Small Animals

by Kim Brooks

  To measure participants’ moral attitude toward the parent, the researchers varied the reason the child was left unattended across a set of six experiments with more than 1,300 online participants. In some cases, the child was left alone unintentionally (for example, in one case, a mother was hit by a car and knocked unconscious after buckling her child into her car seat). In other cases, the child was left unattended so the parent could run in to work, do some volunteering, relax, or meet a lover.

  Not surprisingly, the parents’ reason for leaving a child unattended affected participants’ judgments of whether the parent had done something immoral. On a ten-point scale, with one being not at all immoral and ten being a hugely immoral act, participants usually rated leaving a child unattended as a three, even when the child was left unattended unintentionally even for a moment. But the ratings skyrocketed to nearly eight when participants were told that the parent left the child to meet a lover.

  The more surprising result was that perceptions of risk followed a similar pattern. Although the details of the cases were otherwise the same—that is, the age of the child, the duration and location of the unattended period, and so on—participants thought children were in significantly greater danger when the parent left to meet a lover than when the child was left alone unintentionally. In other words, participants’ factual judgments of how much danger the child was in while the parent was away varied according to the extent of their moral outrage concerning the parent’s reason for leaving.

  Sarnecka summarizes the findings this way: People don’t think that leaving children alone is dangerous and therefore immoral. They think it is immoral and therefore dangerous. “It’s clearer and clearer that it’s not about safety,” Sarnecka told me. “It’s about enforcing a social norm, a moral and social norm. You’re not ever supposed to leave your kids alone; I caught you doing it; you better be sorry. Now I have power over you … Humans are a social species, and we tend to want other people to approve of us. We tend to want to do what we think will be approved of, what everybody agrees is okay to do. What’s more surprising, however, is that people also adjust their factual beliefs to bolster our moral judgment.” Fear and judgment form a kind of negative feedback loop. Parents seem to have become more judgmental of parents’ not watching their children. To justify their moral outrage, they form a belief that an unsupervised child is at risk, and then the perception of increased risk intensifies their moral judgment yet again. Sarnecka’s colleague Kyle Stanford describes this loop as “a recipe for rapid social change.”

  Stanford’s theory is that “suddenly, there’s an availability heuristic that makes people think something like kidnapping is more common than it is, more of a risk than it is.” When a passenger plane crashes, for example, and the crash is covered by the news, people will invariably assess the risk of air travel to be higher than they would when a major crash hasn’t occurred for a long period of time. That’s an availability heuristic. Similarly, a spate of widely publicized child abductions, the kinds of horror stories that haunt us and come to mind with little effort, increased the seeming likelihood of the threat. “This sudden shift increased people’s moral outrage when they saw people breaking those moral rules or taking what they perceive now as risk.” Stanford explains that as people’s “moral outrage increases; they think it’s even riskier and it keeps going around and around, a downward spiral, until the action at last is entirely taboo. The increasing beliefs about risk and increasing moral outrage or condemnation are mutually supporting; each time you raise one, there’s pressure to raise the other.”

  * * *

  Intellectually, I could grasp what he was saying. If a group’s mode of thinking about a certain subject is a closed system, normally following a set of particular rules, the kidnapping panic of the eighties and nineties, or the public awareness campaigns surrounding hot-car deaths in more recent years, served as a sudden disruption to the system that initiated a feedback loop. I wanted to understand it in a different way, though, to grasp on a more personal level how risk perception and moral judgment interact in an individual’s thinking.

  I wanted to know at some level, even if only a neural one, why someone pulled out their iPhone to record my son in the parking lot of a Target in Virginia.

  For this, I turned to the psychologist Paul Bloom, who’d explored similar questions in his books Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil and Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. I asked him about this peculiar connection between moral judgment and irrational belief: If he could explain why, psychologically speaking, the two seem to be inextricable.

  “When we judge something as morally wrong,” he told me, “I think we realize that at some point we’re going to have to justify that judgment to a neutral third party, and the problem we face is that the language of morality doesn’t translate. You can’t say to a parent doing something you don’t like, ‘I morally disapprove of your behavior. You’re behaving in a way that offends my core values.’ People would think you were nuts. And so what we do is we use faulty reasoning to fabricate faulty causality to convince people of the wrongness.” He offers a few examples that have nothing to do with parenting, but show the same psychological mechanism at work. “Let’s say you don’t like trans people. It just feels wrong and scary to you that people are openly identifying as transgender. But you can’t just say, ‘I don’t like trans people,’ so you say, ‘Hey, if we give trans people rights, they’re going to assault little kids in bathrooms.’ Or maybe a certain politician doesn’t like Mexican people. He just doesn’t like the idea of all these Mexican people coming into our country. He can’t say that, exactly. So he says, ‘Mexican immigrants are dangerous. They’re murderers and rapists. If we let them in, they’ll commit terrible crimes.’ Or someone doesn’t like gay people, so they say, ‘Everyone knows gay people cause earthquakes, and we all know earthquakes are bad.’” Bloom laughed a little as he said this, even as he admitted it’s not funny when you think of the implications of this kind of thinking, this attempt to justify what can’t be justified with reason or “facts.”

  I asked him if he thought the problem was worse now than in the past, if social media or other changes in modern life were making people more judgmental.

  “I don’t think our psychology has changed,” he answered. “I think people are prone to judgment because as social creatures, we’re very focused on social hierarchy, how we compare to others, where we each fall on the ladder and whether we’re moving up or down. People have always used outrage or disapproval of others as a way of advancing in the hierarchy. I think what’s changed is that it’s just so much easier to do it now.”

  “Easier to…?”

  “To judge each other, to condemn or critique. Technology has vastly increased our ease and access to judgment. Our opportunities to disapprove of each other, to feel outrage at what others have done or are doing has become unlimited. At any moment I can plug myself into a community and try to manipulate my place in the hierarchy by expressing judgment. We don’t have to go out and kill a buffalo and bring it back for the tribe anymore to move up the hierarchy. We just open our browser.

  “And,” Bloom continued, “I think mothers in particular are very attuned to the hierarchy of where they stand with other mothers.”

  * * *

  As I waited to hear from the police officer in Virginia, I found myself wanting to believe that in the course of a generation, every parent in America, and not only parents but legislators, educators and school administrators, pediatricians and social workers, police officers and bystanders and store clerks and neighbors, had somehow lost the faculty of reason when it came to protecting children—that we were all caught in the negative feedback loop that the Irvine psychologists had identified. This was what I needed to believe to keep going—that our culture was in the grip of mass hysteria, that I was a victim of this hysteria, knocked over by a wave of anxiety and uncertainty, and that I was not alone.

  There was o
nly one problem with this point of view. The problem was that I clung to irrational fears as tightly as anyone else.

  Some things seem dangerous and others don’t, and often, this distinction has little to do with statistics or data or even reality. No matter how many people reassure me that flying is the safest form of travel, I will always be more nervous at thirty thousand feet than I am en route to the airport. There was a time when I felt nothing but elation when plunging into a cloud, seeing the sky go white, then back to blue, and a bout of turbulence was no more frightening than the rumble of driving over a rutted road. I can remember these flights without fear, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t resurrect them. Now a short domestic trip involves sweating, nausea, moderate sedation. It’s safe, it’s safe, I know it’s safe, I want to yell at all those well-meaning people who try to reassure me with statistics. But it doesn’t feel safe!

  When I later made this observation to Barbara Sarnecka, she said she understood my fears completely—but it isn’t fear per se that is so troubling to her but what we, as a society, are doing with those fears. “You’re afraid of flying,” she says. “It’s a fear for you, you know it doesn’t make sense, you know that it’s actually more dangerous for you to get in your car, but you have the fear, and so my feeling is, fair enough, you don’t like to fly. That’s your choice. Maybe it will affect your life; maybe you rearrange your travel so you don’t have to fly. Maybe you take a fear-of-flying class and move beyond it. Whatever. It’s your quirky little thing and it’s not really other people’s business. But when it comes to this fear about leaving children alone, which is equally irrational and equally not based on data or risk, the fear has become both common custom and law. Everyone is being compelled to share the phobia and if they don’t act like they share it, they are literally subject to litigation. You can be arrested and jailed and your kids can be taken away if you don’t behave in this way that’s demonstrably irrational. That’s what seems totally nuts to me. It doesn’t seem crazy when people have fears. It doesn’t surprise me at all that some mothers or fathers have some superstitious feeling that if they never take their eye off the kid, then nothing bad will ever happen to the kids. People are prone to superstition. Throw salt over your shoulder three times and the devil will never take your baby, that kind of thing. It is what it is. But to make it the law? To make it something we all have to participate in under threat of prosecution? That’s when I step back and say, ‘What is happening here? Why have we all bought into this assumption that the parent who is the most cautious, the most irrationally afraid, the most risk-averse, is the best or most loving parent? When did a good parent become a parent who is constantly, obsessively focusing on risk, and not just any risk, but the wrong risk?’”

  Sarnecka points out that the greatest enduring risk to children in America right now is not strangers and not pedophiles and not overheating cars, but obesity and all the health disorders related to it. “What used to be called adult-onset diabetes is now just called type 2 diabetes because kids now get it. They get it because they’re fat, and they’re fat because they never get to go outside and run around, and they’re never allowed to go outside and run around because they’re never allowed to be unsupervised.” She goes on to say that if we feared rationally, we’d worry about obesity and diabetes, we’d worry about how to keep our kids far away from sugary juices, we’d worry about young drivers killed in moving-vehicle crashes, we’d worry about things like teen depression or cigarette addiction. Instead, we tend to focus on occurrences that are far less likely, and yet somehow more frightening. “The fact is,” she says, “having your kid get fat and develop heart disease and die before her time is sad, but it doesn’t scare people. There’s no Law and Order: Diabetes Unit. Instead, the media fixate on these nightmare scenarios with fascination because they scare us in a delicious way, like horror movies. The Centers for Disease Control warn that if current trends continue, one in three US adults could have diabetes by 2050, whereas a child’s chances of being abducted and murdered are way less than one in a million. On average, you’d have to leave your kid outside, unsupervised, for 750,000 years for this to happen. But abduction is titillating, it’s exciting, it has something to do with sex, something to do with violence. And the part of our brain that deals with assessing threats did not evolve to see threats like diabetes and heart disease, things that kill you slowly over a long period of time.”

  Sarnecka’s study seemed to be confirming what I’d sensed without seeing, that this process I’d been caught up in was not about risk and safety and legal protections of children or even the statistical likelihood of particular dangers. It was not about my own incompetence as a mother, or about a lapse in judgment or a concerned stranger or the dangers of the modern world. It was not about things happening in the world at all. It was about the awesome and terrible power of our imagination.

  5

  SELF-REPORT

  Almost a year passed before I found out what would come of that day in Virginia. For a mentally sturdy, easygoing person without a generalized anxiety disorder or a tendency to fixate on unlikely worst-case scenarios, it would have been a long time to wait. For me, to not know if I was going to be charged with a crime, visited by DCFS, or summoned to court, it was an eternity. Luckily, I had other concerns to distract me. This was the year that Felix turned five and Violet turned two, and many days I felt like I was manning a ship that was taking on water. I was trying to keep my kids healthy and happy, my marriage intact, my career extant. When it came to my unfinished business in Chesterfield County in the Commonwealth of Virginia, the mania of juggling the mundane pursuits of family life proved useful. My worries distracted me from my worry.

  Then one morning that spring, the kind of morning when everyone in Chicago staggers out of doors, drunk on sun, disoriented by the warm air, the almost foreign scent of trees and shrubs or just any sort of unfrozen plant life, I received a phone call. I’d made it through the usual marathon of waking, dressing, and feeding the kids, then dropping them off at their respective schools. To nonparents, or to the parents of those mythical calm and compliant children about whom I’ve heard so much but never observed in the wild, this might not sound like much of an accomplishment. For me, it was a feat.

  To be a youngish, able-bodied, mentally functional adult is not to think about the thousands of small miracles of brain and muscle and willpower and concentration that take place each morning just to get a human body out of the house. To wake, for example. To move from sleep into consciousness without screaming or sobbing or crying out for a bottle of milk that has not yet materialized in one’s grasp. To go to the toilet and empty one’s bladder. To not have defecated in one’s bedding in the middle of the night. To drink or to eat without complaint. To eat a piece of buttered toast without worrying about how well the crusts have been removed, how evenly the butter has been spread. To put on one’s clothes the right way, not backward and not inside out. To put on socks without feeling tormented by the placement of the seams, the padding of the heel. To comb one’s hair. To blow one’s nose. To accept the necessity of wearing a coat when it’s cold outside or, God forbid, mittens. To make one’s own lunch, to wipe one’s own butt, to brush one’s own teeth, to spit out rather than to swallow the fluorinated toothpaste. To not require the presence of a particular stuffed animal to soothe one’s self into the jarring routine of the day. To put on shoes. Only when you become a parent and have every increment in this process illuminated by a small, adorable creature that simply cannot yet perform it independently, do you realize the greatness of what we humans do each day, the impossible majesty of what we must accomplish before we’ve even started, what we must learn and be taught, what our hulking, unfinished brains must master.

  On this particular morning in May, I had just completed the marathon and miracle of morning rituals and was still basking in the afterglow, planning to spend the rest of school hours working on my novel at my favorite coffee shop. I parked the car on a n
earby side street, gathered up my computer bag, my purse, my cell phone, scooped up some empty juice boxes and granola-bar wrappers that had fallen to the floor. I was making slow progress down the sidewalk, scanning the street for a trash can, thinking how one day very soon I was going to implement a no-eating-in-the-car policy like the one my father had enforced—not today, not tomorrow, but soon, soon. That was what I was thinking when my phone began buzzing. I stuffed the garbage into my pockets so I could answer it. A Virginia number, but not my parents, not my sister.

  “Hello?” I said.

  The voice on the other end was warm, polite, not at all official or unkind. “Hello. Sorry to bother you. I’m trying to get ahold of Miss Kimberly Brooks. Do you know where I might reach her?”

  “This is Kim,” I said.

  “Miss Brooks, I’m an officer with the Chesterfield County Police Department. I’m following up on outstanding arrest warrants. Are you aware that there’s a warrant out for your arrest?”

  I stopped walking. For a moment, I stopped hearing. My body became impossibly heavy, my arms and legs felt loose. I let my computer bag drop to the ground. Then I let myself drop. I sat down half on the sidewalk, half on the grass, leaned into my knees, tried to breathe. “Excuse me?” I said. “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re not aware that there’s an outstanding warrant for your arrest in Virginia?”