Book Review/Heather Seggel

Carrots and Sticks

In a recent special, Samantha Bee had a used car modified to remove all the features created as a result of safety regulations. The resulting monstrosity included features like a hamster-cage water bottle full of booze to drink from while driving and other deadly tweaks, essentially resulting in a big pile of murder on wheels. The reason, or punchline, was grim: No comparable legal restrictions are applied to guns.The new book “Behavioral Code: The Hidden Ways the Law Makes Us Better … and Worse” (Beacon Press) opens with a comparable proposition, a “red pill” moment drawn from the film “The Matrix,” that would make visible the laws relevant to whatever scene you find yourself looking at.

From crosswalks to seat belts, employment regulations to the fine print on your lease, the law is ubiquitous in our lives. Authors Benjamin Van Rooij and Adam Fine look at the ways its intention to improve human conduct often misfires, and propose some unexpected solutions. It’s provocative, surprising, and highly enjoyable.

The book starts out feeling like equal parts popular nonfiction (lots of anecdotes and theorizing) and dry analysis (it’s about the law, after all), but over time begins to feel more like a mystery on the verge of revealing critical clues. Opening with smaller, more personal matters sets things up neatly. The authors describe a study with a simple premise: People tend to elide the truth with insurance paperwork, but what if they signed a simple pledge to be honest at the top of the form before filling it out? It turns out people who signed such a pledge were in fact more honest with their answers. A surprising aside describes the difficulty the researcher had simply finding a company that would let her run this study. It’s almost as if insurance companies would prefer not to look at such things too closely.

After discussing various iterations of reward and punishment as well as crimes that occur while those committing them are under active investigation, several theories converge when a study of the role of cockfights in Balinese culture is set alongside the misdeeds of three companies: BP, Wells Fargo, and Volkswagen. Each has a history of scandal and corruption, from oil spills minimized via deception to manipulating bank customers into accounts without their consent and bragging about low emissions that were faked in lab settings. Borrowing the same ethnographic tools used to understand the culture around cockfighting, Van Rooij and Fine look at the culture inside companies accused of wrongdoing and isolate aspects common to all of them. This culminates in a list of suggested reforms to law as we know it now, along with some guardrails to prevent cleaning up one strain of corruption only to start a new one in its place.

“Behavioral Code” reads like an airplane book; you can zip through it on a long flight and be engrossed and also entertained. There are examples readers may be familiar with (placing images of eyes in certain settings can reduce shoplifting and encourage payment when an honor system is in place), along with unusual ones (Uber’s “greyball” system, which enabled drivers to identify and avoid picking up people trying to catch them engaged in malpractice). The authors offer corrections to “tough on crime” policies that go too far. They describe the re-humanizing effect of restorative justice, and note that the so-called Dark Triad of personality traits (Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy), often cited when discussing serial killers and other bad actors, can be changed with early intervention. We exist in a media landscape where it often seems that some people are just bad, and there’s nothing to be done but buy a lot of home security systems. The mere fact that this decidedly normal book is proposing that we help people to not become murderers rather than wait for it to happen with a sense of futility is radical and refreshing.

The final topic covered is the Coronavirus pandemic, which made many of our hidden behaviors public. Most people were willing to wear masks and practice social distancing and some degree of self-quarantine initially, but backsliding crept in faster than we might have hoped, and enforcement was inconsistent at best, lacking at worst. As we tangle with new variants of the virus and messy responses from public health officials, the ideas here are good for armchair quarterbacking now, but could be used to make better policy going forward. Read “Behavioral Code” for a mechanic’s-eye view of the law, then work to improve its efficiency or, if that fails, monkey-wrench it into compliance.

Heather Seggel is a writer living in Northern California.

From The Progressive Populist, September 1, 2021

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