When Does Persuasion Become Coercion?

With an assist from the idea, “time to penis”

In the television show Mythic Quest – Raven’s Banquet, the lead character introduces the abbreviation TTP, standing for “time to penis.” How long will it take for players to use an item introduced into the game to make a penis?

The idea is a bit juvenile, but there’s a truth in it. We humans have certain appetites. When the environment allows us the opportunity to satisfy one of those appetites, we try to take advantage of it. So the environments we create for one another—such as the tools available to players of Mythic Quest—really matter.

My previous posts explored this idea when it comes to some peculiar ways we allocate stuff, including all-inclusive resorts, theme parks, and parking. If the environment allows people to reserve a lounge chair by the pool, they’ll do it. People like sitting by the pool. If the environment (of a video game) allows players to make a penis, they’ll do it. (I leave unanswered the mystifying question about why this creative impulse exists. I have no doubt finer minds than mine will have insight into this human peculiarity.)

This post explores cases in which some new ingredient was added to a society, looking at how human nature, often sitting latent, expresses itself in response.

Of Monsters and Men

In the 1980 film, The Gods Must Be Crazy, a member of the San tribe in the Kalahari finds a Coke bottle, discarded from an airplane. It turns out that this new object is useful for many of the San’s tasks, creating demand for the object. There being more demand than supply—just the one bottle—not to mention no price system to allocate it, conflict ensues. The solution is to throw the bottle off the edge of the Earth, launching the quest that animates the rest of the film. In this case, a new tool plugs into humans’ appetite to make life a little easier. The strategies the characters used to get access to the new tool were latent until the bottle arrived.

To take a second example from fiction before moving to the real world, the creation of The One Ring and the other rings of power—e.g., Nine for Moral Men, doomed to die—represents a similar case. Sauron took advantage of the appetites of the dwellers of Middle Earth. Of course men were going to slip the magical rings of power on their fingers, allowing Sauron to spring his trap, since he himself kept the “one ring to rule them all.” [SPOILER: It didn’t work, all thanks to the heroism of a rag-tag band of hobbits and their friends.] Of the three species—elves, dwarves, and men—we humans fared the worst, each ring-wearer becoming servants of the Dark Lord.

Ok, now back to reality.

Let’s start with fish.

If you were to watch piranhas, much of the time they are simply swimming along peacefully. But add some food, and their behavior changes dramatically. The ferocity is always there, waiting for the right conditions in the environment to bring it out. In this case, the right conditions include something they can eat nearby.

For humans, a crucial part of the environment is the set of rules that govern behavior.

In the first half of the 13^th century, religious conflicts were flaring across Europe and the relationship between the power of the state and the power of religious organizations was being negotiated. In Spain, the government used the Inquisition, authorized by the Pope, to assert its power.

In this context, new practices arose. For example, up to that time, if I accused you of heresy and I did not make my case, I faced potential punishment. With the advent of the Inquisition, officials were allowed to make accusations based on hearsay or circumstantial evidence, after which the accused would be encouraged to confess, using methods as well-known as they were barbaric.

The price of accusations was, under the Inquisition, sharply reduced, and the means used to “inquire” were such that once someone was accused, it was reasonably likely that they would confess or be killed. These new circumstances made the potential benefit of accusations much greater. This favorable cost/benefit ratio had the predictable effect. In Spain, estimates are that as many as 150,000 souls were prosecuted by the Inquisition. Evidence from the period suggests that accusations were an especially nifty tool favored by those of lower classes against the wealthy. Cheap, effective accusations could be used to settle old scores, compete with rivals, and so forth. Often, when property was confiscated from someone found guilty, the accuser sometimes stood to share in the bounty. The pattern repeated in witch hunts in Europe and, famously, Salem, Massachusetts. Again, leaders created an opening for attacks on rivals, leaving the accused defenseless because the charge was holding invisible beliefs or performing activities that left no physical evidence. (I like the Monty Python bit in which a character accuses a woman of turning him into a newt. Clearly being a human, and not a newt, he explains, I got better!)

In the case of the Inquisition, normal everyday psychology was sitting around, latent, until the environment changed. As Tolkien explored, humans are greedy and they crave power over others, to say nothing of our nearly insatiable appetite to accuse others of wrongdoing and revel in their ordeals of punishment. When ideas spread, they become like Coke bottles, a new part of people’s environments, potentially bringing to the fore previously latent appetites.

In some cases, these appetites are literal. Consider what happened as people developed animal husbandry and then factory farming. Throughout human history, animals have had no powerful lobby working to guard their rights, and the cost of eating animals dropped precipitously. The result is the 75 billion chickens slaughtered every year.

The results of other cultural innovations are more difficult to predict. If you haven’t watched it, I recommend The Social Dilemma, a documentary available on Netflix. It focuses especially on the innocent-looking-at-first “like” button. What happens when humans, with their appetite for attention, have a tiny new incentive to broadcast ideas others will like? The answer is the social media landscape we are all living in.

The introduction of new ideas does not always have such disastrous consequences. As the Enlightenment unspooled, an idea spread: people might have these things called “property rights,” which states might enforce. This idea got written down in places like the 4^th and 5^th Amendments of the United States Constitution and lots of people started believing it.¹ The adoption of this idea led people who were living in places where the fruits of their labor could be protected to create things other people wanted. This practice had the happy consequence that more and more people can clothe, feed, and house themselves.

Along similar lines, about 2,500 years ago some people in Athens and then Rome thought that it might be fun if leaders were chosen rather than born. This idea, in various (and often imperfect) incarnations, leads people with power to do the sorts of things that are good for the people they rule rather than just themselves. Yes, that’s a naïve way to put it, but in theory democratic republics bring to the fore humans’ appetites to be liked, even loved, rather than feared, Machiavelli’s musings about this notwithstanding.

When I was a post-doc at UCLA, I was housed in the Anthropology Department, lucky to be around talented scholars such as Rob Boyd, Joan Silk, Susan Perry, Joe Manson, and others. I met with a certain amount of resistance from the University’s Institutional Review Board, which I discussed with my colleagues. It turned out that they had also had some difficulties—as have many others at various institutions—and from them I learned about an objection to their research methods I had never previously encountered.

Some anthropologists would go into the field, often an area where hunter-gatherers lived, to conduct experiments. People in these groups had very few material possessions. If an economist were to compute their per capita income, it would be less than one dollar a day. Hunter-gatherer participants would be compensated for their time taking part in the study, sometimes with tools such as fishhooks, which were in demand, and sometimes in currency that could be used in town.

The Institutional Review Board rejected proposals for some of this work in cases in which they judged that the compensation for participating in the research was too big. The argument was that the temptation to earn that much money was simply too great for their potential subjects to resist. Therefore, because the transaction was irresistible, it was coercive.

Up to that point—and, to be honest, still today—I was persuaded by Robert Nozick’s view about how to define and understand coercion, and I thought that coercion was a sort of conditional intended to undermine someone else’s will. In the classic case, I might impose a conditional on you of the form, your money or your life! What I mean is that IF you do not give me your money, THEN I will shoot you. Such conditionals are threats. They change your behavior, causing you to choose something you would rather not do and would not do if it weren’t for the threat.

Subsequent developments in philosophy extended and revised Nozick’s view, which some have seen as too narrow. There are arguments that certain kinds of offers, as opposed to threats, can be coercive. And Nozick’s view doesn’t exactly capture a dog on a leash: leading Fido here rather than there—keeping him out of striking range of the discarded chicken bone—seems coercive, but in a more straightforward physical way than the threat Nozick identifies.

Notice a big difference between the sorts of coercive threats the mugger makes and the allegedly coercive offer that the anthropologist is making. In the threat case, the target winds up doing something they otherwise wouldn’t want to do. In the offer case, with the intervention of the Institutional Review Board, the target winds up not doing something they would rather do. They are, from their perspective, worse off.

Why do administrators at universities want to prevent these “large” payments of six fishhooks rather than a single fishhook?

Think about the idea that offers can be coercive like the Coke bottle, a new idea to play with. In the case of the Institutional Review Board, with the framing that offers can be coercive, they can dictate the decisions made by people thousands of miles around the world, exercising their will over them from the comfort of their air-conditioned offices in Los Angeles. (If you think that this practice is acceptable, please let me know when your next job offer comes and I will decide what the maximum amount they can pay you without the offer being coercive.)

For these bureaucrats, this feeds several appetites all at once. First, Institutional Review Boards live in perpetual fear that their numbers will be culled if the people who propose research projects submit proposals that conform to all the rules. In such cases, there’s little for the staff to do, putting jobs at risk. Requiring revisions because it builds job security.² Second, I can say from experience that the reports back from the Board often contain at least some aroma of moral superiority. You’re going to give them six fishhooks!? You monster! This sentiment is conveyed in standard bureaucratic language, but one can feel the finger-wagging.

And, of course, for at least some of them, there is the warm feeling of protecting those poor, vulnerable adults in Asia, Africa, or South America, who lack the bureaucrat’s sophistication and willpower to resist the siren call of a wage of six fishhooks per hour. The bureaucrat goes home feeling satisfied that she has chastised the powerful Principle Investigator and protected the hapless adult human being from whom she has removed the opportunity to choose whether or not to answer some survey questions for the wrong number of fishhooks.

Notice the theory of human nature that underlies this approach to policy. In prior posts, I’ve discussed the work of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who gives sharp insight into the rules that govern certain practices in the religion in which she was raised, Islam. If you think of adult males as simply powerless to choose to behave when they see a whisp of a woman’s hair, then you might feel justified in draconian rules ensuring this temptation is never visible. According to this perception of people’s will, people making certain clothing choices are subject to stern punishment because they are being as coercive as compensating hunter-gatherers too much to complete a study. This view is a deeply paternalistic one, justifying why the few and powerful should choose for the many and powerless.

Don’t get me wrong. It is right and proper that Institutional Review Boards—and businesses and governments, and so on—try to prevent coercion in the sense of threats. A core ethical principle is that one person should not, and should not be permitted to, coerce another. And, of course, there are some people who aren’t able to choose, and are in need of paternalism. One prominent class of such people are called “children,” and we actually don’t want them choosing what’s for dinner, or every meal would be chicken nuggets and chocolate milk. We give people the vote at 18 in the United States, drawing a line about when we think their opinion about governance should count.

Humans like to make moral attacks. Expand the notion of “coercive” to include offers, and that’s what they’ll do. The “time to attack,” just like the time to penis, is vanishingly small.

Before concluding, I want to be clear that of course these matters are more complicated and it’s not quite as simple as saying that coercion by threat is always bad and coercion by offer is always fine.

Some threats are implicit. Nice bar you have here. Shame if something happened to it. In that case, there is no explicit threat, but the Nozick conditional—if you don’t give me protection money, then my gang will torch your bar—is in the mind of the speaker. It’s invisible, as all human thought is, but it’s also real.

The invisibility of these conditionals and the fact that they might be implicit can lead to much misunderstanding. Suppose a patron literally was just remarking that it was a nice bar and how sad it would be should it burn to the ground. When the owner serves the patron free drinks, we might ask: has the owner been coerced?

This ambiguity leads to a problem. Someone might believe a threat to be present when the speaker has no such intention in mind.

Shared understanding of what is coercive varies over time and from one community to another. This variation is inevitable because norms change over time and the topic is inherently fraught, to do with lots of stuff going on unseen in people’s heads. In one cultural moment, it might be just fine to say “it’s cold outside” as a way to persuade someone to stay inside, where it’s warm, a bit longer. In a different cultural moment, every offer by someone understood to have power might be able to be labeled coercive, and therefore subject to moral attack.

Image Credit - Gemini

A very nice man saw that my partner and I were lost in downtown Istanbul. He offered to help us, and he provided impeccable directions to the Hagia Sophia, which turned out to be as beautiful as its reputation promised. The man invited us to have a look at his carpets for sale, just nearby. He had his young son serve us tea. He explained the care the women took in weaving the carpets and the dire conditions under which the women lived, on pennies a day, refugees from war-torn Syria. He explained that he would let these carpets, here, go for a steal of just 400 dollars, U.S., and which one did we like best?

Anyone who has been in such a situation knows how difficult it is to say no. These merchants are experienced and have enjoyed success for hundreds of years in their trade.

We walked out feeling a little bad, but with no merchandise and all of our money still in our wallets.

Did we feel coerced? I suppose we might have used that word if we had bought a carpet. Maybe. Certainly the merchant tried to persuade us. That seems like the right word.

But, in the event, we said no.

We had one powerful force on our side.

We’re adults.

1. There is a sense in which the lack of property rights was the problem with the Coke bottle. There was no property right over the bottle, so anyone who wanted it could expropriate it from its current user without fearing punishment, leading to conflict.

2. This tendency varies a lot. My experience at CalTech was that the IRB there had a light touch.