Just because somebody has a significant degree of irrationality doesn’t mean they will necessarily fail- skill is a far more important factor (and people can be rational in some areas but not others). How would you deter irrational crooks?
For example if they’re exhibiting availability bias, make punishments public and memorable. Maybe put the mutilated corpses of criminals on display in public places.
For overconfidence bias if they’re underestimating their probability of getting caught, you may have to make the punishment more severe to compensate.
For overconfidence bias if they’re underestimating their probability of getting caught, you may have to make the punishment more severe to compensate.
That won’t work. If the prospective criminal in question is being flat-out irrational, thinking that the probability of being caught is arbitrarily low or zero, no logistically-feasible increase in severity will compensate for that.
Instead, you should attack the subject’s confidence directly. Brag about your analysis of some form of evidence that can’t be effectively suppressed, tell fictional but realistic-seeming stories about crime scene investigators with mythic levels of competence and dedication. To make it clear that you’re not bluffing, capture some people who thought they’d never be caught and extract confessions from them. Ideally, these would be people who’ve actually committed serious, well-concealed crimes, but depending on your other governmental priorities almost anyone could serve as such an example.
Yes, that strategy gets ugly if you carry it far enough. There’s a reason ‘police states’ aren’t fashionable anymore.
Instead, you should attack the subject’s confidence directly. Brag about your analysis of some form of evidence that can’t be effectively suppressed, tell fictional but realistic-seeming stories about crime scene investigators with mythic levels of competence and dedication. To make it clear that you’re not bluffing, capture some people who thought they’d never be caught and extract confessions from them.
So have lots of cop shows on TV? That seems to be the best strategy given how much people generalize from fictional evidence.
There’s a simpler explanation: people like watching cop shows with mythically competent investigators because it helps them maintain the pleasant belief that most crime will be detected and punished. This not only makes them feel safer, but also helps them rationalize away any feelings of cowardice or subordination associated with choosing to follow society’s rules.
To the extent that network execs push cop shows with happy endings for ideological reasons, it’s much more likely that they simply applaud when they see “criminals get caught” than that they follow any hypothesis as complicated as “the best way to deter crime is to lower criminals’ confidence that they will escape detection by propagating fictional evidence that people will erroneously generalize from.”
Increasing the severity of punishments generally does not result in a reduction in the rate of crimes, whereas increasing the certainty of punishment produces a reliable if weak reduction. Trying to overcome criminals’ overconfidence bias by means of draconian punishments appears to simply not work.
Re-Edit: Thanks, I thought that I did that the first time around, but it just caused the text to vanish. I must have mistyped.
Markup here is the same for all links; just put the link in the second set of brackets and the text you want it to linkify in the first set. LessWrong is just an example, they could have easily used Google. Of course, it might help foster the interlinking.
Just because somebody has a significant degree of irrationality doesn’t mean they will necessarily fail- skill is a far more important factor (and people can be rational in some areas but not others). How would you deter irrational crooks?
That depends on which biases they’re exhibiting.
For example if they’re exhibiting availability bias, make punishments public and memorable. Maybe put the mutilated corpses of criminals on display in public places.
For overconfidence bias if they’re underestimating their probability of getting caught, you may have to make the punishment more severe to compensate.
That won’t work. If the prospective criminal in question is being flat-out irrational, thinking that the probability of being caught is arbitrarily low or zero, no logistically-feasible increase in severity will compensate for that.
Instead, you should attack the subject’s confidence directly. Brag about your analysis of some form of evidence that can’t be effectively suppressed, tell fictional but realistic-seeming stories about crime scene investigators with mythic levels of competence and dedication. To make it clear that you’re not bluffing, capture some people who thought they’d never be caught and extract confessions from them. Ideally, these would be people who’ve actually committed serious, well-concealed crimes, but depending on your other governmental priorities almost anyone could serve as such an example.
Yes, that strategy gets ugly if you carry it far enough. There’s a reason ‘police states’ aren’t fashionable anymore.
So have lots of cop shows on TV? That seems to be the best strategy given how much people generalize from fictional evidence.
That is a chilling thought. The preponderance of cop shows on TV is real-world social engineering to predispose individuals not to commit crimes?
There’s a simpler explanation: people like watching cop shows with mythically competent investigators because it helps them maintain the pleasant belief that most crime will be detected and punished. This not only makes them feel safer, but also helps them rationalize away any feelings of cowardice or subordination associated with choosing to follow society’s rules.
To the extent that network execs push cop shows with happy endings for ideological reasons, it’s much more likely that they simply applaud when they see “criminals get caught” than that they follow any hypothesis as complicated as “the best way to deter crime is to lower criminals’ confidence that they will escape detection by propagating fictional evidence that people will erroneously generalize from.”
Right; stupidity (or at least, weakness to bias) is a much better explanation than malice.
Agreed.
Even if there’s an attempt at social engineering, the audiences would have their own motivations for watching.
Anyone have information about whether such shows are popular with people who are subject to obviously corrupt and/or arbitrarily violent policing?
Infallible police shows might also be popular because people identify with the police—it would be fun to be right all the time and able to enforce it.
Not in most cases, but in some.
Increasing the severity of punishments generally does not result in a reduction in the rate of crimes, whereas increasing the certainty of punishment produces a reliable if weak reduction. Trying to overcome criminals’ overconfidence bias by means of draconian punishments appears to simply not work.
Re-Edit: Thanks, I thought that I did that the first time around, but it just caused the text to vanish. I must have mistyped.
Markup here is the same for all links; just put the link in the second set of brackets and the text you want it to linkify in the first set. LessWrong is just an example, they could have easily used Google. Of course, it might help foster the interlinking.