Posts tagged: trust

The Goal of Police Reform Must Be To Restore Trust Between Police and Citizens

One of the only promising political developments as of late is the possibility of policing reform, in some way to change the incentives that the police face in order to reduce police brutality. I will say, however, that I worry that people aren’t thinking far enough in advance of what a desirable new institutional equilibrium looks like. What sort of enduring relationship do we want there to be between police and the citizens they are sworn to protect?

The relationship we want is mutual trust. We want to be able to trust police to enforce the law (or at least most laws, besides grossly unjust and absurd ones), and to otherwise abide by ordinary moral norms. And we want police to be able to trust most people so they don’t react in suspicious and harmful ways without cause. That’s absolutely key: we want both groups to be able to trust each other. High trust and trustworthiness is a kind of equilibrium, and everyone is more at ease and can focus more on positive projects and forms of life when trust is high.

The worry I have about the current discussion is that the cited goals don’t seem to be to restore trust but to destroy it and make it harder than ever to restore. Violent protests and continued policy brutality are leading to fewer police and police less willing to do their jobs. This means crime will increase because of police inaction, and police brutality may not be reduced as a result. What we want is more cops on the beat, not fewer, since police presence seems to have a clear negative effect on crime. But we also want the behavior of police to change to resemble that more like in Western Europe, with less militarization, fewer violent weapons, and less use of physical force. We want police to police well, and we should want to be able to trust them to police and police well.

The first step in any reform, then, is to ensure that the police are given the right incentives to be trustworthy, in particular by acting within the norms of ordinary moral behavior and the public’s moral expectations about permissible police use of force. Ending qualified immunity could be a step in this direction because the penalties for acting outside of the moral norm would increase. The second step is to reform policing so that police are taught to be more trusting, and less suspicion and desiring to dominate others. With a large public reform in this direction, coupled with benefits for police who are more trusting and trustworthy would be a big step in the right direction. But policy that is punitive, that leads the police to feel despised and untrusted, and so with little incentive to reform, is likely to produce worse policy outcomes.

Part of trust is believing that trustees are acting for moral reasons, so we do not want reforms merely aimed at beating cops down and appealing solely to their self-interest. We should also aim at policy that encourages police to act on their conscience, rather than penalizing them for doing so. If we think police are only behaving out of fear, then they will misbehave when they think they can get away with it. But incentives for acting morally can generate more stable behavior because the desired behavior comes from within.

It turns out that trust in the legal system is closely correlated with social trust, though we don’t know why just yet. My sense is that police are often seen as exemplary community members, and so when trust in police falls, trust in most people can fall, at least among younger people who are still deciding how trusting to be. We very much don’t want this to happen, since social trust has enormous benefits. So another reason to support police reform is the potentially positive effect on social trust.

So, when formulating police policy, please keep the end goal in mind: we want to trust police to enforce the law morally. Our goal should not be to punish the police or destroy them, but to reorient their incentives, discourage bad behavior, and encourage good, trustworthy behavior. As trustworthiness rises, trust can rise as well, creating a mutually reinforcing cycle. The present attitudes towards the police, however, seem destined to reduce trust in the police and reduce police presence, which will hurt everyone. We need policing reform, but it must be guided by the goal of building community trust.

 

Low Trust America – Cops and Protestors in a Low Trust Equilibrium

What happened in Minneapolis is a trust disaster. Due to the legacy of racism, black Americans don’t trust legal officials. Indeed, only 17% of black Americans say *most people* can be trusted, in contrast with 46% of whites. I would also bet that white cops trust black Americans relatively little, though getting good survey data on this would be next to impossible. From studying trust, my sense is that police distrust leads some police officers to use excessive force, either out of fear or disdain for untrusted blacks.

Excessive force arguably leads black Americans to resent police action more, and trust the police even less. Accordingly, mutual distrust is a social equilibrium in inner cities, and this tense environment creates the powder-keg social contexts we’ve seen all over the country. That is what it’s like living in a low trust society – conflict can erupt at any time.

Now for some speculation. My guess is that low trust equilibrium was disrupted in the past because black Americans had more high status leaders who believed in non-violence, or at least who believed in non-violence more strongly than most people. The willingness of black protestors to avoid violence even in situations when it would be justified was a way of signaling honesty, integrity, and conviction. That made them harder to dismiss and ignore, and so harder to distrust. That’s not to say they weren’t mistrusted! But it was one way to extricate a community from a low trust equilibrium.

This is totally unfair to oppressed groups, but given how I think about building trust, it seems to me a more effective strategy than more violent protesting.

You build trust by playing cooperate when others expect you to defect; and if you are prepared to be non-violence in more cases than people expect, and at great cost to yourself, you can help extricate your community from a low trust equilibrium. But I worry we have lost the moral basis for deeply committed non-violence.

Unlike fifty years ago, we don’t have many national leaders who believe in systematic non-violence, or at least who are known for holding that position. Somehow older generations have not passed on a strong belief in non-violence to younger people.

I don’t know why this is. But my suspicion is that it is hard to motivate radical non-violence outside of religious belief systems where one thinks that evil people will ultimately get what they deserve, either through divine or karmic punishment. You can get radical non-violence more easily from Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism than you can from secular doctrines because those who suffer from being non-violent can psychologically compensate themselves. For they believe that punishment and vengeance are the job or someone or something else. People will get what they deserve, but not from me!

Last year I wrote a reference piece on Christian anarchism, which led me to read a lot of Christian arguments for pacifism. They were better than I thought, so I’ve been moving in a pacifist direction. But if it weren’t for Jesus’ teachings and behavior, I’m not sure I’d be very convinced that radical non-violence was the way to go. It helps me to know that, in the end, justice will be done.

Of course, other reforms can help restore trust, especially giving police incentive to behave in a more trustworthy fashion. But a strong religion-level commitment to non-violence may help too.

The Queen Builds Trust

Monarchies tend to be more trusting than non-monarchies. Why? One hypothesis is that societies with non-partisan leaders, who are “above the fray,” have the unique ability to remind everyone of the common interests of the tribe/nation. That’s one reason Queen Elizabeth’s amazing message to the British people is so effective. She speaks to all of the British people about their common concerns, about how they need one another, while taking no partisan stances.

It helps that, as she points out, she addressed the nation during World War II, as a teenager. This was a time when the Brits say “everyone did their bit,” activities that I think played a major trust-building role during and after the war.

The Queen also thanks people in whom people already trust a great deal, like nurses and doctors.

Further, she emphasizes how many people are observing important social norms and succeeding in tackling the virus. And she stresses that people will want to look upon their own actions favorably in the future, again stressing the importance and motivation for following important norms, like staying home, washing one’s hands, and so on.

In short, the Queen builds trust by being a long-time non-partisan, tribe-unifying, trust-reminding, norm-cueing, and compliance-motivating high-status trendsetter. From a trust-building perspective, she’s got it all!

Trump cannot be this kind of leader, not just temperamentally, but because he polarizes public opinion perhaps more than any figure in American politics in historical memory. The difference in leadership ability could not be more stark.

If you haven’t watched the video, take a few minutes and watch it.

Low Trust Exacerbates Polarization

In my next book, A Liberal Democratic Peace: Creating Trust in Polarized Times, I develop what I call the distrust and divergence hypothesis, where political polarization and falling social and political trust are in a causal feedback loop. I suggest a number of causal connections between the two phenomena, but I thought I’d discuss a new paper someone sent me two weeks ago. Hans Pitlik and Martin Rode have found that “trusting people have a lower propensity to express support for extreme policies, leading to a general moderation of preferences in trusting societies” which allows for more consensus on critical reforms.

Here’s my basic guess as to what’s going on. When people distrust others, they’re much less likely to listen to them, and much more likely to be suspicious of consensus narratives in explaining certain kinds of events. That’s the connection between trust and conspiracy theorizing. If most people can’t be trusted, we probably shouldn’t believe what most people believe (of course, that’s fallacious reasoning, but it’s emotionally intuitive). But if we trust others, we don’t think they’re lying to us and we think their beliefs are probably well-grounded, and so when we trust others, we tend to modify our own points of view towards the conventional wisdom.

That’s not to say this pattern is especially good, but if we think people tend to be less reliable with respect to the political truth when they’ve epistemically isolated themselves from most other people, then we should worry about how low trust people form their beliefs vis-a-vis high trust people. And if we want to reduce polarization, we may want to pursue trust-increasing public policy.

My Review of Bob Talisse’s Overdoing Democracy

I recently reviewed Bob Talisse’s important new book, Overdoing Democracy, in an online journal, Erraticus, which is open access. Do take a look. The book is good, and it is both inexpensive and well-written. So if you’re interested in the subject, I recommend the book strongly.

Bob’s basic thesis is that American democracy is hurt by the fact that many people are extending democratic debates into too many parts of social life, creating unhealthy and destructive “political saturation.” I agree with his diagnosis, which is well-defended, but Bob tries to avoid giving concrete solutions to avoid taking a side in our democratic disputes, as well as foregoing explaining some of the mechanisms that have led to political saturation, both of which have some benefits, but also some costs.

An excerpt from my review:

I also thought the prescriptive part of the book would have profited from a discussion of why we’re seeing so much political saturation. I see two reasons Talisse doesn’t discuss: (1) that governments have power over a huge range of activities that they did not always have, and (2) that secularization is destroying the main source of cross-cutting identities—religious faith. It might be that societies will be tempted to overdo democracy when they want government to engage in a wide range of activities. Government is force, and so some will invariably wield it against others. Expanded states may mean expanded conflicts, even if one of our conflicts is over how extensive the state ought to be. And it might be that, with the decline of religious faith, we simply have fewer things that we place ultimate value on.

You don’t have to be a religious conservative to think these two phenomena will lead us to overdo democracy. It is not an especially partisan thought that the temptation to overdo democracy will continue unless we limit government’s power over our lives more than we do at present, since that will lower the stakes of politics. Nor is it expressly factional to think that we’re going to be tempted to overdo democracy if we lack compelling comprehensive doctrines that prioritize non-political values. This is true in particular because a relatively less religious society will tend to have more people with ideological commitments because—I think, plausibly—political ideology is the religion of modernity.

I recognize my recommendations will invite people to see the red tribe. Religion and limited government are unfortunately seen as red rather than blue values. But this is a mistake. Decentralizing and limiting the federal government will enable some parts of the country to better pursue a social democratic agenda. And allowing for more religious activity doesn’t necessarily mean more conservative Christians. There are liberal Christians, especially in marginalized communities.

So I think when we try to explore what it would take to stop overdoing democracy, we must look at solutions that may risk tempting our interlocutors to think that we’re in the red tribe or the blue tribe. But such an inquiry is necessary anyway. And without this inquiry, Overdoing Democracy struck me as incomplete. But that does not detract from the overall value of this excellent book, and is something that Talisse can explore in other work.

My Next Book – A Liberal Democratic Peace: Creating Trust in Polarized Times

I am pleased to announce that my next book, A Liberal Democratic Peace: Creating Trust in Polarized Times, will be published late this year with Oxford University Press. It is the data-driven sequel to Must Politics Be War? I argue in this book that specific liberal rights practices can not only be morally justified, but create social and political trust in the real world with real people. I focus primarily on freedom of associations, markets, social insurance, quality of governance, and democratic elections.
 
I wrote MPBW primarily for philosophers and political theorists, but this book is aimed more broadly at political scientists, economists, and policy people. It has philosophical argumentation, but I mark out where it begins and ends so that non-philosophical readers can profit from my overall argument. This book will also be much cheaper, under $30, so if you’re not a philosopher or political theorist who wants to learn about how we can build trust in diverse societies, then this book is for you.
 
Here’s another part of my pitch. I think that mistrust and polarization are in a causal feedback loop, and so those of you who are interested in addressing polarization may find the book of interest as well. If there are laws and policies that can increase trust, then perhaps we can contain the more destructive aspects of political polarization.

Absolving the Six Deadly Sins of the Trust Literature: Reply to Nowrasteh and Forrester

Last week, Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew Forrester published a Cato working paper arguing that the empirical trust literature is so rife with weaknesses that we can’t learn much from it. Their central finding is that sub-regional trust levels in the United States don’t correlate with economic output, despite trust theorists arguing that trust promotes economic growth (primarily, probably, because trust lowers transactions costs, increasing the amount of exchange, and because of better policy implementation through a more trustworthy civil service).

My sense from the trust literature is that many of these concerns have been amply addressed. I’ve spoken with some trust researchers I know and thought I’d blog some of the responses. The basic worry is that Nowrasteh and Forrester are sort of selective in the papers they feature. The trust literature is actually pretty self-reflective, and have addressed a number of these worries.

Here are what Nowrasteh and Forrester claim are sins in the literature. SIN 1:

The first deadly sin of the trust-growth literature is that it contains no macroeconomic growth model that incorporates trust, either in its micro-foundations or otherwise (Beugelsdijk and Maseland, 2011, p. 213). Furthermore, the trust-growth literature does not contain a formal theory of social capital formation broadly or one of trust specifically (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, 2011, p. 469). Most trust researchers aggregate assumed effciencies at the microeconomic level up to the macroeconomic level and assume that trust creates economy-wide growth: an illegitimate leap in the logic of micro- to- macro functioning (Beugelsdijk and Maseland, 2011, p. 208). The relationship between an individual’s trust and income may not be true for society and cannot be aggregated up to form a truthful representation of the whole (Beugelsdijk and Maseland, 2011, p. 208).

Response: the authors don’t engage with the part of the trust literature that explores transmission mechanisms, writing just a bit about theoretical models in pp. 1-2. A number of papers, including this one, find that human capital and the quality of judicial-bureaucratic institutions are the two main transmission channels. In the US context, the first is hard to pinpoint because people often don’t work where they were educated. The second is also a problem since much institutional quality is defined at the federal level.

Another difficulty Nowrasteh and Forrester cite is supposedly that the literature “contains no macroeconomic growth model that incorporates trust.” Apparently this is false. If the likely transmission mechanisms are through institutions and human capital, there are plenty of growth models illustrating such effects. What the formal models miss is how to explain how trust affects institutions and human capital. However, see this paper, this paper, this paper, and Zak and Knack’s highly cited investment driven model. Oh, and this paper and this paper too. On to SIN 2:

The second deadly sin of the trust literature is that the trust question itself does not produce internally valid responses. Recall, the trust question is: \Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you need to be very careful in dealing with people?” There is no universal measure of trust because, in part, its meaning is culturally and contextually specific (Beugelsdijk and Maseland, 2011, p. xvii). The responses to the trust question are \Most people can be trusted,” \Can’t be too careful,” and \Depends.” The meaning of those responses is also unclear.

It’s not true that the trust question doesn’t produce internally valid responses. The primary argument they give is a twenty-year-old quote from Robert Putnam. But a number of studies do show that the generalized trust question does rather well: here, Sapienza 2013 which the authors cite but not on this point, and a Naef and Schupp 2009 working paper using the GSOEP dataset all show clearly that the question produces valid responses. Even Nannestad’s well-known 2008 review notes that the trust question has excellent test-retest stats. Now SIN 3:

The third deadly sin of the trust literature is that responses to the trust question do not generally predict trusting behavior in real-world micro-level experiments or in trust games.

The papers above also address this deadly sin, such as the Sapienza paper, which the authors cite, but, again, don’t draw the right conclusions from. Here’s another paper connecting trust responses and actual behavior. SIN 4:

The fourth deadly sin is that many of the major papers in the trust literature are contaminated by various types of sample biases.

The main findings in the literature can be replicated using much larger samples. And trust scores are so stable over time that slight demographic changes like those they describe are not relevant. SIN 5:

The fifth deadly sin is that even if the trust question were free from measurement error or sample selection bias, trust may be a proxy measurement for other deeper causes of economic development.

The trouble here is that the literature hasn’t found any examples of this. It’s also a bit of a cheap shot because that can be used as an argument against pretty much all findings in the empirical growth literature. SIN 6:

The sixth deadly sin of the empirical trust literature is that sub-national level data in the United States that is collected under better conditions do not indicate a robust positive relationship between trust and growth.

The sixth sin is only a problem if you think that regional trust should cause regional growth. But it might be that the different regions are sufficiently economically integrated with each other that isolating trust and growth in each region doesn’t tell us much.

In sum, Nowrasteh and Forrester seem to have missed some important papers that I think weaken their argument. It will be interesting to see how their paper develops once they take these papers into account. I think they’ll probably need to stop framing the paper in terms of identifying deadly sins, though.

Why Democrats Should Try to Restore Political Trust

The final question at the Democratic debate last night concerned the Ellen-W friendship and invited candidates to talk about a surprising friendship they have with someone across the political isle. Many viewers complained about the question, but I thought is it was appropriate and informative. A number of the candidates talked about the importance of restoring lost bipartisan trust. I appreciate that because bipartisan trust is inherently valuable. But I also think it makes political sense for Democrats. The societies that have the most extensive welfare states tend to be the most trusting, and that’s likely because high trust populations are more likely to support extensive redistribution. It is no coincidence that nation-states developed extensive social insurance following two world wars. Wars with other countries tend to unite nations, and create the solidarity necessary to convince richer and more powerful citizens to allow limits on their economic self-interest.

This is why restoring trust and lowering polarization is really important for Democrats’ policy goals, since they want large expansions of the welfare state. When Democrats act to increase polarization and sow distrust, they will often make their social democratic aims less politically feasible.

Unfortunately, Republicans lack the same incentives.

Beto Makes Politics War

Last night, Beto O’Rourke said that religious institutions that refuse to accept same-sex marriage should lose their tax-exempt status. That’s a sure fire way to make politics war: use the federal government to stigmatize half the country. Every conservative mosque, synagogue, and church in the country would be tarred by their own government as bigoted and fined for what they believe. Note that even the most committed judicial leftists would not revoke the tax-exempt status of mosques, synagogues, and churches, just certain non-profits and universities. And even that remains a distinctly minority position.

Comments like this are why many people of faith don’t trust the left to protect their liberties. The worry is that Beto let slip what most politically and socially powerful leftists believe in their hearts. I hope that’s not true, but in a country riven by polarization and mistrust, it is natural to wonder.

And yes, it’s a cliche, but a true one: this is how you get Trump. What are conservative people of faith supposed to do if this is what Democrats would do in office?

 

Operationalizing the French-Ahmari Debate by Measuring Trustworthiness

I think the recent intra-conservative French-Ahmari debate can be partially resolved by determining the extent to which secular progressives can be trusted to protect robust freedom of religion for religious traditionalists with conservative views about human sexuality.

If secular progressives are trustworthy, at least by and large, then French’s strategy of working within liberal democratic institutions makes sense. Conservatives should hold secular progressives to a constitutional order that they accept in general, but chafe at in certain cases. Secular progressives cannot always be trusted to uphold robust freedom of religion, but they’re trustworthy enough not to fundamentally undermine Christianity in the United States. They will obey liberal democratic norms on the whole; conservatives just have to fight to keep them honest.*

However, if secular progressives aren’t trustworthy, then Ahmari’s approach starts to make sense. Secular progressives will tend to undermine robust protections for freedom of religion in a systematic way, and so ignore constitutional constraints whenever they can get away with it. In that case, politics is war regarding freedom of religion, and conservatives may be permitted to respond in kind. Perhaps the liberal legal settlement is therefore unstable because the left cannot be trusted to uphold it, and so the only truly feasible arrangement is cultural and political victory in the fight against the left. There’s no peace and no middle ground because the other side isn’t trustworthy, and so can’t be trusted to keep a liberal democratic peace.

Social scientists have ways of measuring trust and trustworthiness in society and in institutions (I discuss them here), and we could probably use these tools to figure out the extent to which secular progressives can be trusted to protect robust freedom of religion. It would involve trying to systematically determine the extent to which secular progressives respect freedom of religion when they hold enough political power to violate it. At present, I’m not sure we have enough data to know for sure. There are certainly warning signs that make Ahmari’s position attractive to some, but I think we are far from the point where it is clear that we must overturn our liberal democratic peace.

* Yes, yes, conservatives need to be kept honest too.

Interviewed at 3:16 AM on Must Politics Be War?

Richard Marshall interviews me at 3:16 AM, a popular site for discussion of new work in philosophy. We primarily discuss my book, Must Politics Be War? (which you can buy from a link on the right of the blog or at the link), but we also talk about American politics, my biography, and my work on the proper role of religion in the public square. My work on religion in the public square can be found in my first book, Liberal Politics and Public Faith: Beyond Separation.

Must Politics Be War? in 500 words

My recent book, Must Politics Be War? Restoring Our Trust in the Open Society, argues that liberal democratic order has the unique capacity to avoid a war-like politics. Here’s a summary of the problem and my solution.

The problem of political war: low social and political trust leads to a war-like politics. But high trust is generally infeasible in societies with diverse perspectives on moral matters.

Why? People disagree about what is of value and what morality requires, so it is hard for them to appear trustworthy to one another. What one person counts as trustworthy behavior, another may count as untrustworthy. And when people have deep evaluative disagreements, we tend to see rejection of our views as evidence of an intellectual and/or moral vice on the part of those who disagree.

How do we overcome distrust? By motivating socially trustworthy behavior, behavior that multiple perspectives can see as evidence that one another are trustworthy. Distrust is overcome, then, by observing, or being able to observe, social trustworthiness.

To get social trustworthiness, we need people to comply with social norms that all can see themselves and others are having reason of their own to endorse and internalize as their own. In this way, we need compliance with social norms that diverse perspectives can converge upon. A public justification requirement thus naturally arises from a concern to sustain trust among diverse perspectives. If we want trust in a diverse society, we need to ensure that the social norms to which we are all subject can be justified to each (somewhat idealized) members of the public.

The public justification requirement also applies to legal and constitutional norms. If we organize our legal and constitutional norms according to which norms are justified for each person, we can drive socially trustworthy behavior, which in turn can sustain trusting attitudes even in the face of deep evaluative disagreements.

However, in a diverse society, it is hard to publicly justify non-neutral laws and policies, since people who reject the laws and policies as violent impositions of alien values will have defeater reasons for those laws and policies. This means that the unjustifiably coerced will see no reason to be trustworthy with respect to those laws and policies, and so will disobey when they can get away with it.

Once we throw out all the non-neutral laws and policies, we will be left with a system of rights (civil, economic, and political) that protect a large measure of liberty for each individual or group to live their own lives in their own way. We will end up with an open society. For this reason, an open society has the unique capacity to sustain trust between diverse perspectives, rendering high levels of trust feasible even under diverse conditions, solving the problem of political war.