Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive

Let me provide an example that occurred to me while I was reading this book. I live in California, and my primary motorized transportation is a motorcycle. California is unlike every other state in the United States in that lane splitting is not illegal. So in other states, there is an institutional pressure (to use the jargon Schneier provides), in the form of law, to not slip between lanes of traffic and jump ahead.

In California there is, in parallel, a small amount of societal pressure in the form of disapproval of automobile drivers (who believe that the practice is dangerous, although it often is not), and even perhaps some moral pressure (arising from the sense that one is unfairly jumping ahead of one’s “rightful” position in a queue). There might even be some reputational pressure from friends that find it objectionable.

But at the same time, there is a mild social pressure in the opposite direction from fellow motorcyclists — if you don’t take advantage of the motorcycle’s strengths, then you’re a sucker for sticking only with its weaknesses. That might also create some reputational pressures in some circles.

This means there is a social dilemma, in which two competing sets of pressures are likely to influence an individual’s behavior. In the terminology of the text, if the motorcyclist stays in the automotive lane, they are cooperating with those who would prohibit lane splitting, otherwise they are defecting.

(Note that even in California, the police can always use “illegal lane change” or simply “reckless driving” to punish those that are acting too wantonly — if they can catch them, of course.)

But among motorcyclists, there are completely unwritten and largely unspoken sets of norms regarding the conditions under which one should or should not split those lanes. When I try to explain to my non-motorcyclist friends that lane splitting is quite legal, they invariably cite their horror at being passed even at full freeway speeds by motorcycles traveling well above the speed limit (typically, in my experience, testosterone-poisoned young men on sport bikes or self-styled “outlaws” on Harleys).

Well, yes. But those motorcycles are in turn defecting from the norms implicitly agreed to by the overwhelming majority of more sensible motorcyclists. So, for example, if one of my nephews were ever to take up riding, I would explain both the legal and extra-legal norms that I would hope they would follow. As an individual, I could only use societal and reputational pressure and try to invoke moral pressure.