On his book The Law of Good People: Challenging States' Ability to Regulate Human Behavior
Cover Interview of January 30, 2019
The wide angle
The book attempts to bring together three related bodies of literature
and make them speak to each other. The first one is behavioral economics. Through
thousands of experiments, this literature has shown how limited people are in
their decision making. Current research on people’s bounded rationality, on solutions
to problems such as pensions, food, organ donation, and the like, are important
but behavioral sciences could potentially contribute more by doing more
research on people’s ability to improve their ethicality and by writing more on
larger questions such as the rule of law in society.
The second one is law and society, which focuses on compliance
and rule following behavior with little attention paid to behavioral mechanisms.
In contrast to studies in sociology and political science, the impact of the behavioral
sciences on the law and society literature is limited to very narrow topics
such as procedural justice and moral judgment; it misses the opportunity to use
the behavioral sciences to study the motivations of people and to act on that
knowledge. The third literature, behavioral ethics, which this book introduces
to the legal scholarship, emerged in psychology and management, with less
attention paid to legal institutions, compliance, and enforcement than will be
needed, if we want to solve the problem of ordinary unethicality.
In this book, I combined these bodies of scholarship to suggest
that we might be able to change laws with the intention of raising people’s awareness
of the law and their motivation to follow the law. According to the view presented
in the book, regulators should be able to determine in advance which types of
situations are likely to encourage acts of ordinary unethicality; which policy
tools are more or less effective when dealing with people who don’t view their
actions as unethical or illegal; and could create a more effective regulatory
system suitable for the different types of rule violators.
Intellectually, the book grew out of my background in
psychology and law: I did my PhD in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program
at UC Berkeley between 1999 and 2004; there, I studied the gap between formal
laws and social norms in the context of trade secret divulgence in Silicon
Valley. I believe the fact that economists and psychologists––Bob Cooter, Rob
Maccoun and Phil Tellock––rather than legal scholars were my advisors, ended up
having a huge impact on my academic research, as I continued studying the
behavioral mechanisms that underlie compliance in numerous contexts in the
years since. My research has focused primarily on the behavioral aspects of the
area of regulation, enforcement, and compliance. In 2011-2013, I had an
opportunity to work in the Corruption Lab in Harvard University, where
I was exposed to behavioral ethics, and had a chance to work with some of the
founding fathers and mothers of this field (e.g., Mahzarin Banaji, Max Bazerman, and
Fancesca Gino), leading me to focus on the intellectual and applied potential of
bringing this field to bear more on legal scholarship.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
The wide angle
The book attempts to bring together three related bodies of literature and make them speak to each other. The first one is behavioral economics. Through thousands of experiments, this literature has shown how limited people are in their decision making. Current research on people’s bounded rationality, on solutions to problems such as pensions, food, organ donation, and the like, are important but behavioral sciences could potentially contribute more by doing more research on people’s ability to improve their ethicality and by writing more on larger questions such as the rule of law in society.
The second one is law and society, which focuses on compliance and rule following behavior with little attention paid to behavioral mechanisms. In contrast to studies in sociology and political science, the impact of the behavioral sciences on the law and society literature is limited to very narrow topics such as procedural justice and moral judgment; it misses the opportunity to use the behavioral sciences to study the motivations of people and to act on that knowledge. The third literature, behavioral ethics, which this book introduces to the legal scholarship, emerged in psychology and management, with less attention paid to legal institutions, compliance, and enforcement than will be needed, if we want to solve the problem of ordinary unethicality.
In this book, I combined these bodies of scholarship to suggest that we might be able to change laws with the intention of raising people’s awareness of the law and their motivation to follow the law. According to the view presented in the book, regulators should be able to determine in advance which types of situations are likely to encourage acts of ordinary unethicality; which policy tools are more or less effective when dealing with people who don’t view their actions as unethical or illegal; and could create a more effective regulatory system suitable for the different types of rule violators.
Intellectually, the book grew out of my background in psychology and law: I did my PhD in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program at UC Berkeley between 1999 and 2004; there, I studied the gap between formal laws and social norms in the context of trade secret divulgence in Silicon Valley. I believe the fact that economists and psychologists––Bob Cooter, Rob Maccoun and Phil Tellock––rather than legal scholars were my advisors, ended up having a huge impact on my academic research, as I continued studying the behavioral mechanisms that underlie compliance in numerous contexts in the years since. My research has focused primarily on the behavioral aspects of the area of regulation, enforcement, and compliance. In 2011-2013, I had an opportunity to work in the Corruption Lab in Harvard University, where I was exposed to behavioral ethics, and had a chance to work with some of the founding fathers and mothers of this field (e.g., Mahzarin Banaji, Max Bazerman, and Fancesca Gino), leading me to focus on the intellectual and applied potential of bringing this field to bear more on legal scholarship.