My dad sent me an article today by Loren F. Nordgren of Northwestern University and Mary-Hunter Morris McDonnell of Harvard Law school about the “Scope-Severity Paradox.” Standard logic would state that for the more victims a given crime has, the more severe it would be, and therefore the stricter punishment would be.
As they found in their studies, this was not really the case. Interestingly, in 2 direct studies they found that the exact opposite was the case: students who reviewed vignettes of cases with few victims in fact tended to rate the crimes as more severe than those students who reviewed vignettes of cases with many victims. For example, take two nearly identical cases: A fraudster cheats two people out of their money, and a fraudster cheats 20 people out of their money. Consistently, the first case was rated as more severe, and given harsher punishments than the second.
Weird, right? Observing the results, it’s difficult to grasp that such a thing can even happen, but they were able to document the same result with about 90 different students. While it seems to defy all conventional logic, the researchers were also able to find a cause: identifiably.
In a secondary study, the identifiably of the victims of the groups were increased. The small-group case studies were accompanied by names, occupations, etc. The large-group case studies were accompanied with a photograph of one of the many victims. In this study the severity and punishment scores were drastically normalized, with the differences being statistically insignificant.
While this is an oversimplification of their studies and results, it sufficiently demonstrates the effect, and quite frankly, it just blows my mind! To clarify a bit further, they didn’t just find these results in a lab: they also studied actual jury decisions on all manners of “toxic tort” cases (asbestos, lead poisoning, etc.). Juries awarded smaller judgments to cases with more plaintiffs, and larger judgments to those cases with fewer plaintiffs.
Where this becomes extremely interesting to me is how we all do this illogical thing all the time, without realizing it. I wonder how the actual legal system tends to skew these results as well. Particularly in cases of copyright infringement, especially dealing with the RIAA.
In these cases, the damages sued for are astronomical in consideration of the actual cost of a single song or album, and indeed, jail time for pirating one single song can often be longer (and with more severe parole stipulations) than rape or murder. How do these instances mesh with the findings of this article? Is an advocacy group more immediately identifiable than a murder victim? Or can the advocacy group more readily identify its victims to the jury because of the notoriety any given band already has?
As for how this knowledge can be used to change the world, it seems this article is the perfect explanation for why a martyr is so effective. A singular person is seen as being victimized by a faceless organization, be that a government, interest group, etc. So people are already predisposed to see the acts of the group as more severe (either positively or negatively) because it was just the one person victimized. So no matter which side of the issue you stand on, the martyr is more effective. From his side, he’s an individual victimized by a group. From the group side, an individual was victimizing many. So the predisposition is that the individual is either more powerful as an individual or more identifiable as a “this could happen to me” situation.
Fun stuff. If you would like to read the actual article, it can be found on the SAGE website. Unfortunately, only the abstract is free, unless you have either a personal subscription or a subscription through a school of some sort. If you can figure out a way to read it, I highly recommend it.
