Social Psychology, History and American Courts

I have a genetic disorder and I misprocess fats. When I was four or five years old, I was constantly in trouble for picking up the stick of butter and taking a bite out of it.

Butter is a fat I tolerate well. To this day, I'm a butter fiend and I slather it on stuff.

Looking back on it, I like to think if it had been MY child doing that, I would have made sure he got more butter in his diet and explained to him some appropriate, socially acceptable procedure for ASKING mom to please GIVE him some butter without leaving teeth marks and germs on the butter and getting yelled at for it.

I have a real NEED for extra fats I tolerate well. This is a life threatening matter for me. So I wasn't trying to behave badly. I just craved butter and wasn't getting enough of it.

I remember the last time I took a bite out of the butter stick. I told myself this was the last time and I looked around and made sure no one saw me.

To my SHOCK and outrage -- because this seemed unfair -- I got yelled at moments later.

I wasn't savvy enough to realize:

1. I was the only person who had a track record of doing this, so I was the obvious suspect.

2. I was a lot younger than my brother and sister, so I had much smaller teeth than anyone else in the house which meant my teeth were the only match for the teeth marks in the butter.

If someone is doing something bad and it actually meets their needs, sometimes you can put a stop to that by helping them find a legal and socially acceptable means to meet their needs.

My butter biting could have been stopped with just telling me "Dorina, just ASK. You can have butter. I don't care about that. But I don't want you slobbering all over the butter. It spreads sickness and I end up throwing it in the trash, so it's a waste of money." Or something along those lines.

I've seen news pieces where people steal while out of work and stop stealing when they have a paycheck. So in some cases, you can solve it by helping them make their life work and also telling them "No more stealing or this nicey nice program boots you and you do hard time."

Just make sure you don't come across as rewarding bad behavior and buying sob stories as a get out of jail free card. There needs to be both carrot and stick, not solely one or the other.

So historically, "court" meant meeting with the King or local baron or similar and explaining your problem to someone probably better educated than you who also had authority to do stuff. It was a little like a kid going to Mom or Dad instead of what we do today.

That means sometimes he knew stuff you didn't know and could tell you a better solution, like a parent dealing with a young kid doing something dumb. Or sometimes it was like "Oh, I didn't realize my policy was causing the peasants problems. I shall just change that rule so it won't happen again."

Even IF it was a dispute between two people, it potentially got treated like a parent dealing with two squabbling children. And that means:

1. Find out both sides of the story.

2. Figure out if there's some misunderstanding or situational factor that means maybe no one is guilty of intentionally SHAFTING the other person.

Social Psychology tells us: In a long-running feud, both sides feel the other side started it. 

Sometimes, neither side started anything. Two families that lived next door ended up not getting along and when they finally talked, both sides were going "YOU are so noisy and I am not sleeping well!" And this led them to realize some birds were making noise at night between the two houses.

So it's a best practice to do some very neutral fact finding as step one and modern American courts aren't really designed to do that. 

A real life example from my life: I had a corporate job and I was moved to a newly created team for handling problem files and our entire procedure was newly established.

This is in the Deep South with a lot of baggage about racism and a new teammate I didn't really know came and accused me of stealing her file. She's Black and I'm White and we barely know each other and I'm feeling like she's assuming the worst in part because of historic slavery and systemic racism.

I stayed very very neutral and didn't get defensive. I launched into fact finding mode and managed to determine that -- shock of shockers -- our brand spanking new system had a glitch and there were two copies and we each pulled a different copy of this thing asking someone to do X.

So they updated the system to identify duplicates somehow.

Things like that easily get ugly quickly. It is a best practice to first determine if there's a situational factor like that before looking for who to blame.

If you actively look for someone to blame, you will find someone even if you have to come up with a scapegoat. 

But if you reasonably determine it's not innocent happenstance, it's a mistake to try too hard to insist no one is ever guilty of anything because rest assured there are people who do bad things very much intentionally and those people try hard to claim "Well, mistakes happen! Oops!"

Remember: Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence and thrice is a pattern.

If you find that someone keeps having the same "accident," it stops being reasonable to claim they couldn't have predicted where this was going to go.

If you really don't want it to happen again and it's not a minor little thing, you can spend some time to think about what led up to this and figure out where you need to make sure X, Y or Z doesn't happen lest it lead to this same thing.

That's exactly why one responsibility of most fire departments is fire prevention and educating people. If it's something that will seriously hurt someone, you can identify an accident waiting to happen, so people who keep having the exact same "accident" are at a minimum guilty of negligence and you must stop and ask if they are intentionally arranging for it to keep happening.

If it hurts others and benefits them in some way, look really hard at that possibility. "Oh, oops, errors in my favor! I wonder how to tilt odds in favor of getting more of that!" is called premeditated crime.

One thing you may see is people who aren't very educated and who have had a hard scrabble life and they may not be especially good at explaining why they did something. In an ideal world, the more judicially literate people would help them out rather than abuse that.

Mohammed Ali said something on camera objecting to being drafted like "Those people never did nothing to me!" A lawyer turned that into a concientious objector case.

Another thing you may see is court cases involving someone like that going up against someone with more education, more money, a fancier lawyer etc.

I encourage you to consider such a case to be similar to having children at home with a big age difference. If you have a sixteen year old and a five year old and they are squabbling, who are you likely to tell "You know better and you are the problem"?

It's possible you have a truly psycho five year old who just randomly attacked the sixteen year old with ZERO provocation with the nearest sharp object. It's more likely the sixteen year old is up to shenanigans and slick enough to cover up their bad acts.

You might also compare it to the Nestle Infant Formula scandal. Nestle was let off the hook but I find it appalling that they weren't held accountable when their defense is "Our college-educated marketers aren't guilty of intentionally shafting people with an elementary school education because we had clear instructions in English on our product and never mind that we KNEW full well we were doing this in countries where they didn't even speak English."

When there is a substantial power differential in some way, I personally want extremely compelling evidence you honest to God screwed up and weren't intentionally taking advantage of the difference consciously and intentionally.