip them into shape. And let's not hold out the prospect of following the rules through a kind of understanding of the rightness of those rules.
Robin:
So there's clearly several different issues going on here. One is you could have some sort of overall attitude or reluctance to punishment, and that could be independent of topic. Another issue is firms versus individuals. But, you know, I might say we also punish individuals when they have lie in ways that produce health harms or financial harms, so it's not just about businesses.
And it does seem to me, for example, that people who wanted to make the military medal lying, it's– I don't think anybody really was expecting these liars to get educated in order, I mean, they think that they are encouraged because they're gaining advantage, and they are going to continue to gain an advantage. So there's no education program out there to train or teach people who lie about military medals, and I think Supreme Court ruling didn't produce that new program. It was just saying that you should be able to worry about that and letting it be at that.
Agnes:
Right. But the point is not really about those specific cases, but about that whole sphere of human activity. Right. So you have this like sphere of value, which is like military honor, right? And there's people traffic in this value. And it's desirable, that, in general, we comport ourselves in relation to this value, by way of like, an inner understanding of its meaning and significance, rather than, like a set of incentives that are not like directly related to that, like, "I'll get in trouble if I behave like this."
So we set aside that sphere, the sphere of military honor, as being like a sphere where we want that, in general, it's important enough to us that the behavior in relation to it be regulated by an understanding of its meaning that we're actually going to lose out, we're going to get some behavior that doesn't get punished, in effect, as that we're willing pay that price. And the same would might be true of romance.
Robin:
But by paying this price, are we doing anything whatsoever to produce this outcome? So, I...
Agnes:
Yes. It's sort of like, if you think about, like, suppose that in order to get your kids to behave in a certain way, you'd have to hit them. And you could get them to behave that way. Right? But you'd have to hit them. And you might think I don't want to do that because that kind of messes with my relationship with my kids. And I want them to behave in this way but I want them to behave in that way from an understanding that that's the way that they should behave. And if I hit them, it will be more effective. They behave that way more of the time, right? But I still wouldn't really be getting what I want, which is that at least some of the time they behave that way from an understanding that that's the right way to behave.
And so, you might think similarly, with honor and romance that the relevant values are ones where it's important enough to us that, in general, we be pursuing them from an understanding of their value that we're like less willing to employ this punishment system that would bring in external incentives.
Robin:
So, if we take the example of your child, I would think, you know, at some early age, when they can't understand you very well, you might well hit them, or pull their hand away, just physically restrain them. But then on a later age, you would perhaps hit them but then start to sort of instead of hitting them, talk to them and send them to the room, or sit in a corner, or write "I'm sorry" 20 times or whatever.
But that would seem to be mostly about their developmental age and your relationship to them not about the particular thing they did wrong. It would seem odd if you were to hit them about not coming to dinner on time, but not hit them about doing their homework or something. I mean, I don't see why that would really work as a way to promote value.
Agnes:
I mean, I think the thought is that in general, you want your kids to listen to you in everything that you do out of a certain kind of like, love and trust. And so it's not – we're not going to differentiate doing your homework versus cleaning the room. I think that I don't think it's true that like, I wasn't, I mean, I have never hit my kids but I wasn't more inclined to hit them when they were young. If they're in physical danger, I will move them out of the way and I sometimes use physical force to move them out of the way but that's very different from punishing them. Punishing them would be like inflicting pain on them in order to teach them a lesson, like physical pain on them in order to teach them a lesson.
And I think that people are actually increasingly resistant to using even emotional forms of punishment on their kids. Maybe if I could say, like, a very similar– my intuition about when we're unwilling to use the legal system, if I'm right about this, it should also track when we're unwilling to use financial incentives. Right?
So like, sometimes we're willing to pay people to get the thing we want, and sometimes we're not willing to pay, right? And if I'm right, that's going to go along with when we care a lot about intrinsic motivation. That is, we care that the person do the thing from a certain motivational state. And so, we're not going to want them to avoid it merely to avoid punishment, and we're not going to want them to do it merely to get paid. And so, I would predict that like in romance, we are less inclined to use money as an incentive, whereas like, with health, we'll be more OK to use it.
Robin:
So, we do, for example, have laws against bigamy and other sorts of things. So certainly, there are romantic-related things that we are willing to use other kinds of force with. And it's again, the same person. So you might ask, Well, don't you want the person who might sell you the two blocks of wood to stop doing that for the right reasons? Why is it not an important for them to do that for the right reasons, but for the people who lie about military records to do that, why isn't just always, in general, good for people to do things for the right reasons?
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean, I think that that's true. So, I think that you might think that ideally, that then it's really like more like a margin that we're pushing. Like, ideally, in the ideal society we're working towards, everyone will do everything for the right reasons. Right? The question is just, and like, with respect to laws, there have in the past been laws against adultery too, but we, like, I suppose some of those laws, I think some of those laws still exist, but they're not enforced anymore. Right?
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
We've had laws against homosexuality. And so like, you know, if the space of romance is increasingly moving away from the space of law, then maybe the laws against bigamy are not long for this world.
Robin:
I mean, I agree with you that it does seem like there's a difference in treatment. I'm just more skeptical that the difference in treatment is that we're just trying harder to get people to do things for the right reasons. That is, it looks like that seems a similar argument that would apply in both cases, and roughly equally well. So it doesn't seem like a good candidate for the distinction.
Agnes:
I think I don't care as much about what reasons someone has in selling me a product or a marketing like what they're – I think that I view that relationship as a more alienated one where like, for instance, they could be replaced by like, often by like, an automated process, which there would be any reasons at all, right? And I'd be OK with that. So, I do think there's a real difference, and I think we don't care as much. And we don't expect as much in a kind of transaction with someone you don't know to have access to the reasons.
Robin:
Just throwing in another example, there's a movie called The Talented Mr. Ripley from maybe 20 years ago.
Agnes:
Yeah, I saw that a long time ago.
Robin:
OK. And it's about this guy who pretends to be of a rich set hanging out with a rich set, but he really isn't. And then, basically, he gets a lot of help and resources from them, and treating them like one of their own, and then, you know, he is fooling them by basically committing fraud to trick them into that.
Agnes:
Oh yeah, there's that like, Russian German heiress, I mean, non-heiress woman.
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
There's like a new version of that. I wish she didn't kill anyone.
Robin:
Yes, right. So, it's also an example of like, well, should that be a legal fraud? Should you be able to sue them for lying and gaining all this access that you wouldn't otherwise gain? Right? And if through that process, we could ask how far would you go? And so, you invite them to parties, you spend time with them, you have sex with them, you marry them, you start a business with them. And at what point would you say that it would be appropriate to punish them more than just lecturing them and trying to tell them they should think about things– they should take it to heart and be sorry.
Agnes:
Right. I mean, my thought, look, I think you were, you know, you're right that the way I was initially putting this is that we – it sounded at least so, the thought is that we want to educate the very person who is doing the wrong. I do think like, yeah, ideally, yes, but I think that's not why. It's not because we want to educate that person, that we will put this in the sphere of the non legal. It's because we want that whole sphere to be non legal that is we want that to be a sphere where motivation matters. And that means we're going to get screwed over in some instances.
Robin:
Say we teach our children that they shouldn't defraud people, not just because there's a legal penalty, right? We do try to teach students and children that they should, you know, their word is their bond, and that they should be honest and not lie in business and in other contexts. I don't think we intend to rely mainly and only on financial, or criminal penalties to keep our children from lying in business either. I think we just – if that fails, we're willing to impose other penalties.
And the question is, why aren't we willing to impose other penalties elsewhere? So it is, I don't think – I think most people, in fact, won't defraud other people in business. And the criminal penalties are not the thing producing that. For most people, it is their sense of self-respect and honor that would keep them from outright lying to sell things to people. But some people it doesn't work for and then we have to ask what to do about the remaining.
Agnes:
I mean I do think we teach our children like not to lie, but like, I don't think that I teach them the specifically like, commercial version of that. And it sounds like...
Robin:
But we don't need to, right? They don't have a commercial exception on their head either. I mean...
Agnes:
Yes, but like, I guess I think that, in fact, in a commercial context, it's often like a lot, like less clear, actually, what lying consists. And like that example of the wooden blocks, right? Like, it's true, that it was a bug killer. And like, what, you know, what acceptable business practices are, right? I would take it something you learn in the course of actually doing business. And it's not always obvious from just your moral intuitions.
Robin:
Of course, and the acceptable way to treat a potential date is something you also need to learn from the context of being in context where potential dates are treated, and it's not something you're born with. So, you'll need to learn how to treat people there. But I think most people would think your initial parental education not to lie should have been sufficient to make you realize you shouldn't be lying about the military medals, it's not some subtlety in that context that you needed to learn.
Agnes:
Right. Well, the military medals is one that we've deemed like, extra legal, right? So that would fit if... but the...
Robin:
So the question is, how does not imposing penalties when people go to extremes help people learn that that area is something they should have good motivations for? So, I haven't seen – I'm not seeing the connection there. Right? I get that, in general, the people around us, we presume they're good, and we don't constantly monitor them for malfeasance. We do presume that our immediate associates are telling the truth. And we teach our children and everybody that that is a reasonable presumption about most people most of the time.
And we certainly emphasize that the main reason that you should be honest, and treat people respectfully and well, isn't that there are legal penalties or other penalties, it's that that's the right thing to do and you would want them to treat you that way. But we still have to decide what to do when people aren't sufficiently persuaded by that sort of framework that they go beyond and do deceive each other and cheat each other. We have to decide what to do then.
And the question is, if in those cases we go farther to punish them, does that somehow undermine the message that that was the wrong thing to do? It seems to me, that seems somewhat odd. That is, I think most children get that if there's a thing you did and your parents would scold you, then that's bad. If there's a thing you did and your parent will scold you and that might put you in jail, that's worse. I mean, society is giving you a pretty clear message that that's a worst thing to do. And I think everybody gets that.
I don't see how that undermines the message. It's more shameful, I think for almost everyone to not only do something that people scold you for and say bad things about you, but that gets prosecuted and sent to jail or fined. I mean, people don't like to admit to being an ex-con or to have been lost a lawsuit where they defrauded someone. Those are the – if you heard about that about someone you'd, hey, I was going to do business with them but I've heard they got successfully sued for fraud. I mean, yeah, that would be a warning flag, right?
Agnes:
Oh, yeah. I'm not saying that this makes it like less serious. And certainly it doesn't make people less inclined to not do it, it makes them more inclined to not do it, I think it works.
Robin:
But for the wrong reasons is somehow the threat. I mean, do you really think that telling your children that if they steal something they might go to jail somehow undermines they're doing it for the– you know, not doing it for the right reasons that they would, you're somehow polluting or interfering with the message that they just shouldn't steal period even if it weren't illegal?
Agnes:
I think a little bit yes. I mean, so I think for instance, like, suppose I'm telling my – suppose one of my kids doesn't want to go to school one morning, this has happened before. And like, it's, at one point, I remember saying to... I can't remember even which kid it was like, "Well, it's actually the law that you have to go to school." And then I'm like, I remember just thinking my head, like, quickly following it up, just to make it clear, like, there was no prospect of them going to jail for not going to school, because I could feel that that was like the implication that I'm telling my kid, maybe you'll go to jail if you don't go to school. Right?
And, and but like, imagine if I had that leverage, right? Of like, "Well, if you don't go to school, you're going to go to jail." My kid would go school quick, right? It's be really effective, get them into that school, right. But there's something else that I want to achieve in like time to go to school. I'm trying to get them to see, like, first of all, that if I'm telling them they should go to school, I probably have a good reason. And even if they don't feel like it, they should maybe do it. And then second, there actually are good reasons for them to go to school. And so you could see that, like, the very existence of that threat of jail, like counteracts the amount of work that's being done and the amount of attention like that they're giving to these other reasons, right?
Robin:
So, here's another I mean, issue, if we think about, say, date rape. I mean, I presume we would want people not to do that for the right reasons. But we are willing to go beyond in punishing that. And there are fraud examples, like, there are cases where say the police basically convince someone to have sex with them by saying, "I'm the police and if you don't have sex with me, I will prosecute you for this other thing." And we could want the police not to do that for the right reasons, but we might want to prosecute them for that.
And there are people who fake being police and who get people to have sex with them by lying about being police. Now, you know, that's kind of like lying about the military medal. But do you want them to do that for the right reason? Would you let that person off too, because you want to teach everybody that they should be doing this for the right reasons? What's the difference between lying about being a police and lying about a military medal?
Agnes:
I mean, I suspect that the issue there is not the – I mean, I think like, yeah, I think lying about being police is a big, big deal independently. But here, it's like, the rape context. So like, there are other cases that were brought up in that thing you sent me of like, somebody who convinces somebody else to blindfold themselves and poses as someone that they know, and then, like, has sex with them. And so then the person who's blindfolded thinks they're having sex with someone they know, where they're actually having sex with a stranger, right? And that was considered rape. So there, you don't even have to masquerade as police, you could just masquerade as someone they know.
Robin:
Well, the question is, should it be considered rape? That is the question we're talking.
Agnes:
Right. Right.
Robin:
You could have claimed that this using the military medal would be considered rape. That is, it's using deceit to get sex. So...
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
The definition of the word is open here to our trying to decide which things should get which sorts of punishments.
Agnes:
Right. I mean, I took it that the military medal thing, it was not specific to sex, it was just making false claims about...
Robin:
Right. But that is one of the applications.
Agnes:
Sure. But like, I don't – I mean, I, you know, I just read the Wikipedia page you sent me but like I didn't – that application wasn't singled out as being of special relevance, like it was really an examination of lying about having...
Robin:
Right. But I'm asking you to consider that case deep in order to consider the parallels.
Agnes:
Right. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. That is, like I think you're right, that we might want people to, like in a sexual context, to be motivated by the right reasons that you would think that that would be very important to us.
Robin:
Another example was, you know, somebody like a movie producer get somebody to have sex with him by saying, "I might, you know, be find a movie for you." And what if somebody lies about being a movie producer? And gets the same sort of favorable treatment, right?
We're trying to produce a range of cases here so we can ask the question where to draw a line, if any. You know, you want to say no, the person who lies about me, but you should do it for the right reasons. We're trying to teach everybody that that's a sphere where you need to do things for the right reasons, therefore, we're not going to punish that guy. I'm just not seeing the connection between our saying, like, you should be doing the right things here for the right reasons and failing to punish people who do things that seem pretty harmful.
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean, I think that there has to be, you know, just looking at the case of the military medal versus the blindfold case, or military medal/movie producer versus blindfold case, on the other hand, why, like, is the blindfold case rape, but the other ones are not considered that? And it's like, I guess there's just a variety of ways of having – of not really knowing who you're having sex with. Right? And then at one extreme, it's like, who knows anything about anyone else, right? And... but at a certain point of somebody having sex with you under false pretenses, where we see that as like, the person hasn't consented, right, in effect. And I don't know how we draw that line.
Robin:
Well, I want to emphasize the point that if we just switch over to financial harms, all of these cases would be considered fraud, and many more, right? So, once we're talking about trying to get money out of people, we're not drawing a line anywhere within this range, it's all wrong. And it's all this sort of thing that you could sue for damages.
Agnes:
Right.
Robin:
So to me, that distinction seems to be that it depends on the kind of damage. So, the simple rule that stands out to me is, well, anytime you hurt someone through a deceit, then whatever amount that you suffered, you should be able to sue for compensation for those damages. That would be a way we would treat these uniformly. And then the question would be, can you measure the amount of damages? So, if that's the issue, we could go into that. You might...
So there is a stance that basically the law cares a lot more about money than other things as a way to sort of avoid arguments about how much, how big were losses. So, law is a little reluctant to do pain and suffering damages, for example, or emotional anguish, because now you have to judge how big it was. And so that might be an excuse for low balling the estimate, I think, sort of looking, picking an estimate near the lower end of the plausible range. But still, it seems to me not an excuse for making it zero damages. If, you know...
Agnes:
I think there are just very different kinds of basis for a lawsuit. And so, in the case of the blindfold, the idea is not that there was some harm, I take it, but that it's rape, which is to say that, like someone's consent was violated. And, like, I mean, I get that you might want to translate that into emotional harms or something, right? But, to me, that's very different from like...
Robin:
In fact, for most of law, you need a combination of failing to do something out of duty to do and they're being harmed. So merely failing to do a duty without harm, it usually doesn't produce damages. And so it's an exception if you want to treat it otherwise. So I was thinking in terms of that general framework. You know, if I walk across your lawn I broke, I violated, your property rights but if your lawn wasn't actually damaged, you can't actually sue me for very much.
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean... I think that like with certain kinds of wrongs, like take murder, right, killing someone, it's just really hard to understand that in terms, I think, in terms of the harm to the person.
Robin:
It seems very easy to me.
Agnes:
Like, so are you going to factor in like how old they were, because of how much life you've deprived them off? If you done less of a wrong in murdering an old person than a young person?
Robin:
In fact, when we ask people about how severe a crime murder is, we do find it peaking for, say a 20-year-old for whom, you know they have the most life to live and the most investment has already been made in them and it declines for killing a two-year-old is considered less of the harm or killing an 80-year-old is considered less of harm than killing a 20-year-old. So that's in fact, how people feel about murder. That people do differentiate.
Agnes:
Well, wait a minute, why wouldn't it be even worse with a two-year-old? They have even more life to live than the 20-year-old.
Robin:
This is more in terms of like we didn't, also didn't put that much of an investment in yet, you can just have another kid.
Agnes:
I see. Well, then you're thinking with the parent, you're not thinking about the kid. They're always maximally invested in their life.
Robin:
The point is just in order to understand people's intuitions, they are apparently accounting for these two different factors. But the people do distinguish between murders in terms of how bad they think it is. And of course, people receive different penalties for murders. I mean, judges get discretion to assign different numbers of years of jail, et cetera, for different murders depending on the context. So we do allow differences.
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean, it does make sense to me that the penalty would be sensitive to that, but the category of wrong seems different to me than just the category of harm. Like, if somebody harmed you and they harmed you even unintentionally but culpably, let's say, then they might like owe you compensations, right?
Robin:
So there's a lot of issues that are mixed together when we were talking about sort of things like crime and law and things like that. And we're not going to be able to deal with all of them in one conversation. So, I would try to bracket away most of them unless we can see that they're especially irrelevant. I'd want to highlight the issue of OK, there's this difference in treatment between one kind of harm and another. And that seems to be the most interesting thing.
And one way we can frame this is to say, if we don't want law to deal with something, maybe that's because we instead want social norms to deal with it instead. And to think of these things, in terms of multiple systems for dealing with different things that can go wrong. So, for example, we can think about the norm against squealing or telling on people. And often that norm is applied to norms and to laws. And we could think of it that's a way that we maybe want some local social group to deal with a problem rather than to air dirty laundry in a wider public. And so we want that to be dealt with.
And I have a way, as I've discussed, with ways to lower the cost of using law so that we can apply a law to more things. And my colleague, Bryan Caplan, just mentioned to me a few days ago that he's mentioned that to his class several times and consistently found what I found, which is people don't want law to apply to more things. You know, at the moment, because the legal process is expensive, that limits the size of the harm that we could deal with. And we could actually allow the cost to come way down to use the legal system to deal with smaller problems. And therefore we could allow law to deal with more harms, like someone's scratching your car in a parking lot or things like that. And it seems most people don't want that. So, and that's about just financial harm. So even about financial harms, it seems that people want there to be a legal system, and they want it to be dealing with big harms, but they would rather it not deal with small harms.
Agnes:
Right. So, I guess my thought was that the idea that there are realms where we want people to appreciate intrinsically, just be intrinsically motivated that that was meant to explain why something like that would be the case. That is that the reason why we would want to use social norms rather than law, is that social norms are – they're less obviously punitive, like, I do think quite often we're punishing but we often don't think of ourselves as punishing, we often don't use the word punishing. So, I like when on social media, I tend to hear the word accountability instead of punishment, right? People don't like to think of themselves as punishing. They like the idea of accountability.
Robin:
They want them to be fired or for them to be canceled from an event or things like that.
Agnes:
And they don't want to see it as punishment. So like that is they don't use the word punishment. They don't say "They should be punished." Right?
Robin:
OK. But...
Agnes:
So I think that's striking. Avoidance of that word and the replacement. And I want to grant to you that those cases are very punishment like, but if you think of the functioning of social norms, it's going to be a spectrum, right? Think of like punishing your kids, right? It's actually going to be a really fine-grained spectrum, from just explaining that they did something wrong to something that gets at the edge of punishment, right? And it's often just sort of unclear where you are along that and we might want that. We want – we might want the deniability of calling the thing punishment. And precisely because that's going to track, this is a sphere of intrinsic value.
Robin:
You could just decide not to call jail punishment, and then we could, you know, avoid punishment everywhere if you want to, and we just– if we can just freely not call things punishment.
Agnes:
I think that it's...
Robin:
Because if we're teaching people about jail, in fact, that's a common thing that people have long said, oh, we want is a jail that teaches people, that rehabilitates people, we don't want to just punish them at jail.
Agnes:
I think that ideally, that is what people would want, and a lot of people who want like prisons to be abolished. And that idea appeals to me as well, sort of in the abstract. It's because it would be like the abolition of punishment. And we have like, in a way, like, our next best thing is like that this system happens mostly, like very much behind closed doors, so we at least don't have to look at it. But I think it's hard to not think that like the leg...
Robin:
So, regardless of what the word is, it's still how it works is the key question. So think of a child who does something wrong, at least from the parents point of view. And there's two, you know, there's several kinds of punishment. One kind of punishment is you just have to listen to a long lecture about it, right? Any children's point of view that they see that as the main point, right?
Agnes:
Yes.
Robin:
But you can claim that's not a punishment, it's teaching. And of course, sometimes you might say, when you make them apologize, right. And from their point of view, that's also a punishment. It's very painful and they don't want to do it, but you still make them go apologize, right? And now, you can also say, well, that's teaching them about how to treat people differently, right? But the question is, is that actually making them produce the right motives about these things relative to the other thing we can do?
So again, the fundamental claim you're making is that if we were to find the person who lied about a military medal, somehow that would not be teaching them the proper thing. Because taking away money has a different kind of teaching effect than taking away their time or taking away their pride. If you give them a lecture, you take away their time. If you make them apologize, you take away their pride. If you take away money – the question is how is taking away money, more of a lesson about their proper motives than taking away their time or their pride?
Agnes:
You mean how is it less of a lesson about their proper motives?
Robin:
Yeah, the money, less of a lesson? Yes, I mean, how does it possibly, I mean, produce less of a lesson because it would seem like it's a lesson.
Agnes:
Right. So as I said, I think that it's not the case that whenever we shy away from this, it's because we think we're going to teach the wrongdoers. It might be because we're willing...
Robin:
I mean the rest of us learn a different lesson.
Agnes:
Yeah. So that I think the rest of us... so, but I do think in actually in the parenting case, it is that the very person learns. So I think that...
Robin:
But then the child would not learn if you took away some of their money.
Agnes:
Right. I think that we think that our children learn better when the incentive for not doing the thing is like more closely related to the activity itself. Then they learn that the activity itself.
Robin:
If you get lecture – if you lose an hour listening to a lecture as opposed to losing $10, neither of those are more directly connected to the thing you did wrong,
Agnes:
That's true. But the thought is, the hope is and if you're very bad at lecturing to your kids, then this might not matter. But like the hope is that they don't just see it is like, "All right, I got to sit here for an hour, I'm going to ignore everything they say. And just view it as the cost of one hour of sitting." Where that would be equivalent to just sit over in that corner for an hour, right? If your lecture is that bad then I think they...
Robin:
That's even worse. If they sit in the corner, they can at least daydream.
Agnes:
Exactly. Right. So like, if you know if you see the– like if the lecture comes to be seen as just a form of like inflicting a certain kind of suffering on the kid, right? Where there's nothing, no light is being shed on why the thing was done wrong. And maybe most lectures are even like that. So maybe much of the educational activity that we do with kids, telling ourselves that we're teaching them intrinsic motivation that actually translates to punishment. That just because of our false belief, beliefs about our ability to instill intrinsic motivation.
Robin:
This theory suggests that there should be a huge demand for replacing jail with long, painful lectures, right? That is, we're wasting this huge opportunity that we could be teaching everyone the lesson by making people who are in jail spend most of their time listening to painful lectures.
Agnes:
I think that there's a lot of people who think that it would be better if jail were just more like education. Yes. And I know people who, like... well, so I mean, the issue is like, why would a given domain be in the space of intrinsic motivation or not? And we might just have less hope with respect to someone who's willing to like commit murder, that, you know, that like, in some sense, if the idea of committing murder even shows up to you as a prospect, you're like, you're outside of the space of intrinsic motivation, right? So that would be the thought...
Robin:
Let's talk about intrinsic motivation. So let me make a parallel. So, work versus dating say, right?
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
So, you might be saying work as a context of extrinsic motivation, whereas dating is a context of intrinsic motivation.
Agnes:
Some degree, yes.
Robin:
And I might then try to draw the parallel of how they look pretty similar. So I might say, for work, there are things you want to do with your time that you enjoy, maybe being a musician, or maybe being an engineer, or something that you like to do. But in order to get a job, you will have to learn what the companies want and what other people want, and compromise on exactly how you want to do it so that other people can work with you and find you more productive. So you'll have to maybe wear a suit, sometimes go to an office, have regular work hours, be polite, maybe type up your results. These are all ways in which you're accommodating their extrinsic world in producing your work life. But to a large degree, you are doing that job because you enjoy it. Because you have an intrinsic satisfaction that's been shaped by this larger world.
Similarly, we could say people want to date. And they have a basic loneliness and desire for attachment and friendship and sex, but then they also have to shape themselves and change because the dating market doesn't like the way they started. And they need to pay attention to other people and figure out what they want and like and to be nice to them, or listen to their complaints and understand them. And wash up sometimes, have to get their hair cut, maybe get a job, you know, and be polite. These are all things people have to do functionally if they're going to date. And so, dating is also a combination of extrinsic constraints that you need to learn to adapt to including the other person, what they're like, and the intrinsic desire to date. So in this story I've just described, they are similar. They are both a similar mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations.
Agnes:
I guess I think that they are both mixes. But there are just these slight differences in like, for instance, we think of it as really important in dating to like find the right match, right? And people spend all this time searching for a good match.
Robin:
Yes. And that's also for a job. People spend a lot of time...
Agnes:
It's not as true for jobs. Like people don't...
Robin:
I think, no. People put a lot of work into finding a good job match. Absolutely.
Agnes:
I mean, people – people do put work into finding a good job match, but like people spend years of their life maybe even a decade wouldn't be that unusual, just searching in the dating...
Robin:
And they do that for jobs. Yes. People don't take the first job for the rest of their life. They take an initial job, they see what it's like, and then they switch jobs. Same as with dating, people don't marry for life, the first person they date. The way they search in dating is by trying different people out and talking different people, just like with jobs, they try different jobs out. And they also talk to other people who have different jobs, ask them how it's – what is like, maybe visit them. In both cases, search is a big part of the element. And it does take years, if not decades, to get the best of that.
Agnes:
I mean, I don't think that people have the story, you know, with jobs, like they don't necessarily have a sort of , "Look, I'm looking for my permanent job." Like they might be like, "Hey, I had this job. I'm glad I had it. It was a great experience, but now I want a different job. You know, I don't want to do job too long." So it's...
Robin:
And that's how they talk about dating too.
Agnes:
No. I mean I think most people, in dating, are like looking for someone to marry and then they're supposed to stick with that person. And then if they, for instance, end up divorcing that person and trying to find someone else that's seen as like a failure.
Robin:
It sounds like, you're agreeing with me that when we look at it from a distance, it's the same behavior, but you're just saying, ah, but in their heads, in one case, they have the idea of perfection that they're searching for. In the other case, they don't have the concept of perfection. But perfection is never actually found. They are always actually compromising and actually choosing between what they have now on the prospect of looking for better. But in one case, they're just thinking about it in terms of perfection.
Agnes:
I mean, my... the distinction that I was drawing, was the distinction between sort of this ideal of intrinsic motivation versus the absence of that ideal. So in a way, that's just what I was saying, is that it's just the presence or absence of an ideal of perfection. And you're going to see that being, you're going to see that show up in behaviors, like whether we think there should be sort of external punishments, or whether we sort of expect the punishing activity to be substituted for by understanding. So yeah, I mean, in a way, I think the difference is just the ideal of perfection whether it's fair enough.
Robin:
Let's get clear on this, because I'm not sure I understand you. So the idea is, when I'm actually dating, I actually have to compromise with my partner, and I actually have to consider whether this is my best match, or whether I should look for another one. And even if I get another one, it won't necessarily be the match. But I think if I were to find the perfect match, then there would be no extrinsic constraints, I would– it would be such a perfect match, I wouldn't have to at all take them into account because what I would do naturally would take them into account.
That is, with an imperfect match, I have to compromise that is, you know, maybe they don't like movies, as much as I do. Maybe I like Thai food, they like Chinese, and we're going to have to compromise in a real relationship. But in a perfect match, I would never have to compromise on the kind of food I wanted with them because we would want exactly the same kind of food. And therefore all my natural intrinsic motivations would have no need to balance against any extrinsic, taking them into account, because I would never need to take them into account because we'd be a perfect match. Is that is that the story here?
Agnes:
No. So I think that like, at least for a lot of the time with... this is true for job too, by the way, but I think it's somewhat more true for romantic relationships. A lot of the time, the way compromise looks, is that your sort of tastes and desires evolved together, so that you want the same things. So it's not really a compromise, you're not sacrificing what you want for what they want, because you want the thing they want, because they want it and that makes you happy.
Robin:
But that's only in the true of some perfect limit. I mean, almost all real relationships, people are completely well aware of compromises continuing all the time, right?
Agnes:
I think that there is, at least, I mean I don't know, like, I don't know how other people experience relationships, but... and I also have a weird job. So like, but I think that... like with your job there are a lot of people you interact with where you can't really – you don't expect to see eye to eye with them. Like you have your territory, they have their territory, and then there's compromises. And that's not really what a relationship is like. In the case of a relationship, you can like come to see the thing the same way.
Robin:
Well, so let's acknowledge that real relationships are usually with whole groups of people. So if we just talk about the sphere of family, or even the sphere of friendship, you know, maybe with the one person that you're closest to, there is the least degree of compromise. But now when you think about their parents, and in-laws, children, et cetera. Clearly, in this whole space of relationships, there's a lot of compromise. And everyone is completely aware of that, right? Even if you have the best possible spouse, your children are not like, ideally matched to you and you're going to be making a lot of compromises to accommodate your children and them to you.
And again, this is a lot like work. So again, it seems to me that the actual fact of family life and work are similar in the sense that you search for matches. And you could always switch but, and whatever you stick with won't be a perfect match. And you will have to be making a lot of accomodations and compromises, which are extrinsic motivations. And that's true, roughly equally in both domains. And the main thing is maybe we just want to talk about one in more idealized terms as if there were no compromises to make there.
Agnes:
I think in the case of work, if you just completely hated it, like if you hated everything about it, if every aspect of it made you utterly miserable, you'd still be getting paid. And so, you'd still have something of value that you could take away.
Robin:
And that's true in relationships as well.
Agnes:
I don't think it is true. I think if you hated everything about your spouse, if every moment you spent with them was just complete agony. If every shared activity made you...
Robin:
If you were married, for example, and they were working and you were not working, if you had shared property, I mean, there's still going to be costs of breaking up. And that's true for leaving a job. So again...
Agnes:
Sure. Sure, but that's not – the primary benefit of a job, at least, like in many cases is that you make money. The primary benefit of a romantic relationship is not that you have a shared house, and sometime in the past, it might have been, but that's not the way most people see it.
Robin:
But even in relationships that have gone quite badly, people basically have the connection, and they're reluctant to give it up. That is, they, you know, they would be lonely and alone if they broke off the connection. And that's a thing they value even when the rest of it isn't so great. And that seems to be parallel.
And again, I don't see why even this extreme case should be that determined about how we treat these whole spheres. Again, the whole – the point is how we seem to treat these whole spheres differently and not just in these extreme cases. Look at the middle of the distribution out here, in the middle of the distribution, you got a similar mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. And a similar way in which we use, you know, law and lectures and social pressure to get people to try to focus more on the intrinsic motivation. That happens at work and in families.
Agnes:
I guess it just doesn't seem true to me. You're getting paid, so intrinsic motivation doesn't matter as much. But in relationships, you're not getting paid. The value of it comes from the joy of it, which is only really there. If you have an – are intrinsically motivated.
Robin:
Again, you're going to some extreme case, like look at the middle in this situation.
Agnes:
No. On any like, like ordinary case, like in an ordinary– in most jobs, if people stopped getting paid, they wouldn't do the job anymore, I would think. So they're kind of mainly doing it to get paid. But in the family life, there isn't that counterpart, like, yes, it may be that like, if in the case where you would become destitute, if you were to leave your spouse, you would leave though. But that's not the ordinary normal case.
Robin:
I'm not even thinking about the money, I'm thinking, you're in a relationship, and you're getting things out of the relationship. It's not a perfect relationship. But you have to compromise with the other person is what I'm talking about. When I talk about extrinsic motivations, it's having to take them and their constraints into account is what counts as extrinsic, getting just what you want without the constraints is intrinsic. And you are taking those extra things as pretty important in relationships. You can't just do whatever you want, whenever you want to, you have to account for them. Just like in a job, you have to account for what the employer wants, and what your customers wants, et cetera. You can't just do the job just the way you would want to.
Agnes:
I mean, I guess I just think that in the case of relationships, there's also just a different– there aren't just extrinsic motivations, which is like them getting their way, and intrinsic, which is you getting your way, right? But there is a large territory, and it's not all of the territory, sometimes you do just have to let them get their way, right? But there's a large territory of things where you're both getting your way precisely because of the way in which the relationship has allowed you to develop to that state. And there may be some of that in a job, but there's a lot less of it. So it doesn't need to be that much of it, because you're getting paid.
Robin:
I think there is typically a lot of that. And again, I still don't see how this is the basis for this huge distinction between these areas. Again, we go even with the wooden blocks, we call that fraud, even if it's literally true, so we go pretty far to take anything pretty mildly deceptive and call it fraud. And then in the case of romance, we take clear lying of large consequence and we say, that's a constitutional right. So, I see this large difference here. And it doesn't seem to be proportional to some, you know, modest degree of differences in proportion of intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation.
Agnes:
Here's one thought, I mean, in the business case, it might be that we couldn't – it might be that the default is social norms rather than laws, for any kind of infraction. But that in a lot of business cases, we wouldn't know how to do it. We wouldn't like know how to...
Robin:
Lie?
Agnes:
Like, take the case...
Robin:
How not to lie?
Agnes:
No, not how not to lie, how to like, enforce and teach the norms. Like, I...
Robin:
Think of Yelp, right? At the moment, if you were unhappy with any particular business, you could make a bad Yelp review. And that would be sort of a norm kind of enforcement. Or you could take them to court. We could say now that there's Yelp, we don't need ever anyone to sue for fraud, because you could just make a bad Yelp review. But we don't – we're not doing that, right? We're clearly still...
Agnes:
Maybe we will eventually. I mean, maybe that's the way in which the social norms will take over that legal space. Like, if, you know, I could sort of see that. I could see that if Yelp just... like if the whole reviewing system just becomes kind of universal enough, that doesn't seem unthinkable to me. And like, versus like, the wooden block thing. It's like, we all know that there's advertising and the advertising is designed in some ways to deceive us. And so it's hard to know what the limits of that are supposed to be.
Robin:
So here's one potential account of when you might want to use law versus norms. You might say, say, in a small town, if some business did bad by you, you could pass rumors to other people in the town who are also their customers. And that would be, could be pretty effective about the business. But in a large nation, where you have mail order catalogs, you know, it's just going to be very hard for you to influence other customers much. And therefore, you might want this more distance, hands off law.
And then you might say, well, in a world of dating, where people know each other that is, people are meeting, people who are socially connected them, they might, then if somebody treated them badly, say, by lying about a military medal, they could send gossip about that person and tell people and that could discipline them enough, if they're a small enough, well enough connected world of social connections.
But if they sort of went to another town on travel, and went into a bar, then that sort of relationship would not be very disciplined by this gossip. And then you might say, well, the norms are fine for the small community, but they don't work for these long-distance relationships. But that would seem to imply that we should penalize lying about a military medal for someone you meet in another town who isn't connected via social network, maybe at a conference or something. And– but we would need to worry about it so much in a tighter network of people.
So this is a kind of difference you could focus and you can say maybe more often business is done with parties who aren't in your social network. And more often, romance is done through people you meet through a closer network of people, but it's still only, you know, a difference of degree there. But that's at least a candidate sort of thing you could point to as an explanation for when we want to use norms versus law.
Agnes:
I mean, then you would expect that the advent of like, Tinder and all of that would lead us to become more inclined to use the law.
Robin:
Right. Because they're no longer in a smaller network of connections. Unless Tinder itself would be a law in some sense, if it would impose rules and punish people in its system or something.
Agnes:
Yeah, I mean, the idea that you would use the law for the distant transaction would go along with the idea that the norm is the default. Right? And that we go to the law only when we have to. And that would also correspond to like what you've had, you know, experience from your students, which is they don't want to move more stuff into law. The law is like the last resort.
Robin:
So here's, I mean, we're running out of time here, but I'll just raise one last thing, just to think about it, which is play versus serious. So interestingly, romance often happens in contexts that are framed as play. And in play, where it's supposed to be safe, and you're not supposed to need to impose real rules. And so, if you took the rules of play seriously, we only play in a context where I'll feel safe, and then we only pretend to hurt each other, nobody really gets hurt. And so then we don't really need legal punishments, because nobody is ever really getting hurt. And that if somebody really gets hurt, then it's a violation of the play norms.
And so that's the way we treat play versus serious things. But interestingly, we tend to treat romance as play, even though romance is very important. But it could be that the play norms are setting up this idea that law shouldn't get involved because that would you know, that's serious, like business. Business is serious. And in business, you have to be literal and honest and there are consequences because it's serious. And then somehow, romance isn't serious. Romance is play. And so, we do seem to celebrate and try to produce initial and even lasting romantic relationships in some sort of a play mode. Some sort of play, fun, leisurely mode and maybe that's part of what's going on is that it's just a violation of play, to sort of hold people to exact words and to have strong punishments.
Agnes:
So I mean, I don't think that the like, the military medal case doesn't support that. Just because it's not fundamentally an example of something about romance. It's an example of something about the military. It has a romantic application, but there's no indication that that application is like of special importance. Right?
Robin:
I mean if you read – I'm sorry, you probably haven't read news stories or something. But the main source of the complaints about military medals was about its use in dating. That was the main source of the complaint. It wasn't that they were declaring it to the world that...
Agnes:
OK. But like, is there any indication that like, when the Supreme Court made this decision, they were thinking about those cases, that that was like the issue? Because I mean, as I said, describe the...
Robin:
That's why the laws were passed, that is people pass these laws and the Supreme Court knocked down the law. The Supreme Court used other considerations to knock down the laws, but that was why the laws existed.
Agnes:
I see, OK, I mean, like, there are these other romantic cases where, like the blindfold case, right, so...
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
It's not play?
Robin:
Well, the point is, I mean, I'm suggesting that we just have this idea that in general, romance should be in play mode. That romance is part of play. And once we frame it that way, then we don't want formal rules and laws coming into the play.
But it's a hypothesis. But I mean, the point is just to show that there's a range of things we could explore to think about. And what we've done here mainly, is to just explore some puzzles. And we didn't expect to resolve it here. But I do think it's interesting, you know, it's interesting and productive here to take some concrete phenomena, and engage it. Because in some sense, you can't go too wrong if you take real phenomena, and try to think about it.
Agnes:
Let me just sit and relate this to like our last podcast – so we talked about James's The Will to Believe. And in that essay, he talks about the Pascalian reasons for believing in God, right? Where you make this calculation, saying, even if it's very improbable that God exists, you should believe in God because the reward is huge. And like the punishment for having gotten it wrong, it's like pretty small. And James does not accept this mode of like, will to believe, right?
And you might– I think that the difference here of sort of like, what kind of mode should you be in when you come to believe in God, and that it should not be a mechanical calculation, as James says about the Pascal case. It's actually very similar to the way we view romance. Right? And I don't think it's play versus serious. I think it's like, so James – James doesn't think it's play, like to take the leap of faith, it's not play.
But what is characteristic of this kind of activity, I think that the leap in the dark is that you're not fully aware of what you're doing while you're doing it. I think it's important to us that there are activities where we're not self-aware as we're doing it, we don't have full composure, and we can't perform the sort of calculations that Pascal wanted to do in his case. I think that's how we see romance, not as play but as that.
Robin:
So the general hypothesis here, if we can just abstract from the details is to say, we see our lives in the world that's divided into different spheres. And we see different styles of thought and analysis as appropriate for the different spheres. And that's something of a contradiction to sort of a simple, a decision theory framework, which says there is a one single style of thought appropriate for all spheres. And that makes it interesting as a counter to that usual claim.
You know, the question would then be, what are these different styles of thought? How could they each be coherent if we have the one best style of thought? And what could justify us having different styles of thought for different spheres? So that's obviously not something we can do, but sets up an interesting further conversation.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
All right. Well, till we talk again then.
Agnes:
Bye.
Robin:
Bye-bye.