Free Liars and Outliers by Bruce Schneier

from, and so on. Of course, there's a lot of individual variation. Some people consider their morality to be central to their self-identity, while others consider it to be more peripheral. René Girard uses the term “ spiritual geniuses ” to describe the most moral of people. We also describe many of them as martyrs; being differently moral can be dangerous. 5 Society, of course, wants the group interest to prevail.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:
    Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
    Henry David Thoreau talks about how he went along with the group norm, despite what his morals told him:
    The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior. What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?
    When historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich wrote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” she was referring to defecting.
    Socrates's morals pointed him in the other direction, choosing to cooperate and drink poison rather than defect and escape, even though he knew his sentence was unjust.
    We accept that people absorb and live according to the morals of their culture—even to the point of absolution from culpability for actions we now consider immoral—because we examine culpability in light of the commonly available moral standards within the culture at that time. 6
    This all might seem unrelated to this book; however, it's anything but. Misunderstanding the defector is a common way societal pressures fail, something we'll talk about more in Chapter 15. Think of the risk trade-off as a balance. When Alice is deciding whether to cooperate or defect, she's weighing the costs and benefits of each side. Societal pressures are how the group puts its thumb on the scales and tries to make cooperating the more attractive option. If you think Alice is defecting because she's selfish (she's in it for the money) or concerned about her ego (she wants to look cool in front of her friends) when she actually has a competing moral interest, you're going to get societal pressures wrong. The details are different for every dilemma, but they're almost always important.
    There's another important reason to understand the competing interests: you might get a different type of defection, depending on the competing interest. To illustrate this, let's use a more subtle societal dilemma: whether Alice should cooperate with the police. 7 This is important, because whether and to what extent members of society report crime and assist the police greatly influences how well laws against those crimes work. In the absence of 100% automated burglar alarms connected to the police station, a monitored security camera in every niche and nook, or police patrols tailing every citizen 24/7, the likelihood that a burglar is going to get caught depends mostly on the willingness of bystanders to take action: either by calling the police, or by tackling the burglar and then calling the police. The more people who report illegal activity—both crimes in progress and crimes after the fact—the better institutional pressure works.
    That's the group interest. Competing interests for not reporting include:
Selfish self-interest . Alice might simply not care enough about society to cooperate. She might be too busy with other things in her life, and not have the time to get involved. She might have concluded in a risk–reward calculation that her time and the hassle of reporting a theft outweighs her benefit from reporting it.
Self-preservation interest . Alice might be scared to cooperate with the police for any of several reasons. 1) She might be a criminal herself, and would rather not have anything to do with the