My friend Emily passes along a report in The Washington Post of a highly unusual hold-up at a Capitol Hill dinner party. When an armed robber burst onto the back patio and demanded money, a woman improbably nicknamed “Cha-Cha” replied that, as they were just finishing dinner, he should join them for a glass of wine. He took a sip and, impressed, tucked his gun into his waistband. He stuck about for a little more wine and some cheese, asked the group for hugs, then walked off peacefully.
It’s an unusual story, but perhaps not ultimately as surprising as the article makes it out to be. Jonathan Glover relates a parallel story in his excellent book Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century . Police in apartheid-era South Africa have just forcibly broken up a protest rally, and one cop (billy club in hand) is chasing a female protester down an isolated dead-end alley when she stumbles and loses her shoe. Instinctively, he stops to pick it up and hand it to her. His manners are more deeply ingrained than his police traning, and that’s just what one does when a lady loses her shoe. Suddenly, beating this woman up is no longer an option; he sheaths his club and silently walks away.
We all act on a variety of social scripts, from which we find it enormously psychologically difficult to deviate once they’re activated. Often, this is a problem, causing people to follow orders when they shouldn’t, or to stand by in a crisis when they ought to be rendering aid. Sometimes it has more benign effects. The loss of the shoe suddenly shunted the policeman from his cop-script to his chivalry-script. Something similar probably happened with the burglar.
The crucial move here is that he wasn’t directly challenged within the terms of the burglar script: The guests didn’t refuse outright to hand over their money, but only offered him some wine first, so there was no need to move on to Act II: further threats. But since he hadn’t asked for wine, the offer was not in line with the compliant-hostage script either: It was a social courtesy. Once he’d accepted, he was reading from the party-guest script. And holding up one’s host at a dinner party is simply not the done thing.
The seemingly odd request for hugs may also hint at why that script proved so sticky. It’s no great leap to suppose that if you’re a 20-something trying to rob people at gunpoint, your life has not gone quite as you’d hoped. Probably you don’t get invited to many pleasant dinner parties with nice wine and cheese. That momentary feeling of acceptance into a social world where people don’t need to rob each other may have been worth more than the cash he could have gotten off the guests. It’s frequently noted that a perverse consequence of our prison system is that we end up placing petty criminals in an intensive training program for serious crime. But more than that, we reinforce their identity as criminals. That’s not to say we can rehabilitate felons with a group hug, but stories like this might prompt us to think more about how punishment can be carried out without further cementing the criminal script.
7 responses so far ↓
1 LP // Jul 13, 2007 at 5:05 pm
This gels with the emerging neuroscience idea that the mind/brain is really a bunch of competing modules, some designed to deal with social bonding, some with following rules and detecting cheaters, some with violence, sex, logical thinking, storytelling, and so on. When one module outshouts the rest, it controls behavior (for awhile, until another module is activated even more strongly). In other words, it might not be just psychology at work here — our response to socially inappropriate behavior might trigger different neurological responses, which can almost certainly be changed long-term as well, by choosing societal reactions that reinforce the preferred modules.
2 Chris // Jul 13, 2007 at 5:28 pm
Interesting theory. Robbert Cialdini calls it the “whirr-click” effect, iirc.
still, occam’s razor tells me that drugs are more likely responsible for this sort of thing…
3 Neil the Ethical Werewolf // Jul 13, 2007 at 6:13 pm
It’s a wonderful idea, though I’m doubtful that state policies can be implemented at the subtle level required to make such a thing possible. Just because something is a government policy about how you deal with criminals, it seems that it necessarily becomes part of the criminal script. Such is the social weight of state action.
(Did I just try to convince Julian that government action of some kind won’t work? It’s a strange day…)
4 sangfroid826 // Jul 13, 2007 at 6:29 pm
I believe it’s Cialdini’s “Law of Reciprocation”. His work is an interesting read. According Cialidini, the reciprocity rule applies, even if the recipient does not like the person who gave the gift. It can be cross applied to concessions, persuasion, etc. Great post.
5 JD // Jul 14, 2007 at 12:42 am
You make a very interesting point about the scripts and deviating from them. It’s very aikido-like in some ways, all about deflection.
Two nitpicks:
1. “XX relates a parallel story in his excellent book…” Is “XX” some kind of secret code name for Jonathan Glover? (I’m guessing you just used it as a placeholder until you could look up his name, then forgot it, but it’s kind of funny.)
2. I think the guy was technically a robber, not a burglar, in that he was (attempting to) steal from people, not an empty house, although I’m not sure if that definition is a legal one or a common one or what.
6 Sam McManus // Jul 14, 2007 at 12:17 pm
I think the identity point is a very interesting one. In crime, and war, there’s a huge dichotomy between us and them (The Criminals vs. The Children or freedom-lovin’ Americans vs The Hun). Propaganda is often meant to dehumanize the enemy (look at any political cartoon and see if the Japanese don’t look like space aliens), because once you recognize that person as another human, with rights and parents and a mind, it becomes a lot more difficult to snuff all that out by killing someone. Once the criminal is no longer “the criminal” and is now a person that has committed a crime, they’re less distant from you and, though I hate to use the word in conversation, you grok them a bit more.
7 Andrew // Jul 14, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Interesting story. I can’t help noting that if this plays to other people’s diplomatic fantasies as much as it does to mine, it’s going to get a lot of people killed. I mean this in the most light-hearted possible way, as someone eagerly optimistic about human nature.
In the police interrogation room–
“Why’d you shoot him?”
“I asked him for his money and he asked me to lunch.”
Perhaps it’s worth speculating that Cha-Cha’s womanly intuition told her this guy wasn’t reading from the robber script with conviction, and would be open to her gesture.