Determined, page 34
Where game play is purely altruistic is if you give up one dollar, rejecting a 99:1 offer, in a single-round game, with the chastened other guy thus making a better offer . . . to the next person.
Third-party punishment is even more costly. It’s the Ultimatum Game and you observe player A totally exploiting powerless player B. Outraged, you step in and spend, say, ten dollars of your own money to cost player A twenty dollars as punishment. Humbled, they’re nicer to whomever they play against thereafter, and if this doesn’t include you down the line, your costly act is purely altruistic punishment.[*],[22]
A way to lower the cost of punishing involves reputation, an incredibly reliable means of influencing behavior. In tests of game theory, cooperation is boosted if people know your history of play (i.e., open-book play that produces a shadow of the future); be known as a free rider, and others will start off not trusting you or refusing to play with you. This occurs among hunter-gatherers, who spend a huge amount of time gossiping about, among other things, who has cheated by, say, not sharing meat; get a reputation for that and you’re ostracized, which can be life-threatening. In contrast, the costs of third-party punishment are reduced because your reputation is enhanced and people trust you more; if you’re already viewed as socially dominant, being a third-party punisher makes you seem more formidable and likable.[23]
These are all distal solutions to the problem of the cost of punishment. As first introduced in chapter 2, there’s “distal” (big-picture, long-perspective levels of explanation), in contrast to “proximal” (focusing on motivations and explanations in the moment). Why do animals mate, expending effort and calories, often risking their lives? Distal explanation: because it allows you to leave copies of your genes in the next generation. Proximal explanation: it feels good. Why punish cheaters when it’s costly? The distal explanation is what we’ve been discussing—because reliably and collectively sharing the costs benefits everyone. But it is when we look for a proximal explanation that we see how it’s going to be so damn hard to get people to proclaim the lack of free will and just quarantine the dangerous. Why punish cheaters when it’s costly? Proximally, because we like to punish wrongdoers. It feels great.
Justice Served IV
It’s a magnetic draw of our attention. We want to identify a perimeter; it’s the concentration camp porn of sensing the outer limits of human depravity. It facilitates a feel-good experiment: “What if it were a loved one of mine?” followed by the relief of choosing to step back from the edge of the bottomless pit with the knowledge that it doesn’t apply to us. Sometimes it’s just primate voyeurism. It is our fascination with serial murderers, the filing away of numbers of victims and the grotesqueries of the killings.[*] Jeffrey Dahmer having sex with the corpses of his victims, cannibalizing them, proclaiming his love for them. John Wayne Gacy entertaining hospitalized kids, dressed as a clown. Charles Manson, the sixties cultural incarnation of Satan’s son. The ones with the nicknames—Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac Killer, the Night Stalker, the DC Sniper. The steampunk kitsch of Jack the Ripper.
Another serial murderer whose notoriety has persisted is Ted Bundy. To use a ghastly term, he was a run-of-the-mill serial murderer, killing roughly thirty women in the mid-1970s, far from a record holder. There was the usual sickening litany—rape, murder, necrophilia, cannibalism; he kept decapitated heads of victims in his apartment as mementos, shampooing their hair and putting makeup on them.
We’re particularly fascinated with unlikely serial killers—responsible husband and father, Boy Scout leader, church elder—and Bundy is way up on that list. It’s virtually required to describe him as “handsome and charismatic,” which is exactly what he was in interviews. An honor student at the University of Washington, then a law student, active in politics (a delegate for Nelson Rockefeller at the 1968 Republican National Convention), a kind, empathic volunteer at a suicide hotline. He worked on someone’s successful campaign to be governor of Washington State; the candidate expressed his gratitude with the breathtaking irony of appointing Bundy to the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Committee.
Somewhere around then he began killing. He targeted young women. Early on, Bundy simply broke into apartments and attacked people in their sleep. His approach evolved to luring someone to his car by requesting help carrying something, pulling this off with charm and a seemingly broken limb in a cast. Sometimes he buffed up the verisimilitude with crutches. He would then bludgeon the victim.
Eventually caught, Bundy was convicted for a number of murders (in one much-publicized instance, incriminated in part by the match between his teeth and the bite marks on the buttock of his victim) and given the death penalty. He escaped from prison twice but was eventually put to death in 1989.
Bundy fascinated criminologists and mental health professionals, who handed out a variety of diagnoses of psychopathy, reflecting his manipulativeness, narcissism, and remorselessness. He fascinated the public as well; books were written and movies made about him (two and one, respectively, while he was still alive). Numerous women wrote to him in prison, some devastated by both his death and the subsequent discovery that they were not actually his beloved one and only. Few remember the names of his victims.
Bundy was executed by electric chair. In 1881, a drunk worker had grabbed the wires of an electric dynamo in a power plant and been instantly killed. Hearing about this, a dentist named Alfred Southwick conceived of a machine for electrocuting people as a humane alternative to hanging. After practicing on stray dogs, he had perfected his invention. The chair part of the original “electric chair,” bound for iconic status, was a dental chair modified by Southwick. It was the execution method of choice for most of the twentieth century.[24]
When things went right, the wave of electricity caused unconsciousness within seconds and fatal cardiac arrest within a minute or two. When things didn’t go right, multiple rounds of electrocution might be required, or the prisoner would remain conscious and in extreme pain; in one case, the prisoner’s face mask caught on fire. Bundy’s execution, however, was routine.
The execution was much anticipated throughout the country, with celebratory barbecues held the evening before, many called “Bundy-cues,” featuring “Bundy burgers” and “electric hot dogs.” Particularly raucous partying occurred at a fraternity at Florida State University, a school attended by two of Bundy’s victims. On the day of the execution, hundreds gathered across the street from the prison in Raiford, Florida, where he would be killed. The crowd, which included families with children, sang, chanted, “Burn, Bundy, burn,” and set off fireworks. News of his death was greeted with cheers (the somber witnesses to the execution, as they exited the prison, were reportedly shocked by the revelry). Celebrations over, the crowd dispersed, justice served.[25]
Delicious, Whether Served Hot or Cold
Here’s a thoroughly elegant study, carried out by German psychologist Tania Singer. Subjects were either six-year-old kids or chimps. One of the researchers comes into the room and either does something nice to the kid/chimp—offering some desirable food—or does something mean—teasing them by starting to give the food and then snatching it away. The researcher leaves and then enters an adjacent room, visible to the subject through an observation window. Someone sneaks up behind the researcher and—whoa!—seemingly starts hitting them over the head with a stick, with the researcher crying out in pain. After ten seconds, the assailant drags the researcher to an adjacent room and then resumes the hitting. The kid/chimp can go into their own adjacent room with another window, giving them the opportunity to watch. Do they move to do this? If the researcher being pummeled had been nice to them, only 18 percent moved to see the rest; if the researcher had been mean, 50 percent leaped at the opportunity. Both kids and chimps were particularly interested in seeing someone who was mean to them get punished.[26]
Importantly, getting into the adjacent viewing room was costly. Kids had been receiving tokens for some irrelevant task, which they could trade in for desirable stickers; they had to relinquish tokens to watch the continued punishment. For the chimps, the door to the next room was extremely heavy, requiring considerable work to watch the continued punishment. And when it was the mean person being punished, kids forked out the tokens and chimps moved mountains and heavy doors to see. In other words, the kids and the chimps were willing to incur costs—to pay in currency or effort—to continue basking in the pleasure of watching the antisocial person getting what they deserved.
While watching the continued punishment, kids typically had a facial expression long associated with Schadenfreude, the emotion of gloating over another’s misfortune—an involuntary frown coinciding with the blows, coupled with a smile. If it was the antisocial teaser getting punished, that expression occurred about four times as often as if it was the kind, prosocial person being punished. And for the chimps, if it was the Good Samaritan getting punished, the chimps gave agitated vocalizations; if it was the mean human, not a peep from the chimps.
We pay for stuff that gives us pleasure—a terrifying slasher movie (if you’re that kind of paradoxical individual), cocaine, bananas, a chance to read sexually arousing writing or look at sexually arousing pictures.[*] And here are both kids and chimps paying for the pleasure of watching the wicked get their just rewards.[27]
The study had another fascinating wrinkle, showing the sophistication of humans, even kids, relative to chimps. In this version of the experimental design, the kid/chimp watched the researcher being nice or mean to another human/chimp (that second chimp, termed the “stooge” chimp, was trained for the role, and presumably received coauthorship on the paper). Then, as before, the researcher got attacked and dragged to the other room. Kids would also pay to watch third-party punishment; chimps, who show no third-party punishment experimentally, had no interest in watching it occur.
A great study, showing how deeply seated, both developmentally and taxonomically, is our enjoyment of seeing righteous punishment served. Good luck convincing people that blame and punishment are scientifically and morally bankrupt.
The same unsettling conclusion comes from neuroimaging studies. If someone makes you an unfair offer in the Ultimatum Game, your insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala activate, a picture of disgust, pain, and anger. The lowball offer puts you at a split in the road. If it’s a single-round game, punish retributively or be purely logical and accept the offer that is better than nothing? The more activation of your insula and amygdala, and the more pissed off you report being by inequity in general, the more likely you are to reject the offer. This retributive irrationality is all about emotion—if people believe they are rejecting an unfair offer from a human rather than a computer, there is also activation of that emotional vmPFC; making a similar point, men with higher testosterone levels are more likely to reject such offers.[28]
The picture of altruistic third-party punishment is much the same, with the neuroimaging indices of anger and disgust activated. Along with that is what you’d also expect, namely activation of a brain region called the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ), that region involved in perspective taking. And the perspective taking isn’t just about the victims—the more TPJ activation, the more likely you are to forgive transgressors or accept the role of mitigating factors (e.g., poverty) in explaining their behavior.[29]
So on a neurobiological level, second-party punishers are about disgust, anger, and pain, whereas third-party punishers have the same plus the perspective taking needed to view someone else’s misfortune as akin to your own. But then there is the crucial additional finding in all these cases: retributive punishing in any of these guises also activates the dopamine circuitry involved in reward (the ventral tegmentum and nucleus accumbens). Activation by punishment of the brain region goosed by the likes of orgasm or cocaine. It feels good.[30]
Additional studies make the point even further. Symbolic punishment doesn’t activate reward circuits as much as does the real thing (e.g., blasting someone with a loud noise). More punishment correlates with more activation of the nucleus accumbens, and lots of accumbens activation when you get to punish a cheater for free predicts a greater likelihood of paying to punish a cheater. The circuitry activates whether you are someone who is independently meting out punishment or a conformer joining the vengeful crowd.
Being altruistic can feel good—it decreases pain in cancer patients, blunts the activation of neural pain pathways in response to shock. It even literally gives you a warm glow (such that people estimate ambient temperatures as being higher after an altruistic act). Nice. But being able to righteously punish evildoers feels really good. But as will be seen in a bit, even that can be tamed.[31]
Justice Served V
The United States began as an experiment in convincing a bunch of unlike-minded states to form, if not a perfect union, at least a functional one. This was an iffy proposition from the start; it took nearly a century for Americans to transition from statements like “The United States are doing X” to “The United States is doing X.” And from the start, there has always been an opposition that views the very notion of a federated government as tyranny. That certainly describes the Confederacy. Likewise for those resisting federal mask mandates during the pandemic. Likewise on January 6, 2020, for those who believed that it was despotic for those DC pedophiles to insist that the person who loses an election doesn’t get to be president.
The “patriot” antigovernment militia movement continues to grow, and provided the toxic ideology that motivated an American to declare war against the United States in 1995. Most proximally, he was outraged by the siege of White supremacist Randy Weaver and family in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, and the siege of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, in 1993.[*] On the second anniversary of the Waco siege, he used a bomb made of five thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Timothy McVeigh’s act of terrorism was the most destructive in American history (until 9/11). He killed 168 people, injured 853. More than three hundred surrounding buildings were damaged and 400 people left homeless; the blast registered 6.0 on the Richter scale fifty-five miles away. And as the detail seared into everyone’s memory, McVeigh’s victims included 9 children in a day care center in the building.
Thanks to eyewitness descriptions, McVeigh was soon apprehended. His statements in the years after were conflicting: He claimed he didn’t know there was a day care center in the building and that if he had, he would have shifted targets; he dismissed the dead children as “collateral damage.” He described understanding the pain of victims’ families; he said that he had no sympathy for them. He wondered if maybe he should have bypassed a bombing and instead used his army-acquired skill as a sniper to take out selected targets; he expressed regret at not killing more people. His 1997 trial was moved to Denver, because of the impossibility of a fair trial in Oklahoma; it was estimated that 360,000 Oklahomans knew someone who worked in the Murrah Building. He was found guilty of all charges and given the death penalty. He asserted his supposed dominance by describing his eventual execution as “state-assisted suicide.”
He would be executed by lethal injection, which by then had become the technique of choice, viewed as more humane than the electric chair or gas chamber. The prisoner is strapped down, an IV line is put into the arm (with a backup line into the other), and a trio of drugs is infused that, sequentially, renders the person unconscious within seconds, paralyzes the person and thus stops their breathing, and stops their heart. The painless process kills the prisoner within minutes.
Naturally, it’s not so simple. Trained medical professionals usually refuse to participate or are banned from doing so by their state professional board. As a result, the IV line is put in by a correctional officer, who often botches things, with multiple sticks required or the vein missed entirely so that drug is injected into muscle and then absorbed slowly.[*] The initial anesthetic, which rapidly induces unconsciousness, also wears off quickly, so the subsequent steps might be done to someone who is conscious and feeling pain but can’t express that because they are paralyzed. Sometimes the second drug does not adequately stop breathing, minutes passing with the prisoner gasping for air. Moreover, many drug manufacturers, particularly in the European Union, refuse to sell or are banned from selling a medical drug that will be used for killing, and various states have had to improvise alternative drug cocktails, with varying degrees of success at inducing a painless death.
Despite those potential snafus, McVeigh’s 2001 execution went off without a hitch. The night before, he met with a priest, watched some TV, and had his last meal. Incongruously, PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, had written to the warden, stating that after the lives McVeigh had taken, animals should at least be spared and he be served a vegetarian meal. The warden, defending McVeigh’s rights, told PETA to get lost and that he could eat whatever he wanted, so long as it didn’t involve alcohol or cost more than twenty dollars; whether McVeigh heeded PETA’s call is unknown, but his last meal consisted of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Normally, the witness room has seats for relatives of the victim; more than three hundred applied to be there, along with survivors of the bombing. Room was made for ten, with the rest allowed to watch the execution by a video link from the Terre Haute, Indiana, prison to Oklahoma City; a bug in the video system delayed the execution for ten minutes. The remaining witnesses were mostly reporters, and all gave the same account: McVeigh, from the gurney, made eye contact and nodded slightly to each witness; he lay on his back, stared at the ceiling, and died with his eyes open. While silent throughout, McVeigh had requested that copies be handed to witnesses of the 1875 poem “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley, a treacly, self-congratulatory paean to stoicism in which the author acclaims himself as unconquerable, unbowed, and with a fearless visage, ending with flourishy bragging about mastering his fate and captaining his soul. Screw you all, the mass murderer had said one last time.
Third-party punishment is even more costly. It’s the Ultimatum Game and you observe player A totally exploiting powerless player B. Outraged, you step in and spend, say, ten dollars of your own money to cost player A twenty dollars as punishment. Humbled, they’re nicer to whomever they play against thereafter, and if this doesn’t include you down the line, your costly act is purely altruistic punishment.[*],[22]
A way to lower the cost of punishing involves reputation, an incredibly reliable means of influencing behavior. In tests of game theory, cooperation is boosted if people know your history of play (i.e., open-book play that produces a shadow of the future); be known as a free rider, and others will start off not trusting you or refusing to play with you. This occurs among hunter-gatherers, who spend a huge amount of time gossiping about, among other things, who has cheated by, say, not sharing meat; get a reputation for that and you’re ostracized, which can be life-threatening. In contrast, the costs of third-party punishment are reduced because your reputation is enhanced and people trust you more; if you’re already viewed as socially dominant, being a third-party punisher makes you seem more formidable and likable.[23]
These are all distal solutions to the problem of the cost of punishment. As first introduced in chapter 2, there’s “distal” (big-picture, long-perspective levels of explanation), in contrast to “proximal” (focusing on motivations and explanations in the moment). Why do animals mate, expending effort and calories, often risking their lives? Distal explanation: because it allows you to leave copies of your genes in the next generation. Proximal explanation: it feels good. Why punish cheaters when it’s costly? The distal explanation is what we’ve been discussing—because reliably and collectively sharing the costs benefits everyone. But it is when we look for a proximal explanation that we see how it’s going to be so damn hard to get people to proclaim the lack of free will and just quarantine the dangerous. Why punish cheaters when it’s costly? Proximally, because we like to punish wrongdoers. It feels great.
Justice Served IV
It’s a magnetic draw of our attention. We want to identify a perimeter; it’s the concentration camp porn of sensing the outer limits of human depravity. It facilitates a feel-good experiment: “What if it were a loved one of mine?” followed by the relief of choosing to step back from the edge of the bottomless pit with the knowledge that it doesn’t apply to us. Sometimes it’s just primate voyeurism. It is our fascination with serial murderers, the filing away of numbers of victims and the grotesqueries of the killings.[*] Jeffrey Dahmer having sex with the corpses of his victims, cannibalizing them, proclaiming his love for them. John Wayne Gacy entertaining hospitalized kids, dressed as a clown. Charles Manson, the sixties cultural incarnation of Satan’s son. The ones with the nicknames—Son of Sam, the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac Killer, the Night Stalker, the DC Sniper. The steampunk kitsch of Jack the Ripper.
Another serial murderer whose notoriety has persisted is Ted Bundy. To use a ghastly term, he was a run-of-the-mill serial murderer, killing roughly thirty women in the mid-1970s, far from a record holder. There was the usual sickening litany—rape, murder, necrophilia, cannibalism; he kept decapitated heads of victims in his apartment as mementos, shampooing their hair and putting makeup on them.
We’re particularly fascinated with unlikely serial killers—responsible husband and father, Boy Scout leader, church elder—and Bundy is way up on that list. It’s virtually required to describe him as “handsome and charismatic,” which is exactly what he was in interviews. An honor student at the University of Washington, then a law student, active in politics (a delegate for Nelson Rockefeller at the 1968 Republican National Convention), a kind, empathic volunteer at a suicide hotline. He worked on someone’s successful campaign to be governor of Washington State; the candidate expressed his gratitude with the breathtaking irony of appointing Bundy to the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Committee.
Somewhere around then he began killing. He targeted young women. Early on, Bundy simply broke into apartments and attacked people in their sleep. His approach evolved to luring someone to his car by requesting help carrying something, pulling this off with charm and a seemingly broken limb in a cast. Sometimes he buffed up the verisimilitude with crutches. He would then bludgeon the victim.
Eventually caught, Bundy was convicted for a number of murders (in one much-publicized instance, incriminated in part by the match between his teeth and the bite marks on the buttock of his victim) and given the death penalty. He escaped from prison twice but was eventually put to death in 1989.
Bundy fascinated criminologists and mental health professionals, who handed out a variety of diagnoses of psychopathy, reflecting his manipulativeness, narcissism, and remorselessness. He fascinated the public as well; books were written and movies made about him (two and one, respectively, while he was still alive). Numerous women wrote to him in prison, some devastated by both his death and the subsequent discovery that they were not actually his beloved one and only. Few remember the names of his victims.
Bundy was executed by electric chair. In 1881, a drunk worker had grabbed the wires of an electric dynamo in a power plant and been instantly killed. Hearing about this, a dentist named Alfred Southwick conceived of a machine for electrocuting people as a humane alternative to hanging. After practicing on stray dogs, he had perfected his invention. The chair part of the original “electric chair,” bound for iconic status, was a dental chair modified by Southwick. It was the execution method of choice for most of the twentieth century.[24]
When things went right, the wave of electricity caused unconsciousness within seconds and fatal cardiac arrest within a minute or two. When things didn’t go right, multiple rounds of electrocution might be required, or the prisoner would remain conscious and in extreme pain; in one case, the prisoner’s face mask caught on fire. Bundy’s execution, however, was routine.
The execution was much anticipated throughout the country, with celebratory barbecues held the evening before, many called “Bundy-cues,” featuring “Bundy burgers” and “electric hot dogs.” Particularly raucous partying occurred at a fraternity at Florida State University, a school attended by two of Bundy’s victims. On the day of the execution, hundreds gathered across the street from the prison in Raiford, Florida, where he would be killed. The crowd, which included families with children, sang, chanted, “Burn, Bundy, burn,” and set off fireworks. News of his death was greeted with cheers (the somber witnesses to the execution, as they exited the prison, were reportedly shocked by the revelry). Celebrations over, the crowd dispersed, justice served.[25]
Delicious, Whether Served Hot or Cold
Here’s a thoroughly elegant study, carried out by German psychologist Tania Singer. Subjects were either six-year-old kids or chimps. One of the researchers comes into the room and either does something nice to the kid/chimp—offering some desirable food—or does something mean—teasing them by starting to give the food and then snatching it away. The researcher leaves and then enters an adjacent room, visible to the subject through an observation window. Someone sneaks up behind the researcher and—whoa!—seemingly starts hitting them over the head with a stick, with the researcher crying out in pain. After ten seconds, the assailant drags the researcher to an adjacent room and then resumes the hitting. The kid/chimp can go into their own adjacent room with another window, giving them the opportunity to watch. Do they move to do this? If the researcher being pummeled had been nice to them, only 18 percent moved to see the rest; if the researcher had been mean, 50 percent leaped at the opportunity. Both kids and chimps were particularly interested in seeing someone who was mean to them get punished.[26]
Importantly, getting into the adjacent viewing room was costly. Kids had been receiving tokens for some irrelevant task, which they could trade in for desirable stickers; they had to relinquish tokens to watch the continued punishment. For the chimps, the door to the next room was extremely heavy, requiring considerable work to watch the continued punishment. And when it was the mean person being punished, kids forked out the tokens and chimps moved mountains and heavy doors to see. In other words, the kids and the chimps were willing to incur costs—to pay in currency or effort—to continue basking in the pleasure of watching the antisocial person getting what they deserved.
While watching the continued punishment, kids typically had a facial expression long associated with Schadenfreude, the emotion of gloating over another’s misfortune—an involuntary frown coinciding with the blows, coupled with a smile. If it was the antisocial teaser getting punished, that expression occurred about four times as often as if it was the kind, prosocial person being punished. And for the chimps, if it was the Good Samaritan getting punished, the chimps gave agitated vocalizations; if it was the mean human, not a peep from the chimps.
We pay for stuff that gives us pleasure—a terrifying slasher movie (if you’re that kind of paradoxical individual), cocaine, bananas, a chance to read sexually arousing writing or look at sexually arousing pictures.[*] And here are both kids and chimps paying for the pleasure of watching the wicked get their just rewards.[27]
The study had another fascinating wrinkle, showing the sophistication of humans, even kids, relative to chimps. In this version of the experimental design, the kid/chimp watched the researcher being nice or mean to another human/chimp (that second chimp, termed the “stooge” chimp, was trained for the role, and presumably received coauthorship on the paper). Then, as before, the researcher got attacked and dragged to the other room. Kids would also pay to watch third-party punishment; chimps, who show no third-party punishment experimentally, had no interest in watching it occur.
A great study, showing how deeply seated, both developmentally and taxonomically, is our enjoyment of seeing righteous punishment served. Good luck convincing people that blame and punishment are scientifically and morally bankrupt.
The same unsettling conclusion comes from neuroimaging studies. If someone makes you an unfair offer in the Ultimatum Game, your insula, anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala activate, a picture of disgust, pain, and anger. The lowball offer puts you at a split in the road. If it’s a single-round game, punish retributively or be purely logical and accept the offer that is better than nothing? The more activation of your insula and amygdala, and the more pissed off you report being by inequity in general, the more likely you are to reject the offer. This retributive irrationality is all about emotion—if people believe they are rejecting an unfair offer from a human rather than a computer, there is also activation of that emotional vmPFC; making a similar point, men with higher testosterone levels are more likely to reject such offers.[28]
The picture of altruistic third-party punishment is much the same, with the neuroimaging indices of anger and disgust activated. Along with that is what you’d also expect, namely activation of a brain region called the temporal-parietal junction (TPJ), that region involved in perspective taking. And the perspective taking isn’t just about the victims—the more TPJ activation, the more likely you are to forgive transgressors or accept the role of mitigating factors (e.g., poverty) in explaining their behavior.[29]
So on a neurobiological level, second-party punishers are about disgust, anger, and pain, whereas third-party punishers have the same plus the perspective taking needed to view someone else’s misfortune as akin to your own. But then there is the crucial additional finding in all these cases: retributive punishing in any of these guises also activates the dopamine circuitry involved in reward (the ventral tegmentum and nucleus accumbens). Activation by punishment of the brain region goosed by the likes of orgasm or cocaine. It feels good.[30]
Additional studies make the point even further. Symbolic punishment doesn’t activate reward circuits as much as does the real thing (e.g., blasting someone with a loud noise). More punishment correlates with more activation of the nucleus accumbens, and lots of accumbens activation when you get to punish a cheater for free predicts a greater likelihood of paying to punish a cheater. The circuitry activates whether you are someone who is independently meting out punishment or a conformer joining the vengeful crowd.
Being altruistic can feel good—it decreases pain in cancer patients, blunts the activation of neural pain pathways in response to shock. It even literally gives you a warm glow (such that people estimate ambient temperatures as being higher after an altruistic act). Nice. But being able to righteously punish evildoers feels really good. But as will be seen in a bit, even that can be tamed.[31]
Justice Served V
The United States began as an experiment in convincing a bunch of unlike-minded states to form, if not a perfect union, at least a functional one. This was an iffy proposition from the start; it took nearly a century for Americans to transition from statements like “The United States are doing X” to “The United States is doing X.” And from the start, there has always been an opposition that views the very notion of a federated government as tyranny. That certainly describes the Confederacy. Likewise for those resisting federal mask mandates during the pandemic. Likewise on January 6, 2020, for those who believed that it was despotic for those DC pedophiles to insist that the person who loses an election doesn’t get to be president.
The “patriot” antigovernment militia movement continues to grow, and provided the toxic ideology that motivated an American to declare war against the United States in 1995. Most proximally, he was outraged by the siege of White supremacist Randy Weaver and family in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, and the siege of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, in 1993.[*] On the second anniversary of the Waco siege, he used a bomb made of five thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Timothy McVeigh’s act of terrorism was the most destructive in American history (until 9/11). He killed 168 people, injured 853. More than three hundred surrounding buildings were damaged and 400 people left homeless; the blast registered 6.0 on the Richter scale fifty-five miles away. And as the detail seared into everyone’s memory, McVeigh’s victims included 9 children in a day care center in the building.
Thanks to eyewitness descriptions, McVeigh was soon apprehended. His statements in the years after were conflicting: He claimed he didn’t know there was a day care center in the building and that if he had, he would have shifted targets; he dismissed the dead children as “collateral damage.” He described understanding the pain of victims’ families; he said that he had no sympathy for them. He wondered if maybe he should have bypassed a bombing and instead used his army-acquired skill as a sniper to take out selected targets; he expressed regret at not killing more people. His 1997 trial was moved to Denver, because of the impossibility of a fair trial in Oklahoma; it was estimated that 360,000 Oklahomans knew someone who worked in the Murrah Building. He was found guilty of all charges and given the death penalty. He asserted his supposed dominance by describing his eventual execution as “state-assisted suicide.”
He would be executed by lethal injection, which by then had become the technique of choice, viewed as more humane than the electric chair or gas chamber. The prisoner is strapped down, an IV line is put into the arm (with a backup line into the other), and a trio of drugs is infused that, sequentially, renders the person unconscious within seconds, paralyzes the person and thus stops their breathing, and stops their heart. The painless process kills the prisoner within minutes.
Naturally, it’s not so simple. Trained medical professionals usually refuse to participate or are banned from doing so by their state professional board. As a result, the IV line is put in by a correctional officer, who often botches things, with multiple sticks required or the vein missed entirely so that drug is injected into muscle and then absorbed slowly.[*] The initial anesthetic, which rapidly induces unconsciousness, also wears off quickly, so the subsequent steps might be done to someone who is conscious and feeling pain but can’t express that because they are paralyzed. Sometimes the second drug does not adequately stop breathing, minutes passing with the prisoner gasping for air. Moreover, many drug manufacturers, particularly in the European Union, refuse to sell or are banned from selling a medical drug that will be used for killing, and various states have had to improvise alternative drug cocktails, with varying degrees of success at inducing a painless death.
Despite those potential snafus, McVeigh’s 2001 execution went off without a hitch. The night before, he met with a priest, watched some TV, and had his last meal. Incongruously, PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, had written to the warden, stating that after the lives McVeigh had taken, animals should at least be spared and he be served a vegetarian meal. The warden, defending McVeigh’s rights, told PETA to get lost and that he could eat whatever he wanted, so long as it didn’t involve alcohol or cost more than twenty dollars; whether McVeigh heeded PETA’s call is unknown, but his last meal consisted of mint chocolate chip ice cream.
Normally, the witness room has seats for relatives of the victim; more than three hundred applied to be there, along with survivors of the bombing. Room was made for ten, with the rest allowed to watch the execution by a video link from the Terre Haute, Indiana, prison to Oklahoma City; a bug in the video system delayed the execution for ten minutes. The remaining witnesses were mostly reporters, and all gave the same account: McVeigh, from the gurney, made eye contact and nodded slightly to each witness; he lay on his back, stared at the ceiling, and died with his eyes open. While silent throughout, McVeigh had requested that copies be handed to witnesses of the 1875 poem “Invictus,” by William Ernest Henley, a treacly, self-congratulatory paean to stoicism in which the author acclaims himself as unconquerable, unbowed, and with a fearless visage, ending with flourishy bragging about mastering his fate and captaining his soul. Screw you all, the mass murderer had said one last time.
