Transcript The Unnatural Witness

The Unnatural Witness?
Jeanette Garwood
Leeds Metropolitan University
[email protected]
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The Unnatural Witness?
Being an active witness, being willing to
tell what you have seen, when you are
not a victim, is actually a very strange
pro-social action.
The thesis of this presentation is that
the forces against being a witness are
so strong that willingness to bear
witness when one is not a victim is an
odd behaviour.
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The Unnatural Witness?
What are the forces against bearing witness?
Children are strongly socialised against telling
tales

‘Don’t tell me tales’; ‘Don’t be a tattletale’

Thus they make good victims - both of other
children and of adults
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The Unnatural Witness?
Religious Injunction Within both Judaism and Christianity make a
deal of this (and this occurs twice in the Old
Testament)
"Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy
neighbour."
Exodus 20, verse 16
Commentators suggest this requirement is
beyond perjury.
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The Unnatural Witness?
Consider the case of the ‘woman taken in
adultery’ from the New Testament The punishment should be stoning, but the
person without sin is to cast the first stone.
The requirement on the woman, that she be
forgiven, and not be stoned to death, is that
she stop the behaviour in question But she is not to be condemned
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The Unnatural Witness?
Firstly, prohibitions are only required
when people are likely to do wrong.
The Westminster Larger Catechism
(1649) gives an expanded account of
the requirements of the Ninth
Commandment for followers of
Christianity 6
The Unnatural Witness?
“a charitable esteem of our neighbors;
loving, desiring, and rejoicing in their
good name; sorrowing for, and
covering of their infirmities; freely
acknowledging of their gifts and graces,
defending their innocency; a ready
receiving of a good report, and
unwillingness to admit of an evil
report, concerning them; discouraging
talebearers, flatterers, and
slanderers…” (emphasis added)
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The Unnatural Witness?
Two issues are important here - the
prohibition on perjury
The injunction to avoid focussing on
wrong doing
An interesting precursor to operant
conditioning, perhaps
Praise the good…
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The Unnatural Witness?
And this is before the examination of
modern psychology’s findings.
Part of the thesis here, is that there are
good evolutionary reasons for being
suspicious of those who will report on
the behaviours of others.
Harmony in communities is very
important.
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Socialising ‘morality’?
The crude socialisation of children has been
touched upon
Moral development has been subject to much
research, and Hans Eysenck’s approach
might help, because he placed children in a
wider social world, in a way in which stages
theories do not.
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Socialising ‘morality’?
Eysenck’s model rests upon essentially
a socially acceptable behavioural basis,
fed by parents (especially mothers),
seeking to condition children to the
society where they will live as adults,
with the stable (non-neurotic)
introverted child learning mostly quickly
to conform (Eysenck, 1977).
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Socialising ‘morality’?
Conforming would generally mean not
causing disharmony - being a witness can
cause disharmony.
Eysenck’s model would help to account for
the non-witness, rather than the witness.
Harris (1995) indicated that by adolescence
the value systems being adopted are
‘designed’ for the next generation, and
propagated far more by peers than by
parents, issues of loyalties may arise.
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Thinking about the ethic of care
Gilligan (1982) may give more of a window
onto bearing witness - she argued that the
ethic of care is paramount.
This would allow the consideration of impact
to act as a variable in bearing witness:
Serious offences, such as assault might be
reported;
Offences of a less serious kind might be more
easily dealt with within a social framework,
bearing witness becomes less likely.
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Thinking about implicit justice
Robinson & Darley (1995), suggest that
implicit justice is an important factor in the
likelihood of giving import to offence.
Their findings where that the broadly based
participant groups did not always see
offences as seriously as the criminal code
treated them, and were frequently more
lenient than the code would allow.
They comment that it is important to have
some public support for the criminal code,
otherwise it will not be supported.
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Pluralist Intuitionalism
Shwader and Haidt (1993) and Haidt (2001)
may offer an even more compelling case for
the unnatural witness:
Pluralist Intuitionalism, gives a tripartite
account of moral thinking.
Autonomy (law, rights, harm reduction)
Community (collective enterprise; harmony)
Divinity (spiritual nature; sanctity; purity)
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Thinking about In Groups and Out
Groups
Policing has never been a popular role even
before the formal police force became a
concept.
Although rich men were expected to help to
keep the peace, they rapidly found others,
whom they paid, to fulfil the roles of
enforcement on their behalf (Rawlings, 2003).
People who talk to police officers can be seen
in a negative light…
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Thinking about Just Worlds
Blaming the victim is a common outcome
when bad events occur – just deserts seems
to be part of the implicit justice system of the
western human (Lerner 1965; Lerner and
Simmons, 1966).
Brens and Wagner (1994) found that Just
World beliefs influenced the views of
participants in evaluating both the victim’s
and the offender’s culpabilities - would you be
a witness if you thought the victim deserved
their fate?
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The Ultimate ‘Unnatural Witness’ – The
Whistleblower
There are plenty of cases here to show how,
what we might call a Westminster Catechist
approach takes over, especially in science:
First the person who has made the
accusation is vilified, and then possibly, their
case against the organisation or individual is
investigated.
Sprague (1993); Bucka and Kleiner (2001);
Edwards (2001); Judson, (2004);
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Data on attitudes to Bearing
Witness
Unobtrusive/non reactive measures
On-line discussion board Netscape
Community 2005
Response to a US High School’s
intention to pay students for info about
illegal activity in school…
69 entries in the two days from posting all North American
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Data on attitudes to Bearing
Witness
48 correspondents were responsible for the
67 filed responses.
Some merely commented on whether school
kids should be paid for ‘snitching’
Some went on to discuss the rights and
wrongs of bearing witness at all
Some comments were very abusive against
those who suggested that people - adults as
well as children - should bear witness to
criminal wrong doing
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Data on attitudes to Bearing
Witness
Of those against paying for info on illegal
behaviours in schools over 20% raised Nazi
practices Socialising children to ‘sell their family and
friends to the authorities’.
No one mentioned the McCarthy Enquiry,
however.
There was also an assumption that reporting
on crimes would involve informing on friends
rather than on peers (the ideas that all peers
in school are friends.
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Data on attitudes to Bearing
Witness
34 of the 48 (79%) went on the comment
about informing, or bearing witness when
cash payment were not offered as an
inducement.
The pattern changes dramatically when
money is removed, with two thirds saying that
there are times when one really should bear
witness - but some of these commentators
were very threatening to those who did
suggest that being a witness was right.
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Data on attitudes to Bearing
Witness
A theme in both the correspondents who do
see being a witness as right, and those who
do not, is the question of living in a
community, and being accepted by others This seems to be referring to Baumeister &
Leary (1995) ‘Need to belong’
Parents seem very sensitive to the fact that
their children need to be in a safe
environment at school - which requires
reporting - but that having a reputation for
being a witness can be problematic.
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Belongingness
Woven into this concept is the needs to be
affiliated to a group, to feel that one belongs
to families, as well as to social groups of a
wider kind.
So, if ‘telling’ on a group will make you
excluded, it is not in your interest to do so
(also in evolutionary terms)
There will be times when joining those who
offend will be a more effective strategy for
keeping the sense of belongingness.
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Belongingness
The need to belong may directly violate the
idea of autonomy - law, justice and legal harm
reduction Causing disharmony registers as a more
serious offence, than the action which has
been witnessed (even if, given out of a
context, people would say that the offence is
a very serious)
Causing disharmony gets the person
responsible for the reporting banished.
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Belongingness
This certainly describes the fate of
whistleblowers very well.
The next step is to examine the attitude of
those who rely on witnesses (the police; CPS,
etc.,), to find out whether they too perceive
witnesses with the same aura of
unnaturalness as is argued here - both via
theory, and some empirical results.
All offers of possible populations for research
greatly appreciated…
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