9 Comments

In fact, major religions compel you not to judge knowing it has to be a continuous effort (to the point that not religious people tend to see religious ones as "judgmental", despite so many examples that most people in general are)

Expand full comment

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article—thank you for sharing your insights! However, I would appreciate it if you could incorporate more external sources rather than focusing primarily on internal ones.

I agree that side-taking is a crucial aspect of morality, but I wonder if it tells the whole story. For instance, why is punishment (distinct from revenge) so deeply driven by emotion? What role does the deterrence of free riders and antisocial behavior play in this context? Also, why doesn’t the intense emotion behind mob justice dissipate more quickly? What drives some people to persist in stalking an accused individual for an extended period?

Furthermore, what explains the tendency for in-group members to be more forgiving than those in out-groups? And why is there so rarely a path for reintegrating those who have repented or been cleared of charges?

Expand full comment

Why is side-taking “necessary” in the first place?

In theory, punishment wouldn’t need the involvement of an entire community; it could be limited to the victim and their kin, who would be responsible for seeking reparation and enforcing punishment.

Moreover, mob justice often hinders the victim’s ability to receive proper reparation.

Expand full comment

First of all, thank you for taking the time to comment and thanks for the kind words! Second, there are a lot of questions here and I don’t think I can do justice to all of them. So I think I’ll provide short replies and then sources that in my view address some of these questions.

1. The distinction between what is often called 2nd party punishment (revenge) and 3rd party punishment is interesting. I deeply respect the work that Rob Boyd and Jeff Carpenter and their respective colleagues have done on this topic. The short version is that revenge looks well designed for deterring harms to self whereas third party punishment doesn’t look that way (to me and some others.

2. In terms of the dissipation of mob justice and persistence, to the best of my knowledge there isn’t all that much work on this topic. If I had to guess, it has to do with the fact that in most communities, there is enough zero-sumness that once someone is back on their heels, they are ripe for exploitation. We condemn the person who “kicks a man when he’s down” but the fact is that it’s easy to steal his wallet. So my guess is the short answer is that people under siege are targets of opportunity. (My personal view is that this is one of the best assays of character – how does someone behave when a rival is vulnerable. From this, we learn much. The Banker’s Paradox paper below is an excellent take on this.)

3. Forgiveness. Here, I like the work by Mike McCullough. See his book Beyond Revenge. Briefly, it’s the opposite of the case above. Good allies and exchange partners are rare. So if one harms you, it’s good to deter future harms but retaining the relationship is a benefit in the long run. Hence, forgiveness. This idea helps to explain why ingroups are often more forgiving.

4. The question about reintegration of those cleared of charges is, to me, absolutely fascinating and, to my knowledge, under-researched. I don’t know of any good work on this but would be very eager to learn about ideas in this area.

5. Side-taking. Alex Shaw has nice work illustrating that it’s difficult for people in a social group to remain outside of conflicts. (I’m biased. I am on the paper cited below.)

Citations:

SOURCES

Mathew, S., & Boyd, R. (2011). Punishment sustains large-scale cooperation in prestate warfare. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(28), 11375-11380.

Carpenter, J. P. (2007). Punishing free-riders: How group size affects mutual monitoring and the provision of public goods. Games and Economic Behavior, 60(1), 31-51.

McCullough, M. E. (2000). Forgiveness as human strength: Theory, measurement, and links to well-being. Journal of social and clinical psychology, 19(1), 43-55.

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1996, January). Friendship and the banker's paradox: Other pathways to the evolution of adaptations for altruism. In Proceedings-british academy (Vol. 88, pp. 119-144). Oxford University Press Inc..

Shaw, A., DeScioli, P., Barakzai, A., & Kurzban, R. (2017). Whoever is not with me is against me: The costs of neutrality among friends. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 71, 96-104.

Expand full comment

I'm deeply grateful to you for taking the time to answer my questions and provide such helpful resources! It's an honor to receive such a comprehensive response from a brilliant scientist and writer like you. Thank you so much!

I'd love to hear your thoughts on the best way to study these phenomena psychologically, given that social psychology is still recovering from the replication crisis.

Expand full comment

Thank you for the kind words! Right now, my view is that the best way forward is to focus on reading work by the top scholars. That's generally a good idea, but now more than ever it's the case. I have in mind Cosmides, Wertz, Pinker, Krems, Barrett, Hagen, Miller, Pietreziewsky, DeScioli... I can't list them all, but a good heuristic is that if someone spent time at UCSB, their work is likely to be good :-) Honestly, if one read How the Mind Works and the Tooby/Cosmides corpus, especially The Psychological Foundations of Culture, one would be among the best educated evolutionary psychologists around.

Expand full comment

Bravo. I recently read “ I saw Satan Fall Like Lightening” by Renee Girard (I am now retired!) and thought sociologists and evolutionary psychologists have neglected the ubiquity of lethal mobs in history. Can you think of any attention to this in the ep literature?

Expand full comment

Thank you! I’ve never read the book, but I have added it to my list. In terms of your question, I can’t think of very much work that discusses lethal mobs, historically. John Tooby talked a little bit about using outrages to gather mobs in places such as this one:

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2010). Groups in mind: The coalitional roots of war and morality. Human morality and sociality: Evolutionary and comparative perspectives, 191-234.

[https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/GroupsInMind2010.pdf]

Generally, I agree that it seems like an oddly neglected topic. There’s usually a discussion of lynching in social psychology textbooks, but it seems rare to see extended discussions of how moral outrages are used to gather mobs for violence of various sorts though, again, Tooby is an exception. If others know relevant work, I’d be interested to learn of it.

Expand full comment

Thanks

Expand full comment