Philosophy and science at the service of human rights

INTERVIEW/ Cristina Bicchieri

It is not enough to have good intentions, nor merely to have good models, human rights and peace activism today enlists the help of social scientists and philosophers, in order to understand how to motivate change in behavior and practices at home and abroad. Cristina Bicchieri, Philosophy of Science professor at University of Pennsylvania and author of a number of books on ethics and choice, spoke to Comunidad Segura about adapting goals to local realities:

“People act based on what expected behavior; they gauge their actions in the expectations of their community. If you understand these expectations you can promote change.” The philosopher and social scientist believes that to generate change a new perspective is needed: “What you have to do is work case by case. You have to study the norms, the attitudes, the values of these people and work from the ground up. Not from the top down, there are a lot of failed programs because of this. This is very foreign to American practice, they come in saying you have violated human rights, that you have to enact laws against it”

Biccheri tells us in this exclusive interview of how understanding of social norms led the NGO Tostan to eradicate female genital mutilation in Senegal, discusses the connection between gang violence and lack of communication, and finally on the effect of violence in the media.

Your work is at the intersection of philosophy, psychology and economics, what is your research about?

In particular my recent work has been on social norms, and I did behavioral experiments to understand what makes people follow or disobey a social norm and what I discovered is the importance of expectations.

But why are social norms important for activists in peace and development?

I wrote a book about social norms, I did a lot experiments. At a certain point UNICEF got very interested. Why, because when they began to implement Human Rights, they realized that HR are always embodied in something. You fight for the rights of women, of children. What they do is identify negative practices, big, obvious violation of rights, childhood marriage, female genital mutilation, child sexual exploitation, sexual tourism etc. There are countries, such as Kenya with laws against it. Nevertheless I am talking about cases in which people are making bad choices, or following social norms that lead to an infringement of rights. I study how these norms affect behavior.

You have a theory on how people decide to obey social norms

People behave based on their expectations. When you ask yourself, how should I behave? You look for what is expected of you. There are two types of expectations. Empirical expectations are when we look around, and observe how other people behave, or are told how they behave. It is a very important piece of information. Then there are normative expectations, linked to social norms, which tell me what I think other people expect me to do, what I think other people think I should do. If you want to promote change, you have to be aware of this.

But how does that mix with obeying laws?

It is very important to distinguish social norms from legal norms, which are laws, these are written down, codified supported by legal sanctions. Moral norms on the other hand, are like personal values, you don’t care as much what other people do or not, I think I do what is right.

What are social norms?

Social norms are norms of reciprocity, norms of fairness, how to divide in a fair way, norms of cooperation, etc, are all social norms. Because what we do or do not do depends very much on what we expect other people to do or not.

You take people’s ethics into a lab?

I tested how we follow norms and saw it very clearly in an experiment. I was able to affect how an individual chooses to behave by telling him or her, different things about how other people behave in similar circumstances. For example I tell people that the majority of other people are very selfish and our experimental subject behaves very selfishly, if I tell the subject that the majority of other people are more generous, and they will behave more generously.

Do they change because they rely on you as an authority figure?

No, I change the information that is provided to them indirectly, through a computer…

So all individuals are easily manipulated?

Look at it this way, the majority of people can be swayed. There is what we call a bell shaped distribution. That is to say, I look at the general population and I see there are two minority groups, (at each extreme of the bell shaped curve) to one side very good people (who act generously) and at the other, very selfish people. No matter what I say to these two groups, they will still act according to their own motivations. Now, I’d say that about 90 percent of people are swayed to be more or less generous in their behavior, by the information I give them. They change. I use the same people in different experiments and with different information, and it is amazing how they change, the very same people, because they adjust their behaviors to fit what they think is expected of them.

You think this is true in different countries, cultures?

There have been behavioural experiments from anthropologists, and the results are not unsimilar to ours for example. Take the Ultimatum game for example, it tells you interesting things about similar norms and opposite results in different countries, such as the United States and Papua New Guinea.

Here in Brazil we say there are laws that stick and laws that don’t, how does this affect the protection of human rights?

Absolutely, its very true. What happens is human rights workers start realizing it is important to understand how certain countries support indirectly certain bad practices. For example, I was discussing Kenya, I looked very carefully at studies by Unicef, where they have informers and interviews conducted in villages, etc. Two important factors are the status of women and children. Women are considered inferior to men, which contributes toward sexual exploitation. And secondly, children are subservient to the family, it is expected, for example, that a good son and a good daughter should contribute financially to the family. Selling sex is very financially rewarding. Families are very proud when a daughter has a while man especially paying for sex, she can buy a refrigerator.

But the same families also see their daughters sick with aids, raped, pregnant, but then the women are rejected.

What happens is that if you go to them and say, this is a violation of women’s rights, you do not touch the community, it is not a language that they understand. So you make them understand that these practices kill, basically the daughter’s life is at risk, and a good parent does not want his daughter killed.

What you have to do is work alongside local norms.You do not challenge the norm that a dutiful daughter will do something for the family. You also know that it is a good norm that a family takes care of the children. What you must do is to re-categorize these bad practices as going against the norm that they hold dear.

This is very foreign to American practice. They will come in saying you have violated human rights, that you have to enact laws against it. What you have to do is work case by case. You have to study the norms, the attitudes, the values of these people and work from the ground up. Not from the top down, there are a lot of failed programs because of this.

You mentioned the outstanding case of the eradication of genital cutting in Senegal, by Tostan, is that the ideal method?

That is the case of  Tostan’s work, led by Molly Melching. They work on female genital mutilation, they went into villages, they studied social networks, who talks with whom, how they communicate with each other, how information is disseminated, secondly, once they know that, they bring together people, especially the older more important people, and start talking to them, not about human rights, but about the fact that the practice of genital mutilation does not really solve any of their problems, is not really good for the girls, because they suffer a lot when they have sex, they can die when they give birth, they can die from the mutilation itself, from infections so if you love your daughter it is better not to do that…

But what is unique about their approach? What made is so successful?

The important thing here is that they did not talk to people individually; they had a big discussion with the whole village. So everybody was involved and everyone could see each other, what they were saying. At the end they had to make a public pledge. As I told you before, empirical expectations are important. I have to observe what people do or are going to do. Otherwise why should I be the only one who does not cut my daughter and then she won’t find a husband? Molly was very smart and when she brings all these people together to make a public pledge, she is working at the level of expectations. Villagers are looking at each other while they pledge. This is interesting, typically the girls marry out of their village into nearby villages. So the network grows. They go to many villages and this is replicated in nearby villages, basically they were incredibly successful in Senegal in completely eliminating genital mutilation.

If you want to promote rights, you have to promote assertiveness, capabilities in women, in children you want to target, but don’t go there and say we need new laws that will support human rights, because it is not going to work, period.

This is a case where all the actors are local and are interacting with each other. There are other cases when local actors are at a disadvantage, take sexual tourists arriving from the northern hemisphere..

There are two sides to a market, there is demand and there is supply, and you have to act on both. The Kenya experience is interesting, they enacted laws against child prostitution but they arrested the children. The result: a child who is raped, who is beaten up, will never go to the police, they are terrified of being arrested. You must have a law that only punishes the perpetrator, the European who goes there and pays for sex must be punished, be put in jail. You have to act on both sides, on the one hand, the perpetrator, the side of demand, on the other hand you have to work with supply, you have to work with the communities the parents etc, you have to work with that.

The issue of urban armed violence, involves young people, young men.. how do you apply this idea of social norms with gangs or with child soldiers…

One very interesting thing is that there is a lot of violence that is expected of individuals as gang members. A number of studies in America have conducted interviews where gang members, when interviewed individually, very often say they were not happy with the violence and the behavior they thought was required of them. But they thought they were the only ones to have such thoughts and therefore in a vulnerable position. This is what they call pluraristic ignorance in social psychology. Many people in a group disagree with the norms of the group. But there is no transparency, and no communication. There have been studies not just of youth gangs, but of very strict religious groups, with very strict rules, that when interviewed in private members show they differ. These are all situations in groups where there is no transparent communication, where it is impossible, you fear being ostracized etc. I think it is wrong, but I observe everybody else doing it and I take it from their acts that they think it is right. An appropriate policy here would be to break the isolation of gang members and make this rejection of violence public.

You are optimistic with respect to the future? You came to a meeting on transnational crime, human trafficking…

Well I think that most of these things have always happened. What we do have is unprecedented access to information. This is new today. This also makes me optimistic that we can promote change in bad practices, for example. I also believe that governments, NGOs such as the UNICEF and civil society must work not only with demand, but with supply. If you work from the ground up you will generate change.

You talk about the importance of information, or knowing what other people do to create expectations. How do you see the role of violence in the media, in shaping behavior?

The issue to me is not so much whether behavior is violent but how that behavior is rewarded. There is pathos to the notion that good behavior pays.

Read Further:

Bicchieri’s webpage at the University of Pennsylvania, Department of Philosophy

Biccheri’s personal page.

Description of the Ultimatum game

About Female Genital Mutilation, or Cutting

Tostan

FGM in the WHO

 

FGM/C in Wikipedia