Border town lockdown

Gallup, New Mexico is now in as stringent of a lockdown as we’ve seen in the United States. The situation has moved on from my last post, where I claimed that while it was a good thing that the Navajo Nation had not restricted movement outside of the reservation, this lack of restriction on movement was undermining its own curfew (since people could — and did — just leave). Gallup’s (outgoing) Mayor did what the Navajo Nation would not — that is, restrict entry into Gallup, which was then extended for another three days. The restriction is slated to be lifted tomorrow (May 07) though there is some talk of an extension.

The lockdown is being enforced. There are local and state police, as well as the New Mexico National Guard, at all roads leading into Gallup, and entry is granted only to those who can show proof of residence (e.g., through state issued ID with a Gallup address) or essential workers. That is a significant and unprecedented policy shift – it essentially locks out tens of thousands of Native Americans (primarily from the Navajo Nation) who would ordinarily come into town to shop at the beginning of the month when pay checks, social security checks, and other government assistance checks are received.

It’s worth thinking about the justification of this “full” lockdown policy against its alternatives, especially in light of an important and emerging body of evidence about the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. What we are learning is that probability of transmission is highest during close contact in enclosed spaces, and that susceptibility to contraction increases with age. In other words, the highest risk of transmission is in crowded indoor environments and for older people. It’s not clear that a full lockdown is necessary to minimize the risks of transmission relative to less stringent policy alternatives.

Right now, there are two possible policy options on the table: (1) a full lockdown and (2) a partial or targeted lockdown. I think that (2) is preferable to (1) for reasons I make clear below. Some of these reasons apply most clearly in this specific case (in virtue of, e.g., Gallup being a “border town”) while others generalize more broadly. I also note that the third option is “do nothing” (no policy response whatsoever) but I’m assuming – and I hope we are all in agreement on this by now – that is not a sensible course of action.  It’s worth considering the two options in more detail:

Full lockdown. Gallup NM is close to a “full lockdown” in the sense that it has completely restricted entry for non-residents and there is a curfew for residents. Even essential businesses (except hotels) were told to close early (5pm at the beginning of the lockdown, though that has now eased to allow them to stay open until 8pm after 3 days). Lockdowns can be more or less stringent, of course, but this seems to me to be one of the more stringent, credibly enforced policy that I’ve seen put in place in the United States.

Is this policy justified? I don’t think so. First, the lockdown will stop people from getting critical supplies they need. As I said in the last post, 30% of people on the Navajo Nation lack access to potable water and frequently travel to border towns like Gallup to get it. A policy that limits access to water undermines the justification of the policy insofar as the policy is intended to reduce regional COVID-19 infection rate. You can’t wash your hands without water.

Note that there is an obvious question as to whether the policy is aimed at reducing regional (read: Navajo Nation, McKinley County, Cibola County, San Juan County, etc.) infection rate rather than local (read: McKinley County) infection rate. I think the goal should be the former for a number of reasons (both moral and practical), but whether the political incentives make it so is another question. Either way, the problem is regional rather than local, so the policy will eventually catch up – one way or another.

Second, assuming that people will need to get basic supplies from somewhere, the policy may shift the problem elsewhere. That might be good if “elsewhere” is spread out across a number of border towns and places on the reservation, but it would be bad if “elsewhere” is just another single border town (like Farmington or Grants). If the “beginning of the month” crowding at Gallup’s Wal-Mart was the worry that the policy was intended the mitigate (hint: I think it was), then shifting that crowd elsewhere doesn’t make “regional” sense. The crowd needs to be “spread out,” so to speak. One implication of this is that we ought to be cognizant about what is happening with all that pent-up demand: will there be the same amount of people heading to Wal-Mart when Gallup opens up or has that it been satisfied elsewhere? Presumably we should be taking steps to ensure the latter and preparing, just in case, for the former. (I note here that the State of New Mexico has set up potable water sites on the reservation and the Navajo Nation has also been handing out food and water supplies as well, presumably driven by the same concerns I’m outlining.)

A complete (or as complete as we’ve seen) lockdown imposes significant costs not just to business but also, as implied above, to consumers who need certain markets to remain open. (When I say need, I mean need.) Presumably, the state should clear a pretty high justificatory bar for the use of coercive state power that restricts such movement and shutters critical markets. And remember, too, that the Navajo Nation has a mostly rural population, with large swaths of its geography lacking cell reception and internet access, and so sitting at home ordering Amazon Prime is just not a viable option for a lot of people. Restricting access to Gallup is restricting access to basic goods and services that people on the Nation need.

Targeted lockdown. If not a full lockdown, what else? I think there is some consensus that a partial or targeted lockdown is probably the socially optimal policy. We’re moving towards that elsewhere: require consumers and workers on the front lines to wear masks and other PPE as applicable, have limits on how many customers in a store or place of business (especially crowded places like a single Wal-Mart), and install “COVID friendly” store architecture at places of work (sneeze guards, spread out workstations, etc.) All of this coupled with a robust test-and-trace strategy, of course, which we should expect to be resource and labor intensive (relative to other parts of the country) given the physical geography of the Navajo Nation. The point is to keep markets open while minimizing risks associated with their operation rather than closing them completely.

These are all things we know by now. But what about COVID relevant behavior outside of the purview of lockdown policies? The emerging evidence on transmission dynamics we have is pointing to the home and other crowded-enclosed-spaces (outside of places of business, e.g., social gatherings) as primary sites of transmission. The Navajo Nation is ripe for domestic transmission given widespread extended family cohabitation with a fairly large younger population. In other words, lots of young people living with their elders in closed quarters. We should be cognizant of the fact that easing from full-to-partial lockdown will (probably) increase the likelihood of intra-family transmission, as younger people will be most likely to be out and about and then go home to their older family members. Given that the infection rate is so high despite demographics and population density of the Navajo Nation, it seems as though intra-family transmission should be receiving a lot more attention than it has been.

One way to mitigate the risk here is to allow individuals who need to be out and about (such as essential workers) to voluntarily quarantine away from their families in unused hotel rooms (of which, by the way, there are a lot, since the State of New Mexico issued a rule placing a 25% ceiling on hotel occupancy about a month ago). Voluntary is important here, though, and whether there will be uptake if this offer was on the table is an open question.

One other aspect to either strategy, one that is receiving less attention but deserves more, is the role that informal rules and norms play in the overall infection rate. A full or partial lockdown won’t do much if there are still rituals or religious events – the sorts of events that are intimately tied up with Navajo culture and identity – being held on the reservation. These events tend to involve close contact between many people, both young and old, along with singing in sometimes enclosed spaces for extended periods of time. (“Singing” is particularly relevant here given the role it plays in the aerosolization and thus transmission of the virus.)

To be clear, I don’t know if events such as these are still being held, but I don’t think that, as a matter of policy, we should assume that there won’t be some degree (maybe even high degree?) of non-compliance in this regard. Ritual and religion are a central feature of life in this part of the world — a fact that any risk minimization strategy should be mindful of.  And since there is no way that the Navajo Nation police (or any other law enforcement agency) will be able to enforce social distancing guidelines to ensure anything close to 100% compliance for reasons I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we’ll need to rely on community-wide expectations (and attendant social sanctions) for a high degree of compliance. Are we working on that? We should be.

Why does the Navajo Nation have such a high COVID-19 infection rate?

The Navajo Nation, the largest Native American reservation with one of the largest tribal populations in the United States (around 170,000 people across 27,000 square miles crossing Four Corner state lines), has the third highest per capita infection rate of COVID-19 after New York and New Jersey. This fact in itself is remarkable – and alarming – given the conspicuous absence of the factors that (we reasonably might think) contributed to the high infection rates in New York and New Jersey. Specifically, the Navajo Nation does not have a robust public transport system with high ridership (there is no subway in the desert), does not have a large heterogeneous “international” population (96% of tribal members identify, unsurprisingly, as American Indian or Alaskan Native), and has a relatively low population density (around 6 persons per square mile, against, for example, New York State’s 420 persons per square mile or New York City’s 26,000 persons per square mile).

A high infection rate on the Nation is alarming because of a perfect storm of circumstances that may translate into an overwhelmed hospital system or a high fatality rate: prevalence of preexisting conditions (such as respiratory illness caused by both indoor pollution (coal and wood used to heat homes) and outdoor pollution (oil and gas development concentrated in “hotspots” on the Nation); high rates of diabetes and obesity; extended family cohabitation (often three generations, including vulnerable immuno-compromised elders, living under a single roof); a lack of provision of public goods (such as access to water); a lack of the right sorts of private goods (such as access to grocery stores – the Nation is a “food desert” in a literal sense); a haggard public health infrastructure of the sort that would be required for a robust “test-and-trace” strategy; and a high poverty rate (around 38% on persons on the Nation live in poverty). These factors are, of course, interrelated and self-enforcing: high poverty rates mean a lower tax base, and a lower tax base means less funds to provide requisite public goods and healthcare facilities and makes extended family cohabitation more advantageous relative to the alternatives, for example.

Some of these factors also contribute to the high infection rate as well. Cohabitation with extended families means a more people under one roof in close contact with each other; not having access to clean water makes hygiene and sanitation procedures impossible (and also means you need to leave the house to get water); poverty means employment that is typically non-conducive to remote work, already out of the question in some areas that lack even basic cell reception; and “food deserts” mean having to drive to border towns like the one I am in — Gallup, New Mexico — to get basic provisions from a single (and therefore crowded and possibly infectious) WalMart.

One contributing factor for the high infection rate must also be some degree of non-compliance with social distancing guidelines. Asking a community to practice social distancing runs into familiar collective action problems since social distancing is costly for any given individual, not only in economic but also in sociopsychological terms. We are “by nature” social, so common sense, old Aristotle, and new social science tells us, and going without social interaction for weeks or months on end generates significant psychological costs – a fact that some of us are becoming acutely aware of. Relationships, familial or otherwise, give our lives meaning, and are of particular significance in the close-knit communities on the Nation. Moreover, the benefits of social distancing are more-or-less invisible to the individual asked to bear its economic and psychological costs – at least immediately – given the delay between compliance and subsequent reduction in infection rate, as well as the counterfactual imagination required to appreciate the costs of non-compliance (horror stories of overwhelmed hospital systems happen “over there, but it could not happen here.”)

Group characteristics will also play a crucial role in whether compliance is achieved and whether the benefits of that compliance accrue. For example, age demographics – the majority of individuals on the Navajo Nation are young – contribute to the visibility of costs and invisibility of benefits, since the young are less vulnerable to the more acute and direct effects of the virus (a fact that would be reflected in their risk perceptions regarding contraction but, significantly, perhaps not in their perceptions of their own propensity for transmission). But whether they are less likely to “feel” the effects of the virus is irrelevant, of course, since the point of social distancing is to stop the spread to specifically vulnerable populations and, therefore, stop overwhelming an already poor healthcare system. A healthy young person infected with COVID-19 may not feel it, but their grandma probably will. And a final point worth mentioning here, of course, is that the vulnerable population of the Nation extends beyond older individuals, given the comorbidity of COVID-19 with certain preexisting conditions and the high prevalence of these very conditions in the Navajo population.

One way to ensure compliance with social distancing guidelines is to use the force of the state – formal institutions, most obviously in this case, the law – to make sure that everybody stays home. For its part, the Navajo Nation has tried to do precisely that through a (by all indications, heavily enforced) curfew every weeknight between 8pm and 5am, and a complete curfew over the weekend. But it would be near impossible (and undesirable, I might add) to ensure compliance through the heavy hand of the law given the Navajo Nation government lacks basic state capacity (as evidenced by the 30% of its tribal members who lack reliable access to clean drinkable water) and the costs involved in monitoring and enforcement across such a geographically sparse rural population.

Moreover, since the Navajo Nation has not (for good reason) restricted freedom of movement to neighboring towns – which, as of writing, do not have curfews – individuals are free to leave and “meet up” elsewhere. Several local hoteliers in the border towns surrounding the Nation (such as Gallup) have told me of an increase in demand for hotel rooms from “locals,” a category that includes those on the Navajo Nation, relative to “non-locals,” namely travelers heading east or west on I-40 contrasted with comparable expected demand given the time year. This is, of course, anecdotal evidence, but anecdotal evidence that is nonetheless suggestive: people who prefer not to live under a strict curfew can simply move across the Nation’s border, undermining the point of the curfew itself. Unsurprisingly, McKinley County, which sits adjacent to the Navajo Nation, has the highest number of COVID-19 cases in New Mexico and its medical resources are being stretched thin, prompting the outgoing Mayor of Gallup (Jackie McKinney) to ask New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham to declare a state of emergency and lock the city down on April 30, 2020.

Without the possibility of formal enforcement of the sort of restraint that social distancing guidelines exemplify – stay home, leave only when necessary, cancel social events, practice appropriate hygiene and the like – policymakers (and community leaders) must be sufficiently sensitive to the role that informal institutions (such as expectations, beliefs, social norms, and so on) play in generating policy-relevant outcomes. This is especially important in cases like this, where the benefits (unlike the costs) of cooperation are not immediately visible or delayed, and preference for compliance is unavoidably interdependent on expectations about others’ behavior (holding social events involves expectations that others will show up; not holding them for fear of social sanctioning from friends involves expectations that others will not show up). Compliance with social distancing will not turn on whether we can formally enforce curfews (though this certainly does not hurt); rather, compliance will require, especially in the long run, the presence of particular community-wide expectations that others will also show “conscientious restraint” – bear initial costs of social distancing as much they can in a manner consistent with our best scientific evidence – so that community wide benefits might accrue at some later time.

Changing informal institutions is challenging, even in the best of times. Doing so on the Navajo Nation during a pandemic is even more difficult. This stems partly from a credibility problem, exacerbated in this case for at least two reasons. The first is the response from the US Federal Government. Trump’s go-to strategy of thinly veiled dog-whistles aimed at riling up an angry white base through deliberately egregious rhetoric while masking policy actions that are usually (brown-children-in-cages notwithstanding) a degree removed from that rhetoric has been disastrous. The tragic point here is that this strategy predictably does not work, since public health policy admits of no neat separation between rhetoric and policy when behavior change the end goal. In other words, Trump’s modus operandi of saying a really bad thing, but doing something less bad, does not work because speech (official communication) and action (administration of policy) converge in this policy context.

Rather than incongruity and chaos, coordination of expectations requires harmony and consistency between rhetoric and action to preserve the credibility of the source of coordination – in this case, the Federal Government – since individuals will take heed of, and comply with, the public health messaging if they expect others to do so too. What, for example, should we be complying with in this case? Should we socially distance and stay at home, as Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, and, at times, Trump tell us to? Or should we rise up against the tyranny of social distancing policies, and, to quote Trump, “liberate” Michigan and Virginia?  

Or… maybe we should “liberate” the Navajo Nation? That’s an interesting idea. This point calls attention to a deeper credibility problem, one that precedes Trump and thus extends beyond his (and the Federal Government’s) response to the crisis. Tribal members have good reasons to distrust the US Government for what are obvious historical reasons, reasons that turn on the historical treatment of the Navajo and other indigenous populations. This is a history that includes forced sterilization of Native women, routine and systematic violation of Native property rights, and violence against Native persons. The general point here is that this history is particularly germane to the policy outcomes here, since success turns on the degree of voluntary compliance of an entire community – “conscientious restraint” – which in turn requires coordination from a source which has in-group credibility in the absence of robust state capacity. There’s no reason anyone would – or should – take agents of the state (and their public health messaging) seriously when they have historically been little more than predatory bandits.

As should be clear, the “behavioral” aspect to this problem is but one part of it, but one that will become increasingly important in the long run. No amount of coordination efforts on the part of any government will change the cold, hard fact of a lack of appropriate public and private infrastructure; but then again, no amount of policing and formal laws and regulations will stop people from breaking social distancing (at least not any amount of policing we are comfortable with).

The Chaco Phenomenon

Chaco Canyon is a mystery. As Stephen Lekson writes in Chaco Meridian:

Chaco has long been the bête noir, deus ex machina, eight-hundred-pound gorilla, and in-room elephant of Southwestern archaeology ... What was Chaco? Archaeologists despair, pronounce Chaco an unsolvable mystery.

So what was Chaco? According to Lekson:

There are some evident facts: Chaco was big. It was showy. It was expensive. Its architecture was clearly stratified (in the social sense): "Great Houses" were high status buildings on one side of the canyon, and small, modest, lower-status "unit pueblos" huddled on the other. Not many people lived in the Great Houses, and those who did were buried with pomp, circumstance, and possibly retainers, or more likely, descendants in a family crypt. Much of each great house was designed for functions other than gracious living: warehouses, offices, ritual, maybe even barracks. Anywhere else, Chaco Great Houses would be called "palaces," but that term seems incongruous--even indecorous--in the Pueblo region. Get used to it: they were palaces.

These supposed palaces sit in what is now called Chaco Canyon (about 60 miles from Gallup, New Mexico). It’s a harsh, desolate, and unforgiving place: whenever it's cold in northwest New Mexico, it's always a few degrees colder there. Whenever it's warm in northwest New Mexico, it's always a few degrees warmer there. There are no real rivers that go through there. So what is so special about Chaco Canyon? Well, amongst other things, this:

Pueblo Bonito (taken by me). For scale, that’s a person next to the central kiva.

Pueblo Bonito (image taken from Google Earth).

Here’s an artist’s rendition of what Pueblo Bonito would have looked like around 1000 years ago:

What Pueblo Bonito would have looked like 1000 years ago.

That's Pueblo Bonito — the main "Great House" and, by some accounts, the largest public building in North America until apartment buildings were constructed in 19th century Chicago. Around 400 to 1000 people lived there. Construction at Chaco Canyon started around the 9th century and was completed by the end of the 12th century. And the presence of that Plaza Tree — a “majestic ponderosa pine” — requires its own explanation.

Whether the Great Houses are palaces or not seems to be an open and controversial question, partly because palaces imply states, and states imply a form of social organization wherein some group has a monopoly on socially sanctioned violence. Such a picture seems at odds with our romanticized views of ancient Pueblo culture as an idyllic and peaceful state of nature. But we know that this is wrong: “Massacres, raiding parties, ambush, scalping, and captive taking … happened in the prehistoric Southwest.” Nevertheless, Lekson claims that the commitment to this romanticized view is why “U.S. archaeology doesn’t permit pre-Colombian states north of Mexico.”

At any rate, here are some more interesting features of Chacoan culture:

Roads. Ancient roads, sometimes to "nowhere," have been found around the area and they all lead back to Chaco. These roads have been documented using airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology.

A. Cuadra/Science/Bureau of Land Management

There's a "Great Road North" that goes straight into another canyon, called Kutz Canyon, but there's nothing there and nothing along the way. What's curious is that ancient Chacoans didn't have horses, wheels, or Teslas. So why did they have roads — which, by the way, were an incredible feat of engineering, highly technical and well-kept, and not used for any discernible purpose (no campsites were ever found along them, for example). These roads are generally straight and run straight up cliffs if they need to.

Here's one conjecture: some people think they were used for trade but were sacred, so you could walk on them but could not camp along them. Others think they were built as public works projects near the beginning of the decline of Chacoan Culture, a last "push" to keep the common civilians happy, perhaps not unlike many contemporary public works projects.

Here's another conjecture: archaeologists estimate that walking along a Chacoan road from A to B reduced caloric expenditures by 38%; it was more efficient, from an energy perspective, to walk along a Chacoan road than along the desert bed. And a 38% reduction in caloric expenditure is a tremendous boon in calorie scarce environments like ancient New Mexico.

No defenses. For a long time, there was no "warrior" class at Chaco, no gates, no forts, no citadels, etc. until right before it fell (~13th century). Yet there were incredible riches there, including: “Exotic parrots (Scarlet Macaws); chocolate from the Gulf of Mexico or Mexico's pacific coast; oyster shells from the bays of north Guaymas, Mexico; copper bells from Zacatecas; pottery from far west (Arizona); Mimbres pottery from what southern New Mexico; pipestone from the Dakotas and Alberta, Canada; and heishe shells from California coast and Texan coast.” This list was taken from David Stuart’s Anasazi America (p. 137).

Scarlet Macaw fossil (KNAU/Earth Notes).

To put that in perspective, I lived in the area some ~10 centuries later and, uh, the closest thing I've ever seen to a Scarlet Macaw is Pierce Randall’s pet cockatoo. I also lock my door (during the day and at night!).

Ancient astronomy. The walls of many great houses are built according to astronomical observations -- alignments that would have required intergenerational astronomical knowledge given the sheer scale and accuracy observed: "buildings like Chetro Ketl and Pueblo Bonito are oriented to face the direction of the rising and setting moon. When the moon reaches its lunar standstill (which takes place once every 18.6 years) it is framed perfectly by the doorways ... twelve of the major buildings not only align with solar, lunar, equinox, and solstice cycles, but also interrelate to each other, built in “symmetrically organized designs” on axes of major and minor lunar standstills.”

Anna Sofaer goes as far as to call Chacoan buildings “cosmological expression through architecture.”

Astronomical alignment in Chaco (Pinterest).

There are many other curiosities at Chaco Canyon. I'll leave you with some of my questions:

(1) Why Chaco Canyon? Just to build a smaller great house (around 400 rooms), 26,000 trees had to be imported by foot from over 30 to 50 miles away (mostly west, the Chuska Mountains). There were lots of other places to build, places with water and trees, etc. nearby. Yet Chacoans chose Chaco.

(2) Why did Chacoan society collapsed dramatically? These buildings were boarded up and formally abandoned within a generation. Some answers to this question are more controversial than others.

Comment on Chaim Gans’s ‘Cosmopolitanism, Cultural Rights, and Unequal Citizenship’

I had the pleasure of providing commentary on Professor Chaim Gans's Cosmopolitanism, Cultural Rights, and Unequal Citizenship at the Frankfurt Summer School on Global Justice at Goethe University. You can find my comments here. 

Launch speech transcripts for Collective Action on Corruption in Nigeria in Abuja

Here's a transcript of the speech I gave at the Abuja launch for our Chatham House report, Collective Action on Corruption in Nigeria on 17/05/17. For the transcripts of other speeches given at the same event by British High Commissioner H.E. Paul Arkwright CMG and my co-author Leena Koni Hoffman, please click here. 

So the report is called: ‘Collective Action on Corruption in Nigeria: A Social Norms Approach to Connecting Society and Institutions.” I just want to start off by talking about what we mean by the social norms approach.

I think the key question motivating the report – and I think it’s one that policymakers, including all of you, really care about – is why do corrupt practices persist, and how do we change them? And the structure of this question is quite like other questions that face policymakers in their daily work – why do pernicious practices (like child marriage, open defecation, domestic violence, and so on) in general persist, and how do we change them?

What’s key and integral to our approach is that these two questions are intimately linked. We need to know why a particular practice persists and sustains itself in order to understand the kind of policy intervention we ought to design to induce behavioural change. And what the social norms approach emphasizes – and I’m going to lay my cards on the table here – is the set of social expectations that underlie behaviour. So we need to figure out what those are – and it’s important to remember that they might be social norms, but they might not, more on that later – before we can devise policy solutions.

Another important aspect of our approach is that the framework we use to understand corruption is as a set of interactions amongst people, amongst individuals, that is, real life flesh and blood human beings. In other words we try to understand it as a social phenomenon driven by a set of beliefs. We think corruption is stable because the beliefs that support it are self-reinforcing and resistant to change.

It’s worth mentioning at this point, I think, that we take a neutral social scientific approach to this work. We’re not interested in moralizing, or playing the blame game, or disparaging any particular sectors or institutions found in Nigerian society. We’re not interested in talking about metaphorical beasts of corruption either.

And I’ll tell you why we’re not interested in playing the blame game: It’s the fact that corruption is so frustrating – the reason it’s so frustrating is that it represents a situation where everyone (or almost everyone) realizes that it is a problem, that is, that corruption is a problem. And everyone (or almost everyone) also has a preference to live in a society that is free of corruption, or at the very least has comparatively less corrupt behaviour than the status quo. I want to suggest that even the front-line bureaucrat who is asking for a bribe in whatever context would probably prefer to live in a high honesty low corruption society than a low honesty high corruption one. And that’s what makes this whole thing so frustrating. If it’s true that everyone agrees there is a problem, and everyone has a preference to change, why hasn’t it happened yet?

Well our approach sheds some light on that problem. It’s because corruption is a stable phenomenon whereby everybody has an incentive to continue to engage in it because of a set of interdependent beliefs (even if some of those beliefs are false, which is what our evidence suggests). Social expectations of this sort are difficult to change because they’re resistant to change.

But I do want to push a kind of cautious optimism here, because I want to stress the idea that just because social expectations are resistant to change doesn’t mean they can’t change. Corruption on our view isn’t driven by evil actors or unchangeable conditions, but social expectations. And you can change social expectations. In fact we give you some tools to do just that in the policy recommendation section of our report.

So the takeaway to the social norms approach is to find out what are the types of beliefs driving a practice, and then to devise a policy response to attempt to change them. But you might ask: how exactly do you find out what types of beliefs underlie the behaviour you’re trying to change?

Well you go out into the world and try to find them, try to measure them. That’s what we did – we did a specialized social norms survey. We worked with around seven Nigerian university departments and organizations, including the National Bureau of Statistics and carried out around 4,000 surveys in six states and the FCT. We also did interviews around the country as well.

We didn’t use the word ‘corruption’ in the survey because we didn’t want to prime the respondents into giving us responses that they thought we wanted to hear. We wanted to get at their true beliefs so we tried to be as morally neutral as possible in the framing of the questions. We also asked them about their factual beliefs, moral beliefs, and legal knowledge surrounding the practice in question. Here are some pictures to partially prove to you that we really did go out there and do these surveys.

I think it’s important that we be clear about what exactly we mean by ‘social expectations.’ In the study, we use Cristina Bicchieri’s definition of social norms, which are made up of two different kinds of expectations. These are: (1) empirical expectations, which is basically an expectation about what other people do in a given situation. And (2) a normative expectation, which is basically an expectation about what other people expect you to do in a given situation. The thought is that if you hold these two expectations about a given behaviour, you will conform to that behaviour—or, in other words, you will conform to that norm. And if you don’t conform to that norm, you will be sanctioned in some way (sanctions can be innocuous like idle gossip, or they can be extreme and violent).

Consider an example that I was told about just the other day. Apparently there’s a social norm in Nigeria about handing things to people with your right hand. If you give something to someone with your left hand, then you may get sanctioned – that is, the person might say, ‘hey, don’t give that to me with your left hand. Give it to me with your right hand.’ I probably wouldn’t violate this norm because I’m right-handed, but say I did – say I gave something to someone with my left hand and they sanctioned me in some way. They told me not to do that again. That might put the thought in my head that other people expect me to give them things with my right hand and not my left hand—that would be a normative expectation in the sense described above. And if I observe other people doing that, namely, I see that other people also give things to people consistently with their right hand, then that might give me the empirical expectation. And I will probably start giving things to people with my right hand. All you left handed people probably have learnt this by now.

Another example is tipping in the United States. In the US, you’re expected to tip at least 15 – 20% after a meal to the waiter. And if you don’t, then you might get sanctioned. If I were with a close friend who did not tip after a meal, I might say something to them like ‘hey, you should really leave a tip.’ Or if I was with an acquaintance, maybe I’ll gossip about them behind their back to my other close friends like, ‘I was at dinner with this cheapskate the other day.’ Maybe I wouldn’t. But you know who definitely would? The waiter. In fact if you did that consistently, I bet the staff at that restaurant would know who the cheapskate was. They’d say, ‘here comes the cheapskate.’ Or ‘here comes the European.’ Or ‘here comes the English guy.’ Because you might be a cheapskate, or just ignorant of the norm (like Europeans, like an English person), or you might be all three.

I also want to stress one last distinction before moving onto the findings. So the kinds of behaviour I just described are driven by what we might call interdependent beliefs – that is, they are beliefs that are dependent on what other people think and do.

But it’s really important, from a policy perspective, to figure out if what’s driving a particular behaviour is independent or interdependent. So you might have beliefs that drive behaviour that aren’t dependent on what other people think or do. For example, using an umbrella when it’s raining outside is like this, as is brushing your teeth. I don’t care if you all use an umbrella or don’t when it rains outside – I will use my umbrella because I don’t want to get wet. And I don’t care if you brush your teeth or not, I value having healthy gums and a clean mouth, so I will brush my teeth. Well I might care if you don’t brush your teeth and you talk too close to me, but even so, that won’t govern my choices regarding the brushing of my own teeth!

Moral rules and moral convictions also work like this – if you have a strong moral conviction about not killing people or about not eating meat, then you shouldn’t care about whether other people kill others or eat meat. You will not kill people or eat meat because of a personal moral conviction.

Why this is important is that whether a behaviour is independent or interdependent will govern the kind of policy response required to change it.

What our findings suggest is that there are social norms governing the solicitation of bribes amongst law enforcement officers in Nigeria, but there are empirical expectations governing the giving of bribes. So law enforcement officers might ask for bribes because they have pressures from within their relevant reference networks to do so, but people generally give bribes because they see other people doing it, or they expect other people to do it, or because it’s just a way to get out of administrative hurdles.

Onto our findings. So, as I just mentioned, social norms of corruption seem to be limited to specific contexts and sectors in Nigeria, like law enforcement officers.

Second, if the environment or options are changed, behaviour will change. So people give bribes in many instances because it might just be an efficient way to circumvent inefficient rules and administrative hurdles. It’s quicker and cheaper to give a bribe than it is to go through official processes which take a while. Also, fines are usually less than bribes, making it easier to give a bribe.

We also found that collective action is impeded because in some places people have misconceptions about what other people think. That is, they systematically make mistakes about what other people think.

To return to the point about social norms amongst law enforcement officers, our research suggests that there seem to be both upward and downward pressures to engage in corruption amongst law enforcement. So senior law enforcement officers expect lower ranking officers to solicit bribes from the public and lower-ranking officers expect senior officers to do so.

What’s interesting here is that there is moralistic and value-laden language surrounding non-compliance which indicates a social norm at work – so you have this odd situation where typical moral judgments seem like they’ve been flipped upside down. Those who do the in fact morally correct thing and stand by their moral convictions and the law by not engaging in bribery are the ones who are called evil and wicked, and those who do the morally questionable thing like ask for bribes are not. Being called these things, and the loss of privilege and status that these names indicate, from people in your reference network creates strong social pressures to conform to a norm.

We also found what seems to be a case of people being systematically mistaken about other people’s beliefs, indeed, other people who are in their community. For example, in Enugu, around 9 out of 10 people said that it was wrong and illegal for a police officer to ask for a direct payment for a traffic violation instead of going through the official process, but they also thought that 5 out of 10 of their fellow citizens thought that the officer should ask for a bribe. So you have a case here, a situation where people are systematically making mistakes about the beliefs of their fellow citizens in a way that makes collective action hard. This is because it’s exactly these kinds of false beliefs that give rise to the fatalism and inevitability surrounding corruption, that make it seem like such a hard problem to overcome. Of course you would think it impossible to overcome corruption if you thought half of the people in your community think that law enforcement officers should ask for bribes and you personally think, at the same time, it is wrong and illegal for law enforcement officers to do so. These false beliefs need to be dispelled and the illusion lifted to even begin to facilitate anti-corruption collective action.  

The second behaviour we looked at was regarding a government health facility employee asking for a payment for a hospital bed – a bed that you should legally be entitled to for free.

On the diagram, you can see the shorter lighter blue bar in the middle of the other two. This bar represents responses to ‘do you think it is wrong for a health facility employee to ask for payments for a hospital bed?’ I think Adamawa came in at the highest for a yes but that’s still relatively low, with just over 20%. But then you have the other two bars – do you think a government health facility should ask for a payment, and a high percentage of respondents across the board said yes.

What’s really interesting here is that when asked about whether it was illegal for a government health facility employee to ask for a payment for a hospital bed, lots of respondents also thought it was illegal. That’s the yellowish bar. So here you have a situation where most respondents didn’t think it was wrong, in fact, they thought the nurse should ask for a payment, but nevertheless they thought or knew it was illegal.

So what’s going on here? Despite the fact that many respondents thought that asking for a payment for a bed was illegal, they found it less objectionable than bribery at the checkpoint. Presumably this is because they can see themselves as funding an underfunded service as opposed to being extorted at a traffic checkpoint. The experiences must feel different.

So people view this as making a private transfer for something that ought to be a public transfer. They’re funding a government institution and they can see where their money is going.

Even so, though, we should remember that asking for a payment for a hospital bed basically amounts to a regressive tax because it puts the burden on those who can bear it the least, that is, the poorest people. This is presumably because wealthier people can already afford to go to private hospitals where they pay for healthcare as it is.

So I want to end on that, and hand it over to my colleague Leena to go through the rest of the findings and the policy recommendations. Thank you.

Navigating the murky waters of cyberspace

A modified version of this post was published in Homeland Security Today on 01/01/15: a digital copy can be found here.

The uneasiness of cyberspace

The recent Sony hacking scandal brought one important policy question to light: To what extent should the US government be involved in the cybersecurity affairs of private citizens and business? Answering this question is difficult; the issues are highly complex, there are epistemic barriers to fully appreciate the risks that need to be managed, and it’s a platitude amongst cybersecurity professionals that cyberspace is notoriously murky. But getting the answer right is imperative because of the issues at stake – privacy, the scope of government, and even national security might hang in the balance.

The task of a good cybersecurity policy is to help us navigate through these complexities and mitigate risk. In my mind, there are at least four reasons why the government will become increasingly involved in the cybersecurity affairs of private citizens and businesses:

(1) Hackers from so-called closed-societies are sanctioned (either implicitly or explicitly) by their respective states: In closed-information societies, such as North Korea and China, hackers may operate with the blessing of the government. Implicit backing from a government ‘allows’ hacker activity to go unchecked. For example, many hackers in North Korea or China must operate at least with the tacit knowledge of the government since the Internet is so closely monitored in those countries. My suggestion here is that the ‘permission’ to allow hackers to operate in an otherwise controlled environment constitutes an implicit endorsement of hacker activity. Of course, this claim rests on the assumption that these governments have knowledge of the hacker-activity; surreptitious hacker-activity in controlled information environments does not have the implicit endorsement of those who are controlling the environment.

This implicit endorsement can be contrasted with the explicit endorsement of a government. In this case, a government maintains formal ties with hackers—for example, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Unit 61398 is China’s ‘cyber unit’, apparently responsible for numerous attacks on US-based public and private targets. These hackers could be part of the formal apparatus of the government (such as PLA Unit 61398) or be an independent hacking group that receives resources from a government.

That’s not to say that this kind of implicit acknowledgment but formal distance cannot characterize the relationship between the state and hackers in more open societies as well. Nevertheless, there does, prima facie, seem to be a salient distinction to be made between tacit acknowledgment in societies that straightforwardly monitor and censor the Internet, and tacit acknowledgement in societies that are comparatively ‘open’ in the relevant respect.

The upshot is this: What may look like lone hackers may not be lone hackers, particularly if they are operating in a controlled-information environment. So, for example, what may look like criminal cyber attacks for financial gain might instead be a form of sophisticated economic espionage, or worse.

(2) Information and resource asymmetries: This point is related to (1). If the pertinent cyber hacking groups are getting help from states as large as China, or states willing to spend as much money on their military as North Korea, then private cybersecurity resources will probably not be enough.

Asymmetries of information resources are particularly pronounced in cyberspace. Indeed, even small businesses are worthy targets for hackers. For example, consider the fictitious Mr. and Mrs. Kim, small business owners, who don’t know a thing about cybersecurity, but the computer at the front desk of their small independent motel holds thousands of customers’ credit card information and personally identifiable information (PII). Or say Mr. and Mrs. Kim have a franchised (but still small) hotel – a Best Western, for example. They still don’t know anything about cybersecurity, but their front desk is connected to Best Western International’s central information hub. This might give hackers access to millions of credit cards and terabytes of PII. The point is this: it’s unfair to expect Mr. and Mrs. Kim to develop cyber security practices that will keep them safe from hackers with the backing of the Chinese or North Korean governments. Similarly, it might also be unfair to expect larger businesses to develop cyber security measures that will protect against, say, PLA Unit 61398.

But we might say that it’s not unfair to expect the large multinational corporations take drastic cyber security measures, as they have resources comparable to or larger than countries like North Korea. For example, WalMart’s revenue in 2013 was almost 40 times as much as North Korea’s GDP. But asymmetry issues remain: North Korea spends a significant amount of resources on its military, and presumably quite a bit of that money goes towards gaining information superiority in cyberspace. From defector accounts, for example, North Korea has a specific program to train ‘home grown’ cyber-warriors. WalMart, however, does not have strong enough incentives to pour resources into maintaining a WalMart’s Liberation Army Unit 61398.  

It’s important to stress that the information asymmetry stems from an incentive asymmetry. North Korea, China, and indeed all states have strong incentives to put resources into gaining information superiority because relative gains far outweigh costs. An excellent military cyber unit, for example, can not only obtain sensitive and classified national security information, but it can also cause physical damage to ‘smart’ systems or systems otherwise reliant on network infrastructure (see [4] below). Hackers can also cause significant psychological and economic damage. For example, convincing New Yorkers that there is a nuclear bomb in Manhattan (say, by controlling information flows to the city) would shut the city down and in the process economically paralyze the Northeastern United States. These kinds of attacks can be executed from a computer at no threat to personnel unlike traditional warfare.

(3) Incentives for secrecy: Private actors have a strong incentive to cover up cyber attacks on their systems. This is because consumers place trust in the cybersecurity infrastructure that lies behind much of their face-to-face activity with businesses. When you deposit money into a bank, you expect that nobody can simply hack into your account and take your money – importantly, you trust the bank will insure that nobody is able to do that.

You place a similar trust that nobody can access your information when you rent a room from Mrs. Kim, or when you buy something from Target.

But what incentive would the bank, Mrs. Kim, or Target have to tell you that your credit card information was, say, a part of a large package of information taken from their systems? None (notwithstanding legal compliance). In fact, their incentives run the other way: If the bank lets it be known that someone has hacked their systems and has access to their accounts, it risks a bank run. There are similarly significant costs for Mrs. Kim and large retail stores as well – a loss of trust means a loss of business.

These incentives might run directly against national security interests. It’s important to recognize that what may look like discrete cybersecurity incidents might be part of a broad and sophisticated attack. Obtaining information about cyber attacks is not only prudent for privacy and financial reasons, then, but also for gathering intelligence and developing a robust cybersecurity posture. My view is that a mature cybersecurity posture is not only about ‘keeping out’ who we want to keep out or protecting information, but also about gathering information as well – what are the hackers looking for? Why would they possibly be looking for this or that information set? Is there a discernible pattern to their activities? 

(4) Networked infrastructure: Industrialized societies are embedded with networked infrastructure, which means that industrialized societies are embedded with cyber risk. Sometimes industry doesn’t follow best practices, as in the case of the German steel mill that didn’t keep a ‘gap’ between its networks and the public Internet. A cyber attack in 2014 caused physical damage to the steel mill, and even closed down one of its blast furnaces. Cyber attacks can wreak damage even when there’s an air gap between the public Internet and closed networks. Consider the infamous Stuxnet – a computer worm – that was introduced to the closed environment of Iran’s nuclear industrial control systems through an infected USB drive. Stuxnet shut down almost a fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges before it was discovered.

These worries are only set to intensify with the growth of smart technologies and smart cities, as more critical infrastructure becomes part of the ‘Internet of Things’. Cyber risk to power grid networks, water delivery systems, and transportation increases with the increased connectivity in smart cities. Moreover, various third party contractors (with perhaps varying cybersecurity postures) are typically involved in the running of this critical public infrastructure, increasing overall vulnerability.  

These are but some of the issues we ought to keep in mind as we decide on an appropriate cybersecurity policy for a changing information environment. As cybersecurity professionals, decision-makers, and policy analysts know, cyberspace is an especially messy area when it comes to discerning the proper role of government. But even amidst all of this messiness, one thing is clear: we have a formidable task ahead of us in navigating these murky waters.