Want people to do the right thing? Save them the guilt trip

Yes, my association with the catholic church ist also mostly about guilt and fear. Scaring people to make them do the right thing.

In general the church was the dark symbol of fear. Have you ever been to the vatican? The same in big. Everything there is big, with the intention of making you small and fear them. At least that was my impression. Other people I was with had different experience

The catholic religion in itself is also a lot about loving and doing the right thing out of love and wanting to help for the sake of it. But yes, for me it mostly comes down to doing good things out of the fear of bad things happening to you.

"and saw four people standing there, gawking, taking pictures and video. He asked if anyone had called 911, and no one had."

And wow, I have to say I cannot imagine this happening here in germany. Except maybe for some very dark areas on a bad time of the day.

> Best way to get people to do the right thing: pay them to do it.

This is strictly not the best way because it both requires the extra cost of reinforcement to be administered, and tragically fails for anything we haven’t installed that mechanism for. It is practically impossible to install reinforcement points for every single agent and for every single thing they do.

Intrinsic motivation is simply much cheaper, making people want to do the right thing by their internalized codes, by reinforcing the frame in which they see themselves as moral people, reinforcing the benefits of reciprocity and gift economy.

This is why purity codes are much stronger in rural communities where most of the transactions are not through money but good moral standing. Granted, those codes themselves can easily get outdated, and distributed moral standing calculations basically limit the practical group size to a function of Dunbar number, but the alternative of codifying desired behavior in monetary or legal terms is just too blunt and easily gameable.

I mean, why don't you do that, and other people will try other things and whoever wins in the marketplace of ideas wins.

What I've noticed in Japan, is people who have cultivated a positive self image, who think of themselves as a good person, will be motivated to behave in a way consistent with that image, just the same as everywhere else. People who are motivated to to avoid external judgements, risks to pride or status, will just do the bad thing when no-one is looking, or in a way that sufficiently "launders" the connection between their actions and their social status. And the byproduct of all the external social pressure is a lot of psychological pain, self censorship, crippling risk aversion, and acceptance of bullying dominant personalities.

>Greetings from Melbourne, Victoria, currently on stage 4 lockdown because enough people are selfish and don't care (unless threatened).

It's because your governor adopted a stupid policy that doesn't account for human nature. How well has banning drugs and teen drinking worked to limit those? It failed completely. How could anybody in their right mind believe the same heavy-handed approach is optimal for dealing with a public health emergency? It's not the people's fault, it's the governor's fault for adopting a policy that's doomed to failure and them blaming other people when the inevitable happens.

It's like designing an organisation. If it's possible for one single human failure to bring down the whole thing, if it's possible for one guy to accidentally delete the prod database, the fault doesn't lie with the guy who fucked up, it lies with the person who designed the system.