rss-bridge 2022-04-18T21:05:00+00:00

When Doing Right Feels Wrong

Have you ever been in a position where you had to choose between someone you care about and a value that you hold dear? Maybe you had to decide whether to report a friend who was cheating on an exam, or a co-worker who was stealing from the tip jar. This week, we tell the story of a Detroit police officer who found himself in this sort of dilemma, forced to choose between people he loved and the oath he swore to serve his community. What happens in our minds when we have to decide what is right and what is wrong?

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When Doing Right Feels Wrong

By Hidden Brain Staff

/ April 18, 2022

Additional Resources:

Research:

The Power of Moral Concerns in Predicting Whistleblowing Decisions, by James A. Dungan, Liane Young, and Adam Waytz, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2019.

The Psychology of Whistleblowing, by James Dungan, Adam Waytz and Liane Young, Current Opinion in Psychology, 2015.

The Whistleblower’s Dilemma and the Fairness–Loyalty Tradeoff, by Adam Waytz, James Dungan, and Liane Young, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2013.

Grab Bag:

Why Do Whistleblowers Risk Speaking Out?, by Adam Waytz, TEDMED, 2018.

The Whistle-Blower’s Quandary, by Adam Waytz, James Dungan and Liane Young, NYT Opinion, August 2013.

Transcript

*The transcript below may be for an earlier version of this episode.
Our transcripts are provided by various partners and may contain errors or deviate slightly from the audio.*

Shankar Vedantam: This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever had one of those conversations where half the people in the room have a very strongly held opinion, and the other half feel just as strongly in the opposite direction? This happened to me a few years ago. I was having dinner with friends in Washington, DC. Everyone was talking about some shocking news that had just come out. Tens of thousands of top secret documents from the national security agency, or NSA, had been leaked to journalists.Archival tape: TV Announcer: Since at least 2008, the national security agency has been using secret technology to hack into....Archival tape: TV Announcer: Secret, and far reaching, and it's been going on for yearsArchival tape: TV Announcer: ... the government can compel a phone company to provide this metadata, as it's called, from millions of customers.Shankar Vedantam: The man who released all these documents was Edward Snowden, a computer security consultant at the NSA. The documents detailed extensive secret U.S. surveillance of people and governments across the globe. Edward Snowden believed that what the NSA was doing was wrong, and that the public had a right to know.Edward Snowden: I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity, or love, or friendship is recorded.Shankar Vedantam: Fearing, correctly, that he was in the cross hairs of U.S. security agencies, Edwards Snowden fled the United States, and found refuge in Russia. Back at the dinner table with my friends that night, someone asked a simple question. Edward Snowden, hero or traitor? One side of the dinner party was certain. This man was a hero. He had acted in the public interest, alerting Americans to heavy handed surveillance by their government. The rest of the group was equally certain. Edward Snowden was a traitor, who shares national security secrets that embarrass your country, endangers the lives of U.S. intelligence agents and service members, and then finds refuge in Russia. Vladimir Putin's Russia. What fascinated me about this debate was how quickly people came to their conclusions. How certain they were, that they were right. What explained it? Today, we explore what happens when two core moral values are pitted against each other. Loyalty versus honesty. This week on Hidden Brain.Shankar Vedantam: Darwin Roche grew up Detroit, Michigan in the 1970s and '80s. His father was a millwright. He dismantled, repaired, and reassembled huge pieces of machinery in a steel factory. Darwin's mom stayed at home to raise him and a sister. She'd help them with their homework, and give them life advice. She'd also whip up big family dinners. Every Sunday evening.Darwin Roche: My childhood was pretty good. I can't recall any really adverse childhood experiences that I went through as a kid, and then as well as a young adult and a teenager. So I had a pretty good lifestyle. I really enjoyed being a kid.Shankar Vedantam: Darwin's parents were loving, kind, churchgoing folks. They tried to impress the right values on young Darwin.Darwin Roche: Doing the right thing for the right reasons. Being a person of honesty and integrity. Doing the best you can, and doing the right the first time, in everything that you do.Shankar Vedantam: When Darwin was around 12 years old, he violated his parents' moral code. One day, he snuck into a neighbor's yard, and picked some of her flowers. As he was walking home with his freshly assembled bouquet, the neighbor called his mom, and told her what he'd done.Darwin Roche: My mom really got after me about doing that. And she was telling me how important it is to respect other people's property. So the punishment, or I guess, the reward would be that I had to do yard service for her, for the remaining summer. I had to cut her grass and everything like that.Shankar Vedantam: Darwin said this lesson taught him what kind of person he wanted to be. At home, he became the model son. At school, he got good grades. But when he was 16, he received a different kind of lesson. A lesson that taught him what kind of person he didn't want to be. He was driving to pick up his sister from school. Two friends were in the car with him. All of the boys were Black. Suddenly in his rear view mirror, Darwin saw the flashing lights of a police car.Darwin Roche: And so I didn't think anything of it, because I've never had any negative encounters with law enforcement at all.Shankar Vedantam: There were four officers in the squad car. All of them got out. One approached Darwin.Darwin Roche: So the officer approached the driver's side door, and he asked me for my driver's license.Shankar Vedantam: Darwin knew his license was in the car, probably in the side pocket of the door. Something told him not to reach for it.Darwin Roche: So I said, "My driver's license is here, but I just don't know where it's located." And so at that point he ordered all three of us out of the car. And then he told us to put our hands on the trunk of the car, of my car, while they searched the interior of the vehicle. And then the officer walked back to me and said, "Hey, I found your driver's license," and he held it in his left hand, and he showed it to me. And I smiled, because I was happy, because I didn't know where it was. And then he slapped me in the face very hard, and told me to wipe that smile off my face. He took his hand, and did like a clamp around my throat, squeezing my Adam's apple.Shankar Vedantam: At one point, Darwin looked at the other three officers.Darwin Roche: And the other officers, they were Black males, and they just shrugged away. And I was looking at them like, "Are you going to allow this to happen? Are you going to allow someone to assault me?" And I'm 16 years old, and I haven't done anything wrong. And so at that point, they just went along to get along, and didn't do anything to intervene. And then, the encounter lasted for about five minutes, but that five minutes, I thought that they were actually going to kill me, because he told me wh

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