At the same time, the illustrations A6 and B6 also seem to represent situations that appear to be win–win for the vegetable vendor (lower overhead costs) or the grocer, and us (lower purchase price). If so, that ought to represent a C–C behaviour. Yet, intuitively we can see that at a meta-level, the two behaviours are D–D in nature. How? The behaviour of a profiteering shopkeeper is inherently defective, because his exploitation of the customers cannot be to the customers’ advantage. At the same time, the customers’ inaction in not penalizing such a shopkeeper, which at first glance appears to cooperate with the shopkeeper, in effect amounts to a defection at a higher plane. How? Because by continuing to patronize such a shopkeeper, the customer reinforces the exploitative behaviour of the shopkeeper, leading towards a more exploitative group of shopkeepers in the society. And when shopkeepers in the society as a whole become more exploitative, everybody—including our customer who does not punish a defecting shopkeeper—suffers equally. Thus what appears to be a D–C behaviour between the shopkeeper and the customer at one plane is in fact a D–D behaviour when you bring the society into the picture at a higher plane.
We rue the fact that our laws rarely punish wrongdoers. True, the probability that a litterer, a traffic jumper, a thief, a ruffian, a hit-and-runner, a bribe taker or even a regular smalltime crook will be caught and punished is rather low. But, in our personal lives, we are equally reluctant to enforce fairness. We would rather suffer unfairness, discrimination, corruption, unhygienic conditions, exploitation and such than strain ourselves challenging it.
How often do we take out a morcha or go on a hunger strike in protest against the appalling conditions of our roads, absence of clean drinking water, lack of sidewalks, zebra and overhead crossings, abysmal state of basic education, garbage on the streets, total breakdown in the justice delivery system, nightmarish traffic, corruption and such? But we do not hesitate to burn half a dozen buses or buildings (and a few people as well) for a finger wrongly raised in a cricket match. What exactly is our idea of unfair treatment?
ULTIMATUM GAMES
In a bid to inquire if capitalism is fair to the poor in an ethical, moral and material sense, behavioural economists such as Ariel Rubinstein and Ingolf Stahl have devised some delightful experiments and games to assess fairness or unfairness among people. You too can try them out at a party. Typically, games designed to measure fairness take the form of an ultimatum.
Consider this. You are given Rs 100. You are now asked to divide this amount between yourself and another person (whose identity is unknown to you) in any manner you wish. The other party may choose to either accept or reject your offer. In case the other party rejects your offer, neither of you receives anything (and that’s the ‘ultimatum’). Now that puts you in a pickle. Rationally, you would like to keep as much of the Rs 100 for yourself, say Rs 99 and offer Re 1 to the other. But you are aware that the other party may well reject the paltry offer. Your problem now is to figure out how much you should offer the other party so that the offer is not rejected and yet you retain as much of the Rs 100 as possible.
There are other variations to this game. You are told that you will be given Rs 100. You have to divide this amount between yourself and an unknown party. If the other party accepts your offer, the game will terminate. If that party rejects your offer, neither will get anything and the game will move to stage two. At this stage, the other party will be given Rs 25 (one may choose any other amount at this stage) and the roles will be reversed, but there will be no right of rejection in this final round.
Having received these instructions and Rs 100, how much will you offer the other party?
Conceptually the problem is simple, if you use the backward induction method. If the game moves to stage two, the other party can retain Rs 24 and offer you one rupee. Hence any offer higher than this in stage one should be acceptable to the other party. So you should offer Rs 25 in stage one.
If this second game is played often enough, especially by reversing the roles of the first and second parties, the participants begin to catch on that they need not share more than Rs 25. Yet, many still prefer to share a higher amount for reasons of fairness.
Published research indicates—and that’s my experience as well when conducting these experiments outside India—that participants ‘play it safe’ and typically offer closer to 50 per cent in both stages of the game. But the percentage has been typically much lower in my ad hoc experiments among Indian respondents.
The idea of fairness has been pushed even further. In some experiments, the allocators are randomly given Rs 100 as dole or at the toss of a coin and asked to play the one-stage or the two-stage game. In another group the allocators are not chosen just by luck. They are made to ‘win’ Rs 100 by showing some prowess such as answering certain questions correctly and so on, in order to ‘win’ their right to be allocators, and then asked to play the same game. It is often found that those who ‘win’ their money the hard way tend to share a smaller fraction of their given bounty than those who just get lucky with their money.
Similar to the above situation is a variation involving two groups under two different scenarios. People are split into two different groups. In scenario one, a subject is asked to play the allocator against a receiver from his own group. In scenario two, a subject plays an allocator to a receiver from the other group. In such variations, allocators are found to be more generous to receivers from their own group compared to those from the other group. Apparently, the ‘we–they’ effect is quite pronounced in matters of fairness. People worldwide tend to be fairer to their own group (defined as they may be) as compared to ‘others’.
In yet other variations, researchers have investigated whether allocators are fair even when their offers cannot be rejected, or how allocators behave when they know that the receiver had been unfair (skewed sharing) or fair (even sharing) in a similar game with another party. For example, in one version of such a game with no rights of rejection for the receiver, say one of the allocators, X, had kept Rs 98 for himself and allocated only Rs 2, while another allocator, Y, had split the amount equally, 50–50 with the receiver. A subject of the experiment is asked to choose one of the following two offers:
a. He is provided with a capital of Rs 90, of which he will
keep Rs 45 for himself and give Rs 45 to Y, or
b. He is provided with a capital of Rs 100, of which he will
keep Rs 50 for himself and give Rs 50 to X.
It has been frequently found in studies elsewhere that subjects prefer the first option, which rewards the fair guy, Y, rather than the unfair guy, X, even though the option entails taking a cut of Rs 5 for the subject.
Do Indians show a tendency to penalize the unfair, particularly when penalizing the unfair involves a cost to oneself? It appears not. Recall our discussion earlier regarding questions A6 and B6. We said that even when a vegetable vendor has been unfair to us, or a grocer runs an unkempt shop, we are not always willing to pay a price to penalize them. When we abet such behaviour by patronizing the unfair traders, we end up encouraging similar behaviour all over, which results in exploitation and ugliness all around. What appeared to be a D–C (or C–C) behaviour at a personal level turns out to be a D–D behaviour when viewed from a collective perspective. This is because patronizing such vendors may be viewed as cooperation from the vendor’s perspective but a defecting behaviour from a societal perspective since patronizing such vendors leads to a nationwide malaise.
On the occasions I have conducted similar experiments in India and elsewhere, I have found a lower degree of self-regulation and disposition to sharing and a greater propensity and tolerance for unfairness among us Indians compared to the cosmopolitan average.
THE WAY WE ARE
Our lack of self-regulation has serious implications. Our Constitution, at the time of its conception and drafting, contemplated a democracy where the government was meant to serve the people. To achieve this, government was to be
divided into three branches—legislature, judiciary and the executive—with each branch being able to supervise and regulate the other two. This was intended to be a system of checks and balances. In India, increasingly, each of these branches is striving to act in isolation, free from the influence or control of the other two. Often this leads to a situation where the judiciary begins to play an activist role. Once an issue is viewed as ‘parliament versus judiciary’, it provides leeway for various people to disregard the directions even of the highest court of the country. Only a few months ago, the Supreme Court had to order the eviction of a Governor of a state from a house that he was occupying in Delhi! The same Governor was also severely indicted by the Supreme Court for misleading the executive about the condition of polity in his state. According to news reports, rather than stepping down in a dignified manner, the Governor announced his intentions to ‘take the salute’ on Republic Day as the head of the state. In short, given the virtual non-existence of self-regulation among us as a people and given that it is people like us who populate each one of these three branches, there is bound to be an effect on the institutions as well. There is little surprise that the quality of our polity, bureaucracy and judiciary has declined.
I said earlier that our intelligence level is perhaps second to none in the world. Why then do we seem to lack self-regulation more than most other people in the world? Why are we reluctant to punish the unfair? What prevents us from seeing that, even if we are supremely selfish, it is in our best interest to cooperate? Let me hypothesize a couple of answers to these questions.
Firstly, as we ourselves are unfair to varying degrees it does not shock us when we encounter unfairness in others. This is apparent in the Indian response patterns to some of the questions relating to fairness and unfairness discussed earlier.
Secondly, there is little doubt that we are far more quick-witted than most others the world over. But our intelligence seems to be in the nature of rapid-fire intelligence, like that required in a rapid-chess tournament! For example, it is obvious to the rapid-thinking Indian corporates that it is not worthwhile to invest in research and development (R&D). Let someone else develop the product and it can always be copied. They earn some quick temptation points when they steer clear of such ‘pointless’ expenses as R&D except when it comes to claiming 100 per cent depreciation benefits for air conditioners and such in the R&D centres. As a consequence, in the long haul, our corporates are rarely world class and are not half as smart as they look in the short haul.
But intelligence isn’t all about quick returns. For well-functioning societies, the intelligence required among people is the kind required in standard chess, which calls for thinking two, three or even more levels beyond, and not the kind required in lightning chess, where one barely gets to think one move ahead. Thus enlightened societies need to think of self-interest on the secondary, tertiary or even higher planes and not as instant gratification. One not only needs to strategize one’s own game plan several moves ahead but one also needs to anticipate others’ moves to each one of one’s own, by putting oneself in the other’s shoes. This we invariably fail to do.
WE MISTAKE TALK FOR ACTION
We are glib with our words. Not for nothing does Amartya Sen dub us the ‘Argumentative’ Indian(s). We can rationalize almost anything with verbiage. We are great debaters. We are also a complex people. The world perceives us so.
More often than not, we mistake talk for action, we mistake meetings held for decisions taken, reports written for action taken, judgement announced for judgement implemented, testimonials written for character assessed, speeches made for promises kept . . .
We preach democratic rights to the world but fail to provide basic quality of life to our masses; we take the moral high ground on any issue, but violate the basic rights of our own people to justice; we talk of equality before the world, but apply different yardsticks to our big crooks and small crooks; we talk of being the world’s call centre, but do nothing for the children in the government-run schools and universities to ensure they learn English; we want a permanent seat in the UN Security Council, but run our country like a fiefdom of a handful of politicians.
WE BRAZEN IT OUT
There is another related tendency of ours as a people that has indirect parallel with the observations just made. Elsewhere in the world, media reports seem to indicate that when people are presented with incontrovertible evidence of their misdeeds, after putting up some initial fight, they weaken, waver, give in and confess and show a degree of repentance. But closer home, our sense of shame and dishonour, if any, obtains not so much from the commission of the misdeed but from the exposure of it. You catch me with my hands in the till, and I’ll look up innocently and ask you, ‘What till?’ We put up our best fights when we are up the proverbial creek—paddle or no paddle. If we are rich, powerful and famous, more often than not, we dock home safely. Videotape and cellphone evidence is rubbished with a straight face. BMWs driven by the offspring of the high and mighty that mow down half a dozen innocents simply disappear. A suitcase full of hot cash pulled out from under the bed of a powerful satrap can be allowed to go cold till public memory fades away. A supremo may be all but indicted in the highest court, and in exemplary punishment asked to ‘introspect’ on her sins. Witnesses may switch testimonies like a toggle switch. VVIPs may be repeatedly ordered by courts to vacate their illegally occupied bungalows to no effect. All this, because we neither regulate nor self-regulate; we neither penalize wrongdoers ourselves, nor do we expect our judiciary to do so.
DIFFERENT DEMOCRATIC YARDSTICKS
In India once a person attains a position of power, wealth and fame, no matter how much of a lowlife he is, he considers himself above the law and it is only when others in comparable positions have their own vested interest to bring him to book that he may show more respect for it. We do have such ‘victims’ screaming ‘political motivation, harassment and witch-hunting by vested interests’. Such an accusation may well be true. But it may be equally true that but for such ‘motivation’ the lowlife would have got away completely without ever having to answer the law. All said, in reality, nothing ever happens since these are battles between ‘heavyweights’ who only end up sorting out their differences and finally settle the matter among themselves with some help from clever lawyers. That our judicial system itself is among the most ineffective in the world, and investigating agencies among the most bungling, indifferent and corrupt, helps. Little wonder that our heavyweights have nothing but disdain for our institutions of law and justice.
Here is an example. In a recent high-profile case, a high-flying personage was reportedly airlifted by a police posse on a small chartered plane from one city to another to effect an arrest on murder charges. The point raised by the hotshot legal counsel of the hotshot accused was how could the police carry their arms on a plane without clearance from the International Airports Authority! In this legal luminary’s eyes, it was the police that was the villain on trial and not the murder accused. Clearly, the lawyer here was viewing the law as his handmaiden.
LONG-WINDED ARGUMENTS
The British courts boast of one of the shortest petitions ever. A man had run his car into another, causing damage. The matter went to court. The prosecution established the guilt of the defendant and claimed a certain sum in compensation. The defendant in his petition responded in four words: ‘Liability accepted; compensation challenged!’
Imagine a typical Indian affidavit in a similar situation. It may deny that an accident ever took place. It may argue that the accident could not have taken place because the defendant was not even in town on the day of the accident; or that the accused did not ever own a car or a driving licence; or that he had since changed his name or sex, while the petition had been filed in the old name or sex, and hence was untenable. Each of these points would be filed as a separate affidavit, one after the other, with each affidavit requiring a few dozen adjournments. In short, we would make the case
so long-winded, both in terms of paper and time, that a short and crisp judgement becomes impossible. Given the way petitions are heaped up in our courts, it is a miracle that a case ever comes up for judgement.
If you think I’m merely exaggerating, consider the following news item:3
In a major twist to her flip flops, Best Bakery case witness Zahira Sheikh has told the Supreme Court that no affidavit sworn by her was filed in the apex court based on which the trial was shifted from Gujarat to Mumbai and acquittal of the 21 accused quashed.
Zahira’s latest affidavit came in response to the Supreme Court notice to her on an application filed by Teesta Setalvad seeking CBI probe into her recent shift of stand in the Bakery case accusing the social activist of pressurizing her to implicate persons in the case.
It is clear that Zahira has merely been a puppet in the hands of certain vested interests. But look at the issues raised. The Supreme Court had to decide if Zahira’s change in stance amounted to contempt of court. But before the Court can proceed any further on the matter of contempt of court, which itself was the sub-agenda arising from the main case, the subsub-agenda of whether or not she had filed that affidavit will have to be decided first. This implies that, before the Supreme Court can give a final decision on the original Best Bakery case, it first has to establish that Zahira had filed the affidavit which led to the case being transferred outside Gujarat, and then on the strength of that case, decide whether or not there was contempt of court. Thus, where the Supreme Court had one case on hand, it now has three different cases. Is it any surprise that judgements take such a long-winded course?
Games Indians Play Page 9