Several years ago when I was in grad school, my friend who helped me start a secular humanism club on campus told me that I had been too mean for too long in our club meetings and then basically said that it was better if I just not go to them, at least for a while. Apart from a few people who seemed a bit put off by me at the meetings, this was the first indication I’d had that I was causing a serious problem. I assume he was right, that I had been making things unpleasant for people, and that by this time it was better if I take a break from things. But I was angry and hurt that nobody had told me that I was hurting people’s feelings and that I should dial it back. Why was there zero feedback until things had gotten so bad that someone told me I need to stop coming to my own club?
I think this is part of a broad pattern in social contexts. Someone will do something that is in some way harmful, or which breaks rules or norms, not because they want to cause harm or because they are choosing to break the rules, but because they did not realize they were causing a problem or because they did not realize the seriousness of the problem. Then, instead of being informed that they were causing a problem and being warned that they need to avoid it in the future, they’ll be treated with the full force of social or administrative consequences as if they had deliberately chosen to break a rule. I’m not sure what to call this, so I’ll call it “one-shot enforcement”, because it seems that the intent is not to guide the person toward better behavior through an iterative feedback loop, but to hit the person once with harsh consequences to ensure that they can’t do it again. Oftentimes, this is justified with statements like “We don’t tolerate breaking rules about <most serious way of framing the incident>”, “It’s not like they didn’t know”, or “Ignorance is not an excuse”. Here are a few more examples:
- A 4th grader in Louisiana was at home while attending a class on Zoom when he moved his BB gun so his brother would not trip on it. It was briefly visible on the screen, causing his teacher to accuse him of bringing a fake gun to school, eventually resulting in a three day suspension.
- GMU economist Robin Hanson wrote a tweet asking for tips on how to celebrate Juneteenth, mentioning that he enjoys fried chicken and watermelon. Instead of someone saying “Hey man, just so you know, you’re invoking a stereotype that some people think is pretty harmful, so you might want to avoid using it going forward”, there was a huge uproar, accusations of racism, and a petition to get him removed from GMU faculty. This is all in spite of his explaining that he really didn’t mean anything by it and he just wants to celebrate the holiday by enjoying the appropriate foods.
- One of my friends from grad school is from a country that was formerly part of the Soviet Union. He used to make some pretty lewd jokes and ask questions that people found offensive. Some of my classmates were appalled by this and began swiftly meting out social punishments, like warning people that he was a creepy asshole and telling people not to invite him to social events. Fortunately there were others that took the time to explain to him that he was making people uncomfortable, and he quickly started being a lot more careful. It turns out he’s a really good guy, and he was just used to different norms.
In all of these cases, the rules and norms that are being broken are worth enforcing, but the enforcement is happening in an unfair way. The school might reasonably want to enforce a rule about never having weapons or things that look like weapons on screen during class, but you can’t decide the rule exists (or that an existing rule applies in an unusual way), accuse a student of breaking it, and enforce the rule with full consequences against a kid all in one swoop. It is hard to always know where the boundaries are on acceptable behavior, especially for people who are young, in a new situation, or have difficulty solving social puzzles. It is also hard to keep up when the social boundaries move rapidly, and people can get caught out by doing the same thing they normally do, which has suddenly become a major social transgression. This is all made worse in an environment with lots of rules that are not intended to be followed.
One-shot enforcement is often quite bad for several reasons. First, it is not fair to treat people as if they have been deliberately going against the rules or causing harm when, in all likelihood, they just did not realize that they were causing a problem. Second, it is easier to learn how to act appropriately with frequent feedback, which is only possible with lighter consequences. Third, when punishment is both sparse and harsh, it is both less effective and more prone to abuse by those who are handing out the punishments. Most people who are doing and saying things that are worthwhile are crossing boundaries on a fairly regular basis. In a climate where harsh one-shot enforcement of rules and norms is accepted, if someone wants to cause social harm to one of these people, they just need to keep up with shifting norms and strike as soon as they shift such that one of these people is caught out.
If one-shot enforcement is so bad, then why do we have so much of it? I can think of a few possible causes. The first is the curse of knowledge, which I described as a source of conflict in a recent post. People who know that fried chicken and watermelon are frequently invoked as a stereotype against black people have a hard time imagining what it is like to not know this. Most who were accusing Robin Hanson of being racist seemed completely incredulous that he could not know what he was doing. To them, it does not feel like one-shot rule enforcement, if feels like enforcing a rule that has been around so long and enforced so thoroughly already that by now nobody has an excuse for not being aware of the boundary.
The second possible cause is the pressure people feel to enforce rules and not show any weakness when they are broken. I certainly do not begrudge anyone for pushing back hard against sexist behavior in a university physics department. It really is like a boy’s club sometimes, and we shouldn’t put up with it. Furthermore, men in the department feel pressure to demonstrate that they are against sexist behavior, which they can do by meting out severe punishment for unwanted behavior. Given all of this, it makes sense to me that people feel some pressure to react strongly and harshly to my friend who was making the off-color jokes. Similarly, I’m sure the teachers and administrators who enforced rules against the Louisiana kid with the BB gun had good reasons for feeling nervous about looking too weak in the face of a problem that in any way relates to mixing guns and school.
Unfortunately, I also think that sometimes we get patterns of one-shot enforcement because we are just not sufficiently sympathetic to people that make mistakes. We forget that everyone screws up sometimes, including ourselves. We see someone do something bad and, instead of trying to be understanding and prioritizing doing what we can to minimize harm, both from future incidents and to people involved in the present, we lash out and try to stamp out the problem, with no regard for the interests of the offending party. This seems especially common when the error is related to something very serious and emotional, like gun violence in schools or racism.
But we need to make sure that we’re enforcing rules in a way that is fair and which encourages people to grow, rather than punishing people for simply struggling to follow rules, due to ignorance or a lack of experience with following them. Most of us consider even a gentle notice that we’ve broken a rule or hurt someone to be an embarrassing and regrettable outcome My guess is that the people that will take advantage of a measured response to a first offense are few and unlikely to cause much trouble, especially since they can only really get away with things once or twice per rule. We should also keep in mind that, as with rules that are not intended to be followed, the people who are hurt the most by one-shot enforcement, rather than tight feedback loops are those that are young, new to a situation, or less adept at intuitively understanding social situations.
Underconfidence 