Vsauce! Kevin here -- and when Sammy “The Bull” Gravano ratted on the Mafia,
he wasn’t just saving his own skin -- he was engaging in a high-stakes game
theory exercise… because we all know that Snitches Get Stitches.
Snitching is such a severe social transgression that Judas Iscariot has been paying for snitching
on Jesus to the Romans for nearly 2,000 years -- and the 30 pieces of silver Judas received
for his betrayal is still the benchmark for an informant’s dishonorable compensation.
Even little kids have a sense that snitching is disgraceful conduct -- they ostracize the
kids who “tattle” or “squeal.” Nobody likes a tattletale! In Southern Italy, the code of conduct
known as “omerta” governed the mafia’s refusal to cooperate with authorities against others within
the organization -- it was a blood oath -- and a pentito -- someone who broke omerta -- was a rat.
You take that oath, you never betray. You never
talk. You never say anything. No matter who violates you.
So are Julian Assange and Edward Snowden heroic whistleblowers who risked everything to lay bare
the truth, or are they just weasels, stool pigeons or traitors? It depends who you ask.
But I think that what seems like an issue of virtue and self-interest is a lot more complex
-- it’s a mix of human behavior and game theory, a combination of morals and math… and how we
actually play the game is so perverse that we make it nearly impossible to actually get to the truth.
WHAT’S A STOOL PIGEON? An antiquated method for catching pigeons was to tie
one pigeon to a stool -- as it flapped its wings hopelessly trying to escape,
that attracted other pigeons to its location where they could be captured easily.
So calling a pigeon a “rat with wings” works on a couple different levels.
The most pure example of snitching and its consequences is exposed in the Prisoner’s
Dilemma. You probably already know how it works, so I’ll keep it brief.
2 men are arrested, and they’re separated. If neither snitches on the other one, police
can still convict each of them on a lesser charge with a 2-year sentence. If one turns on the other,
that testimony will allow a conviction on a greater charge with a 10-year sentence,
and the snitch will go free. If both betray each other, it’s 5 years each.
The payoff matrix shows all the possible outcomes of both A and B snitching or NOT snitching -- and
it immediately raises questions about the best strategy. If you’re A, should you stay silent and
hope B stays silent, too? 2 years. Does it make more sense to betray your friend, and hope you go
free if he maintains silence -- even if it means risking 5 years if the other guys talks, too?
If you snitch, your possible outcomes are 5 years or 0 -- betrayal means you
will avoid a 10 year sentence no matter what. Remaining loyal
and not talking gives you possible outcomes of 10 years and 2 years.
So what’s loyalty worth to you?
It’s irrational to put stock in loyalty, and the dominant strategy for both players is to betray
one another. That’s the big game theory takeaway from the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It's such a seminal
concept that its offshoots and implications on decision theory are referenced over
62,000 times on Google Scholar, and the most comprehensive analysis of all-things-Prison's
Dilemma -- Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy -- is over 30,000 words.
In spite of nearly 75 years of scholarship, we've obfuscated and flat-out ignored the
aspect that dictates how this game affects real lives in real life: The house always wins.
In the prisoner’s dilemma, players are incentivized to betray. The worst case
scenario for a player is he honors the code and his friend betrays him. The BEST case
is he betrays, his friend stays loyal, and he avoids prison time -- but even
in that freedom scenario, he’s branded a snitch for life. He’ll face consequences
in the community for ratting out the other guy. Even winning is losing.
But there is no outcome where the police
lose. They can only win. It’s just a question of how much.
The FBI itself says that “informants have played major roles in the investigation and
prosecution of a wide variety of federal crimes” since the inception of the bureau in 1908… and
even with clear published guidelines about how informant programs work,
the whole thing is a murky soup of threats and payoffs. And whether it’s the FBI or NYPD or
Soviet KGB’s system of sekretny sotrudnik, it’s always worked pretty much the same way.
The cops need information to prosecute criminals. If they don’t get it through
investigation, they need to get it through testimony. Sometimes
witnesses are totally comfortable telling what they know… but most of
the time they’re not. Because of the, “Snitches get stitches” repercussion.
And that’s when the game theory changes.
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The one running the game has two options: threats and incentives. Or both. In the
prisoner’s dilemma, both players are offered potential, but not guaranteed immunity if they
give up the other guy. Co-defendants and people arrested for other stuff are offered everything
from lighter charges and sentences to full amnesty, while incarcerated informants can
get simple prison perks or full release. Paid informants basically have a job and a paycheck.
Informants have to decide how they want to play to avoid punishment or
balance their payoffs with the potential consequences of those payoffs -- while
the gamemasters wait around to see just how much they’ve won. Not a bad deal.
Maybe that’s fair. In the prisoner’s dilemma, we know that both players are
criminals -- that’s why the cops are 100% confident they can convict them
on that lesser 2-year charge. There’s no wrongfully-charged man in the dilemma, and
there’s no guy trying to improve his already grim circumstances or looking for a handful of cash.
But rewarding snitches is such a twisted game
it almost got innocent people executed for killing a man who wasn’t even dead.
In 1819, Jesse and Stephen Boorn were convicted and sentenced to death in Vermont for killing
their brother-in-law Russell Colvin. There wasn’t a ton of evidence -- but Jesse
Boorn’s cellmate Silas Merrill said that Jesse confessed to him in detail. Merrill testified
against the brothers and was rewarded with his own freedom from a forgery conviction.
But just before Jesse and Stephen were to be hanged, Colvin was found alive in New Jersey.
He wasn’t even dead, let alone murdered by the Boorn brothers. It was a rare win for
justice -- and the cops who always benefit? Even they kinda won, since they were spared
from the wrong of putting innocent men to death. Yes, a forger went free. Ehhh.
Merrill’s dishonesty reveals one of the obvious problems with informant culture: an incentive to
lie. You already have an inherent sense of the problems with snitching -- but let’s codify it.
When it comes to criminal justice, three things matter:
what’s known, when it’s known, and who knows it.
Truth is not necessarily part of that equation.
To start, informants are suspect because they're usually implicated
in anti-social behavior already -- so they're kinda difficult to trust. Why
wouldn’t they just make things up to hurt the people they hate
and protect their own? And don’t all the benefits feel a little like a reward for criminals?
But the problems with the snitching game are only the beginning. Sometimes informants are
forced to play a game within that game. Witness intimidation happens when criminals
use their own system of threats and payoffs to influence witness testimony. If a witness is
forced to play a game where the house always wins, and you’ll face consequences for their
testimony? Then you can’t win, either -- so all you can do is wreck the game by silencing them.
If you’ve ever watched any mob movie you’ve seen how the Mafia’s omerta code is enforced.
But what makes for great entertainment, has ruined real lives like Anthony Brown’s.
Nearly half, half, of death row wrongful convictions have been tied to unreliable
informants. Anthony Brown was sentenced to death in Florida in 1983 for murder,
but the actual killer testified against him in exchange for his own lenience. And it was the same
for Randall Adams -- he was convicted of killing a police officer in 1977 while the informant who was
the real killer received immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony. NEAT TRICK.
Wanna go down a rat rabbit hole? Google “Randy Steidl” -- in Randy’s case,
a cop sacrificed his own job to expose the truth about the snitch system that wrongfully convicted
him of murder. Randy spent 17 years in prison for murders he didn’t commit, and although he won a
multi-million dollar settlement from his town and the state of Illinois, he wasn’t pardoned.
So… as a society, what can we do to combat the perverse incentives
of snitching? We at least need to understand how information games are played in real life.
History has morphed the Roman goddess Justitia into the modern image of Lady
Justice -- she’s usually depicted as holding a scale that balances the act
with its consequences. She’s blindfolded, which is meant to symbolize impartiality.
But nearly 500 years ago, Flemish painter Pieter Bruegel portrayed a static,
unmoving Lady Justice wearing a blindfold to suggest that she was failing to see injustice.
So which is it? Is she impartial or just ignorant?
I don’t know. But I do know that as long as her lips are free to play the oldest
game in crime and punishment -- snitching and stitching -- it might not even matter.
And as always, thanks for watching.
Thanks again to Fishing Clash for sponsoring Vsauce2. Download now.