Regular EconLog reader Kevin Corcoran sent me the following, which I, with his permission, edited slightly.
I’ve been catching up on EconLog and I noticed your post on why sanctions rarely work. It reminded me of something from my time in the Marines: a different application of a similar idea. It helped lead me to my belief that collective punishment more generally rarely works.
You’ll probably be unsurprised to hear that the Marine Corps is big on collective punishment. If Lance Corporal Smith gets busted for underage drinking, it’s very common for the Gunnery Sergeant to punish everyone in Smith’s entire squad or platoon. The theory behind it is that if we all got punished for Smith, then we’ll all resent Smith for it and will keep him under close surveillance to make sure he doesn’t drink underage anymore, because we’d come to understand how Smith’s actions actually affect all of us. [DRH note: This reminds me of the motivation for Code Red in A Few Good Men.]
Of course, it never happened like that. Nobody ever resented Smith on account of the Gunny cracking down on everyone; they all just resented the Gunny and, if anything, would tend to rally around Smith. There are times when Smith’s actions actually, tangibly do affect everyone around him, but we already had incentives in place to apply social pressure to him if he was slacking in those circumstances. What the Gunny was doing was taking a situation that didn’t actually affect anyone (or at least not in a way anyone cared about) and make it start having a negative effect where none existed before. So, of course, the resentment went to the Gunny and not to Smith.
Worse, it actually created incentives for more people to engage in underage drinking. I tried explaining it to one of my Gunnery Sergeants when I realized it. Start with the idea that some rules are selfishly desirable to break: breaking them confers some benefit to the rule breaker. If you enjoy drinking, then breaking the rule against underage drinking confers a benefit on you: you get to do something you like that you otherwise wouldn’t. On the other side of the scale, if you get caught, you can get in various degrees of trouble and you might be willing to pass up the benefits to avoid that trouble. Now, add to the mix the idea that whether or not you’ll be punished for breaking this rule is no longer a matter of your actually drinking underage or not– you can follow the rules to the letter, but still be treated as if you had violated them. This significantly undermines the incentive to stick to the rules. If there’s a good chance I’ll be punished for drinking whether I drink or not, I might as well have a drink and enjoy the upside. Sure, you might get caught, but someone else might get caught instead of you, so why not at least have the fun you’re being punished for?
As an aside, the Gunnery Sergeant was not at all moved by a Lance Corporal telling him his punishment strategies were all wrong. Maybe this could have served as my “I should have known I’d be an economist” moment.
Well said.
READER COMMENTS
BS
Apr 13 2022 at 2:26pm
>Of course, it never happened like that.
Of course, it does happen like that. There’s a term for it – “blanket party” – which is widely known.
Kevin Corcoran
Apr 13 2022 at 2:51pm
Yes, the term “blanket party” is widely known, but in practice, that sort of thing actually being carried out on an individual due to resentment over collective punishment from the higher-ups was basically non-existent. (The movie Full Metal Jacket is a pretty poor guide to understanding what actual military life is like.) That’s not to say there was no extra-judicial punishments ever carried out – as I mentioned, if someone really was behaving in a way that was burdensome to the rest of the unit, then we already had reasons in place to apply pressure to them in one way or another. But it was never motivated by resentment over collective punishment. People were smart enough to be able to tell the difference between when Smith’s actions actually affected us, and when they only did so because someone else made it that way. That was part of the reason why people would tend to be more resentful of the Gunny than Smith – it felt like the Gunny was banking on the idea that we were too stupid to tell who was the one who was actually making us worse off.
(With apologies to all the Marines I knew who were named Smith – sorry for using your name as a placeholder! Within the Marines, our usual placeholder name for someone who made a habit of screwing up was Schmuckatelli.)
David Henderson
Apr 13 2022 at 3:10pm
Schmuckatelli! I love it.
BS
Apr 13 2022 at 4:40pm
Having re-read, I agree (it’s rarely effective). It depends on whether collective punishment is administered frequently or not. (If it’s rare and has effect, the ratio is misleading.) Depends on military culture.
John Hall
Apr 13 2022 at 5:23pm
Is the goal really to reduce underage drinking? I would say, no. While the Gunnery Sergeant’s stated goal is to get you to police each other, the actual goal is to get the recruits to start thinking about each other as part of a unit. Uniting the recruits against the Gunnery Sergeant is as good a reason as any other to get them to do that.
Kevin Corcoran
Apr 13 2022 at 7:24pm
Hey John –
Underage drinking was just an example I grabbed out of the air, but the same could have been said for a thousand other infractions. Regarding your other conjecture, I don’t think so. I was once a Lance Corporal, but I did become a Staff NCO before getting out of the Marines in 2011. I was part and party to conversations about such policies – the goal really was simply to get people to police each other and reduce the occurrence of whatever the infraction of the moment was. Not only did the Gunny’s not sneakily try to unite the Marines as a team by getting them to unite against him, they seemed endlessly surprised when it happened. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a Gunny confusedly say “Schmuckatelli is the one they should be angry at, not me”, I’d have about forty seven dollars. Granted that’s not a lot of money, but it’s still a fair number of nickels.
And in my experience, the actual effect of such policies was the opposite of what you suggest. People resent collective punishment and being penalized for things they didn’t do. To the extent that “being part of a unit” was made synonymous with collective punishment, the result tended to make people reject the unit mentality, not embrace it. During my last two years in as a Staff Sergeant I made a point to never use anything like that approach – and it worked out well. If a Marine gives 100% but still gets treated like a failure because someone else screwed up, that Marine tends to stop giving 100% and drops their pack fairly quickly.
(Also, as a side note, you referred to “recruits” a couple of times in your comment, which is usually only used to describe people while they are still in boot camp. What I’m describing is the experience I had with Marines in the fleet, not training antics used by Drill Instructors at boot camp.)
Monte
Apr 15 2022 at 3:37am
Way to represent, Staff.
Marine Corps boot camp epitomizes collective punishment. There simply is no better way to instill esprit de corps in a fresh unit trained for combat. Thus, the proud tradition of “first to fight”. The FMF however, tends to lose some of this spirit in times of peace, as individualism slowly starts to creeps back in. But like sleeper agents waiting to be triggered, marines always stand ready to fight, with each other if no one else.
Semper Fi!
steve
Apr 14 2022 at 12:11pm
I was a corpsman and an Air Force officer later. Post military have most of the time held some kind of management/leadership position. I think I largely agree with Kevin with a caveat or two. In a new unit where people didnt know each other well it takes a while to develop this social pressures. I think we were then more likely to get mad at the offender. In an established unit with lots of experienced people then people would get angry with the chief. In my established units I think we probably saw collective punishment less that what Kevin describes and when it happened it was usually bbecaseu something pretty bad happened. I think in that case it was sometimes seen as a way of keeping higher level brass out of our business since we could demonstrate that broad based action had been taken since higher level brass cared much more on stuff not happening again rather than one person being punished.
Have to deal with similar issues when someone makes a medical error.
Steve
Fred
Apr 14 2022 at 1:05pm
Obviously there can’t be a cop looking directly at you all the time, and society tries to engage social pressure as a disincentive to misdeeds. I agree that this often goes awry and instead builds solidarity with the miscreant instead. Thus people in many communities don’t speak to the police, and attempts to pressure people to cooperate with the authorities backfire. The bad guys even become romanticized; our movies are full of “heroes” that are objectively bad guys like gangsters, etc.
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