Institutional License
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In a time of heightened restrictions—when most in-person service businesses, like bars and restaurants are being closed, for instance—it’s possible to become accustomed to walking down the street and seeing block after block of unlit interiors, stacked chairs, and locked front doors.
Imagine, within such a context, that you’re out for a stroll, taking a brief reprieve from a pandemic-related shut-in routine, perhaps walking your dog or headed for the still-open grocery store, and you discover that there is one bar still open.
It’s early evening, and you miss not just a periodic drink in a social space, but contact with other human beings, in general.
That this place is open at all implies very strongly that they have some kind of medical security measures in place, surely? If they didn’t, they wouldn’t be open, right? They’d be shut down by the police, or they’d stay closed of their own volition, because they must be worried about their own safety and that of their staff, almost certainly?
This is the understandable logic of what’s sometimes called Institutional License.
We put our trust in authority, especially in situations in which the issues we face are bigger than what any one of us, or any small group of us, can face in isolation.
What we see on the ground, then, is perceived through the lens of that authority’s actions, often with the implication that the authority in question is not just correct, but borderline infallible.
In a study published in late-August, 2019, entitled The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings, researchers found that labeling misleading or false news headlines as false or misleading, can be effective in reducing their spread.
But the unintended consequence of such labeling is that misleading and false news stories that are unlabeled—because they haven’t been assessed yet, or because they slipped through the filter—become perceptually more believable to people who might otherwise discount them, or at the very least view them more critically.
In other words, when these sorts of labeling systems are deployed, we relegate some of our critical faculties to the experts who are meant to be sorting out what’s true and what’s not.
When something slips through that system, or simply hasn’t entered it yet, this shift of responsibility to an outside authority can leave us less critical and less on guard, because it’s not our problem anymore; or maybe because we no longer feel we have sufficient information or expertise to make a proper judgement.
In the case of the inexplicably open bar, on a street lined with closed shops and other businesses, we may understandably assume that the higher authority that has taken responsibility for such things has allowed this one bar to be open because they’ve implemented proper health measures, because they’re set up in such a way that disease-spread is less of an issue, or for some other unknown but imaginable reason that brings order to what otherwise seems like a glitch in what we perceive as the current state of reality.
In the world of online information dissemination, too, we may see labels affixed to misleading news stories and assume that if a given story doesn’t have that label, it must be real, it must be legitimate. Otherwise it would have that label. That’s what we’ve been told.
The problem with such assumptions is that they’re only valid if the authority in question is perfect: if they filter every news item before it’s shared, and if they never make a mistake in their labeling.
In the case of the bar, this would mean the authorities would have to monitor every single business in the city, and would need to be able to enforce lock-down measures instantly if someone decided to break with protocol and open up their business, even for a short period of time.
In real-life, of course, that kind of perfection doesn’t exist, even within the most surveillance-heavy, censored and authoritarian regimes on the planet. So those of us who live within relatively less-restrictive situations shouldn’t expect anything even close to perfect monitoring and enforcement.
Nonetheless, our logical faculties seem prone to this kind of subconscious math, succumbing to what researchers have called the Implied Truth Effect.
This is, in part, the logic that causes us to give more credibility to even otherwise obviously misleading information contained within algorithmically elevated YouTube videos, and to articles that are featured on social networks like Facebook and Twitter—even the articles that are eventually removed for being blatant propaganda or factually false.
This is even true of people who purport to mistrust authority, and who, if you asked them, wouldn’t have kind things to say about the government or social media moderators, their capabilities, or their validity.
It’s possible, in other words, for us to mistrust and look down upon the skills or knowledge of the government when it comes to their application of pandemic-related lock-downs, but to then apply a sort of appeal to authority argument when justifying an act that would otherwise seem questionable, or which might at least warrant further investigation.
You might think your government is inadequate and ridiculous, in other words, but the fact that they seemed to have shut down every bar except one could tip your internal scales so that you step into that bar, despite lacking any justification for doing so other than subconscious trust in the infallibility of that same government.
There’s a fair bit of confirmation bias at play, in such circumstances. We scramble to find information that supports our existing beliefs or justifies actions we want to take.
There’s also evidence that this disposition is especially powerful in situations in which we feel reduced personal responsibility for our actions, due to the presence of that other entity to which we can pass the buck.
If everyone is social isolating in order to slow a pandemic, going into a bar might put you and everyone you come into contact with at risk of harm or even death. If there were no lockdown measures in place, going into that establishment would be on you and you alone, as would any consequences resulting from that act.
The same is arguably still true if there are protocols and policies in place to keep such establishments closed, but it’s possible to imagine the government is the guilty party, instead, because they decided to take responsibility for everyone’s health, shutting down all those businesses, and yet one bar remains open, providing you with reasonable doubt as to whether it’s okay to step inside and have a drink.
It’s thought that part of the solution to this problem, at least in some contexts, may be found in better messaging.
It’s also possible that we may respond better, as consumers of news and as potential customers of plague-bars, if the perceived responsibility can be shared, rather than completely handed over to an external authority.
Human beings tend to be fairly responsible and rational, on average, when we feel that we are responsible for our own, personal well-being, and when we’re aware that we hold the reins of that particular facet of our lives.
Creating more opportunities for us to feel both in control of, and responsible for, the consequences of our actions could help in this regard, with that outside authority playing more of an advisory and information-dissemination role.
Of course, it’s a risky gamble to assume that even people who are behaving responsibly will behave in a single, desired fashion. And if your plans, as a society, require that everyone does roughly the same thing all at the same time, firmer regulations and rules will almost always be necessary, above and beyond mere advisories.
A widespread, shared sense of social responsibility may allow some governments to assume the majority of their population will do the “right thing” without needing additional carrots or sticks. But in many parts of the world, especially those that are more individualistic in nature, this generally won’t be the case.
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