Jailed criminals think they are more kind, trustworthy and honest than average
digest.bps.org.uk
digest.bps.org.uk
The explanation in the article (that most people really are good drivers and that the average is drawn "low" because of very bad drivers) is flat-out wrong.
The correct explanation is described in detail in Daniel Kahneman' Thinking, Fast and Slow. It's impossible to assess our own position on the grand scale of driving ability; when the brain gets asked a difficult question, it quietly changes the question to a similar one, much easier to answer.
So when people are asked "are you a better-than-average driver", since they have no idea what the average is (or what the average means) they answer instead the question "am I an okay driver" and answer "yes".
This is probably what happens with prisoners too (or, they're actually kinder than the average people they know, and that's why they got caught).
If I see several traffic accidents a year, I note that since I haven’t had one, I must be doing better than the nebulous category of “other drivers”. After all, the probability of someone else’s having an accident this year is scrillions of times higher than the probability of my having one, even if every individual driver is about as good as me.
According to this: http://www.statisticbrain.com/driving-citation-statistics/ only 20% of drivers get traffic infractions, meaning the average driver has never had one.
It's more like we have to interpret what "average" means in this context. It's not "making up something that isn't an average," it's "deciding what quantity to average."
> According to this: http://www.statisticbrain.com/driving-citation-statistics/ only 20% of drivers get traffic infractions, meaning the average driver has never had one.
The average number of infractions per driver is greater than zero. That means that I am better than average. It also means that at least 80% of drivers are better than average.
The median driver has never had one, but the mean (which is what most people mean by average) has had >=0.2
The ethics of crime are a complex subject, and while convicts' own views on the subject are generally self-serving there are shades of grey all over. For example, I knew a bar owner who murdered a heroin dealer, because one of the bar owner's friends OD'ed and died. So he waited until the heroin dealer went into the restroom at the bar one night, then followed him in and shot him dead.
That's pretty cold-blooded (from a legal standpoint, advance planning like that is considered far worse than shooting someone in the heat of a dispute), but then it seems morally mild compared to murdering someone for personal gain. I can't find it now, but there was a really fascinating article posted here a year or so ago about an undercover cop whose specialty is pretending to be a hitman, and the people who attempt to hire his services. Maybe someone else will remember enough detail to turn it up in a search.
Another good example of this dynamic can be seen with alcoholics (whichever stage of alcoholism they might be in). I read recently that apparently about 30% of the US population does not drink at all, and about 10% are outliers (10+ drinks per day!). http://kottke.org/14/10/the-united-states-of-alcoholism.
Having been a non-drinker for most of my life, and a heavy drinker for part of my life, in both cases I felt I was (mostly) 'average'.
Of course, what I failed to take into account was that in my non-drinking period I was part of a community of non-drinkers, and I barely interacted with those who drink a lot, whereas in my drinking period I didn't interact with the 'boring lot' who don't drink and leave parties at such early times as 12 PM.
Another example of this is sexuality. I spent a significant period of of my life practicing abstinence (conservative christian), and a more recent period in an environment where casual sex was the norm. I always thought that this more recent period was the actual 'normal', until I decided to look up 'actual' averages. I thought having a sexual partner count in the double-digits was pretty normal, but apparently here in Holland the average amount of partners is around 6, and the median is lower than that.
My problem is with the word "rather." It can be any degree of either in combination.
Perhaps generation 1 of criminals committed crimes out of perceived necessity, but did not believe themselves to be acting morally. They failed to stress this to their children however, perhaps due to some sense of pride, and the second generation is then raised to believe that crime is normal. This second generation, unlike the first, could have an inaccurate sense of what "normal" morality is.
One factor to note in this, is that there are a lot of people in jail who arguably shouldn't be there. People who are, in fact, not much different from you or I. I suspect on average, the people in jail aren't that different from the people outside of it in terms of morals & ethics.... on average.
That tends to support the claim that these are "bad people" in the ordinary sense of the term.
It is pretty well documented that almost no one thinks they are a bad person: http://www.amazon.com/Evil-Inside-Human-Violence-Cruelty/dp/... (I cannot recommend this book enough if you're interested in understanding evil.)
>>That tends to support the claim that these are "bad people" in the ordinary sense of the term.
I feel like I'm getting needlessly pedantic now. The ordinary sense of the term, imho, is actually wrong and comes from the media(and religion?) vilifying a bunch of things to skew the public's calibration of good & evil. I have a feeling I'm about to fall into a deep rabbit hole of disagreements so I'll just concede that you're right given the mainstream's perception of good & evil.
One doesn't need to have a particularly hardline attitude towards criminal offenders to assume that those guilty of robbery must have hugely transformed their outlook on life if their stated beliefs that they're more moral, kind, compassionate etc. than the average person aren't totally delusional. (Actually, they'd probably have a stronger argument for claiming to be as "law abiding" as everyone else since few people aren't technically guilty of breaching some law)
There are former criminals who are shining examples of people who are not only able to turn their own lives around but are also willing to dedicate huge amounts of time to convince others not to make the same mistakes; one might say showing more kindness, compassion or morals than average. But there are also plenty who think their only real mistake was getting caught.
Dale Carnegie talked about this in "How to Win Friends and Influence People": http://books.google.com/books?id=1rW-QpIAs8UC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA3...
TL;DR; - A hardened criminal and cop killer felt that he was constantly being persecuted by the police and was only defending himself.
Not for me. For me, criminals in jail = on average worse than average unjailed people.
Of course, this is also assuming away the vague and subjective task of determining "how bad" a person is.
There might be more data that asked prisoners to say if they are better than most people, and from the data collected, I'm sure that you could determine if most prisoners thought they were better than the average person.
As it is, I'm assuming that prisoners answered from a list of characteristics about themselves, average prisoners, and average unjailed people on some linear scale.
It's more subtle than that. Both average and median refer to a number, so you have to decide how to turn "driving ability" or "moralness" into a number. Two ways of doing that are to simply sort all people, and then use their ordinal as the number. In that case, average and median would be the same. Another way is to actually assign a meaningful number to each person, but there's not an obvious way to do that. You could choose an arbitrary proxy stat, like how many traffic accidents you've been in or how many people you've murdered, but then you're going to end up with a massively uneven distribution such that a large majority of people are tied for "the best" and thus the majority of people can accurately say they are above average.
That one has always bugged me. How did this supposed poll define "average driver," if at all? Is the idea that you rank all drivers from best to worst, then see if you're in the top half of the list? Or is the idea to take some metric, like the average traffic tickets per driver, and see if you have more or fewer tickets than that average? If it's the former, I'm not sure how you distinguish between all the drivers with flawless driving records. If it's the latter, then I must be above average, since I've never had a traffic ticket.
The same questions apply to this poll, which asked people whether they are "more moral, kinder to others, more self-controlled, more law-abiding, more compassionate, more generous, more dependable, more trustworthy, and more honest" than average.
Using the second concept of "average," yes I do. I have seen lots of car accidents, and lots of people pulled over by police (presumably for speeding or reckless driving). I have never experienced either, other than being pulled over once for a missing tail light (humorously, literally hours after I had purchased that vehicle). So I do consider myself a better than average driver.
But this idea of "better than average driver" just isn't very useful. Because presumably the majority of drivers have not been in an accident, while the average number of accidents per driver is obviously greater than zero. Thus most people are better than average drivers, in the same sense that most people have more fingers than average.
Did you read the two definitions of "average" I posted above? Under the second definition, if we go by traffic accidents, I am clearly better than average, because I have been in zero traffic accidents (as a driver). Since you seem to be going by the first definition, I'm curious how you are distinguishing drivers that all have a perfect driving record.
Consider a population of 100 drivers, none of whom have ever had a traffic accident. The average number of accidents per driver is therefore zero.
Suddenly, two of them collide. Now, 2/100 drivers have had an accident, and 98/100 drivers have still never had an accident. The average number of accidents per driver is now therefore 0.02.
Since 98/100 drivers have had 0 accidents, but the average number of accidents per driver is 0.02, then 98% of drivers have had below the average number of accidents.
Note also that mean and median are approximately equal for large populations given a normal distribution. Most metrics about humans follow a normal distribution with notable exceptions like salary. I don't know if driving skill follows a normal distribution or not, but if I had to bet I know what I would have bet on. :)
Another question lies in whom the convicts were comparing themselves. If I were a burglar whose friends were all hit men or divorce lawyers, I might find some justification in feeling a little morally superior.