Unfair (47 page)

In one experiment, a group:
Miller,
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil
, 30. Some of the games were benign in nature and some required physical confrontation in order to win. Miller,
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil
, 30.

In the “anonymous” second set:
Miller,
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil
, 30.

It seemed to be the costumes:
Miller,
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil
, 30–31.

As a follow-up, the researchers decided:
Vedantam, “Behind a Halloween Mask.”

In the experiment, young trick-or-treaters:
Vedantam, “Behind a Halloween Mask.”

The person who greeted the children:
Vedantam, “Behind a Halloween Mask.”

So what did the kids do:
Vedantam, “Behind a Halloween Mask.”

Well, lots of them stole:
Vedantam, “Behind a Halloween Mask.”

Some groups took the entire:
Vedantam, “Behind a Halloween Mask.”

But there was an interesting twist:
Vedantam, “Behind a Halloween Mask.”

We have all heard:
Jill Filipovic, “The Conservative Philosophy of Tragedy: Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People,”
Guardian
, December 21, 2012,
http://www.theguardian.com/​commentisfree/2012​/dec/21/guns-conservative-philosophy-tragedy
.

Clutching a weapon:
Jessica Witt and James Brockmole, “Action Alters Object Identification: Wielding a Gun Increases the Bias to See Guns,”
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance
38, no. 5 (2012): 1159, doi: 10.1037/a0027881.

In one set of studies:
Witt and Brockmole, “Action Alters Object Identification,” 1159.

Participants were told that:
Witt and Brockmole, “Action Alters Object Identification,” 1160.

With a gun in hand:
Witt and Brockmole, “Action Alters Object Identification,” 1165.

Moreover, simply having a gun:
Witt and Brockmole, “Action Alters Object Identification,” 1164.

The best explanation is that:
Witt and Brockmole, “Action Alters Object Identification,” 1159–60; 1166.

And that suggests that having:
Witt and Brockmole, “Action Alters Object Identification,” 1166.

Even the surrounding landscape:
Anyone who has ever taken the time to look at a map of crimes in his or her community will have noted one of the key features of crime: it is extremely spatially concentrated. Ken Pease, “Crime Reduction,” in
The Oxford Handbook of Criminology
, eds. Mike Maguire, Rod Morgan, and Robert Reiner, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 960. Part of the explanation for this phenomenon has to do with other factors that are spatially concentrated, like poverty. But there is also evidence that elements in the physical landscape may themselves engender crime. Benforado, “The Geography of Criminal Law,” 842–43.

Back in the early 1980s:
George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson, “Broken Windows: The Police and Neighborhood Safety,”
Atlantic Monthly
, March 1, 1982,
http://www.theatlantic.com/​magazine/archive/1982​/03/broken-windows/304465/2/
.

For a long time, the notion:
Benforado, “The Geography of Criminal Law,” 842–43; Bernard E. Harcourt, “Reflecting on the Subject: A Critique of the Social Influence Conception of Deterrence, the Broken Windows Theory, and Order-Maintenance Policing New York Style,”
Michigan Law Review
97 (1998); Kees Keizer, Siegwart Lindenberg, and Linda Steg, “The Spreading of Disorder,”
Science
322 (2008): 1681; D. W. Miller, “Poking Holes in the Theory of ‘Broken Windows,' ”
Chronicle of Higher Education
31, no. 17 (2001)

In one set of experiments:
Keizer, Lindenberg, and Steg, “The Spreading of Disorder,” 1681–85.

When there was more graffiti:
Keizer, Lindenberg, and Steg, “The Spreading of Disorder,” 1684.

When the experimenters illegally locked:
Keizer, Lindenberg, and Steg, “The Spreading of Disorder,” 1683–84.

On a positive note:
Irus Braverman, “Governing Certain Things: The Regulation of Street Trees in Four North American Cities,”
Tulane Environmental Law Journal
22, no. 1 (2008): 47; Frances E. Kuo and William C. Sullivan, “Environment and Crime in the Inner City: Does Vegetation Reduce Crime?,”
Environment and Behavior
33, no. 3 (May 2001): 343–64.

Indeed, in my hometown:
Mary K. Wolfe and Jeremy Mennis, “Does Vegetation Encourage or Suppress Urban Crime? Evidence from Philadelphia, PA,”
Landscape and Urban Planning
108 (November–December 2012): 112–22.

The question that sparked it:
Miller,
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil
, 26–27. If you guessed, “1 in 100,” you can count yourself as average; if you guessed “1 in 1,000” you share company with the professional psychologists that Stanley Milgram surveyed before conducting his experiments on compliance. Stanley Milgram, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,”
Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology
67, no. 4 (1963): 375, doi: 10.1037/h0040525; Thomas Blass, “The Milgram Paradigm After 35 Years: Some Things We Now Know about Obedience to Authority,”
Journal of Applied Social Psychology
29, no. 5 (May 1999): 963–64, doi: 10.1111/j.1559-1816.1999.tb00134.x; Stanley Milgram,
Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View
(New York: Harper and Row, 1974): 31; Philip G. Zimbardo and Michael R. Leippe,
The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1991): 67–68.

Although logic suggested that:
The 63 percent figure is from the participants in Milgram's first experiment, which is similar to the level observed in follow-up work. Zimbardo and Leippe,
The Psychology of Attitude Change and Social Influence
, 68.

What was even more interesting:
Milgram,
Obedience to Authority
, 35, 60–61, 94–95, 119.

If so, obedience plunged:
Milgram,
Obedience to Authority
, 116–21.

With a scientist:
Milgram,
Obedience to Authority
, 16, 95, 99–105.

In the Bridgeport lab:
Milgram,
Obedience to Authority
, 60–70.

We want to believe that:
Miller,
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil
, 8, 26.

But that is simply:
As the psychologist Phil Zimbardo has written, “While a few bad apples might spoil the barrel (filled with good fruit/people), a barrel filled with vinegar will
always
transform sweet cucumbers into sour pickles—regardless of the best intentions, resilience, and genetic nature of those cucumbers.” Miller,
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil
, 47.

There is psychological truth behind:
Miller,
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil
, 3.

Arendt was writing about:
Miller,
The Social Psychology of Good and Evil
, 3. According to Arendt, he was “not even sinister”: an unexceptional bureaucrat had coordinated the execution of millions of people. Nick Cohen, “Where Be Monsters?”
Observer
, January 17, 2004,
http://www.theguardian.com/​uk/2004/jan/18​/ukcrime.guardiancolumnists
.

Here was someone who had:
Kathleen B. Jones, “The Trial of Hannah Arendt,”
Humanities
35, no. 2 (March/April 2014),
http://www.neh.gov/​humanities/2014​/marchapril/feature​/the-trial-hannah-arendt
.

Although subsequent research has revealed:
Jennifer Schuessler, “Book Portrays Eichmann as Evil, but Not Banal,”
New York Times
, September 2, 2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/​2014/09/​03/books/book-portrays-eichmann-as-evil-but-not-banal.html?_r=0
.

 

Gerry Deegan was dying:
Connick v. Thompson, 131 S. Ct. 1350, 1374–75 (2011) (Ginsburg, J., dissenting); Dahlia Lithwick, “Cruel but Not Unusual: Clarence Thomas Writes
One of the Meanest Supreme Court Decisions Ever,”
Slate
, April 11, 2011,
http://www.slate.com/​articles/news_and_politics​/jurisprudence/2011/04/cruel_but_not_unusual.single.html
.

He had worked for:
James Ridgeway and Jean Casella, “14 Years on Death Row. $14 Million in Damages?”
Mother Jones
, October 6, 2010,
http://www.motherjones.com/​politics​/2010/09/connick-v-thompson
.

Now his number had come up:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1374–75 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

Riehlmann was a former prosecutor:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1374–75 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

It all started with:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1371 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

The only witness to the shooting:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1371 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

But that didn't narrow things:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1371 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

The money lured Richard Perkins:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1371 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

According to Perkins:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1371 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

The police snagged Freeman:
John Thompson, “The Prosecution Rests, but I Can't,”
New York Times
, April 9, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/​2011/04/10​/opinion/10thompson.html?pagewanted=all
;
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1371 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting); Thompson, “The Prosecution Rests.”

Thompson's two sons were there:
Thompson, “The Prosecution Rests.”

They watched as the police:
Thompson, “The Prosecution Rests.”

He was twenty-two:
Thompson, “The Prosecution Rests.”

Freeman matched the description:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1371 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

But it was Thompson:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1371 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

His photo in the paper:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1372 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

Now, looking at the Afro:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1372 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

And when they went down:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1372 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

What's more, Freeman had turned:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1371–72 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

All they had to do:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1372 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

The opening move was to try:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1372 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

If he chose to testify:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1372 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

And without Thompson's testimony:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1374 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

Just as important, a prior:
Susan Bandes, “The Lone Miscreant, The Self-Training Prosecutor, and Other Fictions: A Comment on Connick v. Thompson,”
Fordham Law Review
715 (2012): 722.

Deegan was enlisted to assist:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1372 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

Thompson was going:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1356.

Harry F. Connick Sr., the district attorney:
“Harry Connick Jr.,”
Biography.com
, accessed May 13, 2014,
http://www.biography.com/​people/harry-connick-jr-5542
;
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1372 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

John Thompson was sent to prison:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1370 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting); Thompson, “The Prosecution Rests”; Marianne Fisher-Giorlando, “Louisiana,” in
The Social History of Crime and Punishment in America: An Encyclopedia
, ed. Wilbur R. Miller (Los Angeles: SAGE Publications, 2012), 1041.

He was sitting there now:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1370 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

During the carjacking, the eldest:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1371 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

A crime-scene investigator had:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1371 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

But Thompson's lawyer never knew:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1373 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).

He had kept all of this:
Connick
, 131 S. Ct. at 1375 (Ginsburg, J., dissenting).