Psychological differences in perceptions of crime

As a social psychologist, I’ve long been interested in understanding how we perceive crime (what psychologists refer to as transgressions). For example, why do people generally view something like shoplifting more negatively than a manager demanding unpaid work? Surely hours of unpaid wages far exceeds the cost of stolen body wash or toothpaste. So why does shoplifting just feel like a more serious crime?

Now take that same logic and apply it to health insurance. Why do we think killing someone is always wrong but that it’s socially acceptable for a CEO to make decisions that directly harm thousands of people by denying them life-saving medical care?

Clearly, from a utilitarian perspective, based solely on the greatest amount of suffering (or disutility, if you’re an economist), the CEO’s actions constitute, arguable a more severe transgression that harms many more people. So why does shooting someone to death just feel so much viscerally worse?

I’ve obviously been thinking about this contradiction a lot recently given the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Thompson was shot outside a hotel in midtown Manhattan in the early morning hours of December 4th. The suspect, Luigi Mangione, who was waiting outside the hotel Thompson was entering, shot and killed Thompson before fleeing the scene on bike. There’s been a lot of great reporting on the murder and my goal here is not to rehash what many more qualified people (and actual journalists) have already extensively written about. As a psychologist, I’m more interested in people’s reactions to Thompson’s murder.

And the reaction to Thompson’s murder, particularly on social media, has been incredibly revealing, to say the least. Many on the internet are reveling in Thompson’s death. This reaction is not terribly surprising given the vitriol many people feel towards health insurance companies — nearly everyone has had a bad experience with insurers — and with UnitedHealthcare in particular. Under Thompson’s leadership, United’s claim denial rate was one of the highest in the industry (with some estimates of reporting they have a 32% denial rate, although further verification for this estimate is needed).

But what was surprising to me was the largely nonpartisan response on social media — the anger at health insurance companies initiated by the attack have largely transcended partisan lines, with liberals and conservatives condoning, if not celebrating, Mangione’s actions.

I’m not interested here in litigating whether Thompson’s murder was justified — I, and many others, agree that murder is never an acceptable answer and that vigilante justice is a slippery slope. At the same time, it’s hard to have much sympathy for Thompson and his fellow health insurance CEOs. What really interests me about this story is the question of why we perceive transgressions differently, even when they both result in harmful outcomes. Let me explain.

We can all agree that murdering someone is immoral and wrong, and that people who kill others deserve to be punished (with the exception of certain, societally-approved contexts where it is acceptable, e.g., war). But what about a situation where the outcome is similar — someone is killed — but rather than a direct act (e.g., shooting someone) it’s due to a procedural rule determined by a corporation? We can think of these kinds of procedural harms as a type of social murder, coined by Friedrich Engels to refer to unnatural deaths stemming from social and economic oppression, rather than direct violence.

My intention here is not to equivocate the actions of Thompson and Mangione. Rather, I want to note that both of their actions resulted in harmful outcomes but the ways in which the harms occurred strongly influenced our perceptions of their immorality.

Again, to be clear, I’m not interested in comparing the the extent of harm between two terrible things — whether it’s gunning someone down or designing and pushing a policy that denies more people health care. The broader point I want to make here is that our perceptions of the immorality of an act and desire for retribution depends on how the transgression occurs.

If a corporate policy to deny insurance to a customer leads to their death, the outcome is similar — someone died — but we don’t view the designer of that policy in the same way as the gunman (and to be fair, it is a bit more complicated than that). In other words: Why don’t we perceive social murder as equally terrible as regular, good ol’ fashioned murder?

I think a key part of the explanation here is the concept of evolutionary mismatch — for the vast majority of Homo Sapiens existence on earth, the only way to kill someone was through a direct causal act (e.g., hitting Grug on the head with a rock). But now the modern world provides many different, more bureaucratic means of causing harm. The difference is that direct harms like shooting someone, stealing, or assault, are much more emotionally evocative than indirect harms caused by an abstract policy coverage change, white collar crime, or corporate tax evasion — even if the latter results in a greater amount of suffering overall.

This quirk of our psychology is constantly on display — it’s the reason why UNICEF ad campaigns focus on one specific little girl’s suffering than information and factoids about the scale of the suffering. Psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the identifiable victim effect — our tendency to have greater empathy and be more willing to help specific, identifiable people that are suffering as compared to statistics or abstract information about a larger group. This idea is nicely captured by a quote (possibly incorrectly) attributed to Joseph Stalin: “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic”.

But at even more basic level, this feature of our psychology can be attributed to cognitive shortcuts like the affect heuristic, where our decisions are influenced by emotional responses rather than objective information.

Another key explanatory factor in our perceptions of wrongdoing is the intentionality of the act — in general, we tend to judge intentional harms as worse than unintentional ones. Additionally, research from psychology suggests the motives we infer from an act and whether a transgression involves physical contact can also increase perceptions of how wrong we perceive the behavior to be.

To put it simply: we care a lot more about direct harms that are emotionally evocative and where the causal attribution is simple and clear. That’s a problem when indirect harms perpetrated by corporations — like health insurance companies — result in a magnitude of suffering and death that far exceeds the murder of a single individual.

So to put a finer point on it — the transgressions that health insurance CEOs like Thompson commit are much more diffuse (with moral responsibility spread out across upper management, for example), abstract, and far less salient and emotionally evocative than gunning someone down in broad daylight. As a result, their acts — even when ultimately resulting in real harm — elicit much less outrage and anger than much lesser crimes where the harm is direct.

However there is a bit of a contradiction here — namely, if we generally tend to perceive direct harms as less moral than indirect harms, why are so many people condoning if not celebrating Luigi’s actions?

A key philosophical doctrine that can explain this apparent contradiction is the doctrine of double effect. The doctrine of double effect holds that it is morally permissible to engage in acts that have good consequences, even if those acts have foreseeable negative consequences. Clearly there are many people in our society who feel — rightly or wrongly — that the harm the health insurance industry is responsible for outweighs the killing of one health insurance CEO. Even if we agree these perceptions are completely misguided — and that the harm of killing someone is greater than the actual harms attributed to companies like UnitedHealthcare — it’s important to recognize and understand why so many people in our country, on both sides of the political spectrum, feel so outraged as to cheer on vigilante murders.

Finally, it’s important to acknowledge that, at the core of debate initiated by Thompson murder, is the undeniable fact that neoliberalism and corporate greed are socially and legally acceptable features of our economic & political system. Thompson was, after all, acting completely within the law and corporate norms of maximizing shareholder value — in fact, he would have been breaking norms and potentially even laws by acting against shareholder’s interest. But clearly many Americans are fed up. They’re recognizing that our laws and economic system permit, and provide an ethical permission structure, to do terrible things that harm millions of people. Until we address the underlying norms and laws that permit and promote greed at the expense of consumers health and safety, nothing will change.