Why the Law Fails to Keep Us Safe

When was the last time you consciously decided to put on a seatbelt? Sure, sometimes you might forget to wear it, but you probably rush to strap in once those annoying warning beeps begin. Occasionally, when you need to move the car just a little, you may choose not to buckle up and brave the intensifying alerts for a minute or so. But most of the time, you simply do not think about it. You get in, put on your seatbelt, and drive.

How we came to wear seatbelts

This was not always the case. For decades, the vast majority of people did not use their seatbelts. By 1968, U.S. federal law required all vehicles to have seatbelts. Yet, well into the 1980s, only 1 in 10 Americans actually wore their seatbelts. Law changed all this. In 1984, New York became the first state to legally require drivers to use seatbelts. Soon, all states—except the “Live Free or Die” state of New Hampshire—followed suit. Simply introducing the law had a massive impact. Seatbelt usage across the country shot up from 10% to 50%—a 400% increase.

Source: Max Pixel/Creative Commons Zero - CC0.

But half of Americans still weren’t buckling up. In response, states began organizing enforcement campaigns with catchy slogans like “Click It or Ticket.” Seatbelt slackers were warned that they could face fines if they failed to comply, though the fines were low, mostly well below $100, especially when compared with speeding tickets. Concurrently, authorities broadcast public service announcements using the mangled corpses of lifelike crash-test dummies to warn people about the gruesome effects of not wearing seatbelts. And car manufacturers installed those seatbelt warning alarms, reminding (or really just irritating) us into buckling up. With all of these combined, today, about 90% of Americans wear a seatbelt. Most of us just strap in automatically without even realizing it.

How the law can keep us safe

The history of seatbelts is a prime example of how the law can fundamentally change our everyday behavior. It shows that simply adopting a new set of rules can get people to fundamentally change the way they go about the most basic things in their lives. Law is the prime human-made system to alter our behavior. Law is here to protect us from violent crime, just as it is to save our environment. It safeguards our most basic rights at home, at work, and even against government infringement. And it is also on our streets so we do not kill each other—let alone ourselves—while driving.

The fact that the law is able to achieve all these objectives is remarkable. Just consider what the law really is. Behind all our reverence for Congress, the Supreme Court, law libraries, and flashy attorneys, the law itself is actually quite a modest thing. It consists of a series of texts published on paper. The amazing thing is that somehow, these written words can shape our behavior.

Understanding the behavioral code

To understand this, we must look at what is behind the legal rules. We must look at the behavioral code, the root causes, and hidden forces that drive human behavior. These invisible forces determine our responses to society’s laws. They decide whether the law succeeds or fails.

Take seatbelt usage, for example. The first two elements of the behavioral code are easy to miss. Simply enacting a new law changed behavior tremendously. From a behavioral perspective, this means two things. First, people successfully learned what the new law was and what behavior it required. All too often, this is not the case. Much of the legal code—especially when new laws are enacted—remains entirely unknown, and therefore largely ineffective. Second, the law could rely on its power, the deference people feel to obey it regardless of whether there is enforcement. Seatbelt usage shot up 400% without any clear enforcement or threats of fines, showing that our shared sense of duty to obey the law and the legitimacy of the legal system plays a major role.

Several other behavioral mechanisms also kicked in. By instituting a fine, the law made people fear the repercussions of not buckling up. But what is interesting here is that the fines were quite low, much lower than for speeding where fines clearly fail. These low fines helped trigger the desired behavioral response likely because they demonstrated that the government was serious about this new law.

Next came persuasion through public messaging campaigns that convinced people that buckling up was in their own interest. Such campaigns sought to move seatbelt decisions from an extrinsic motivation (“I don’t want to get punished”) to an intrinsic motivation (“it’s in my own self-interest so I don’t get hurt”).

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Then came the warning beeps. These annoying beeps created a practical obstacle for those who were still not buckling up. This added a behavioral layer on top of the duty, fear of punishment, and intrinsic motivation. In effect, these warning beeps made it very hard, or at least very annoying, to drive without clicking our seatbelts. If all else fails, we’ll chime you into submission.

As more people began buckling up, using a seatbelt became more normal than not using one. The behavior became sustained socially as people started to take cues from others. And finally, buckling up reached the peak of the behavioral code: it became habitual and automatic. The behavior became so deeply internalized that it was no longer a decision. We barely notice that we are automatically obeying the law.

So, there we have it: a microcosm of a successful marriage of the legal and the behavioral code, all in changing our seatbelt habits.

Much of the behavioral code operates in obscurity. We are seldom aware of its existence, let alone the way it truly functions. We do not see people’s sense of duty, or how they view the legitimacy of the legal system. We have trouble understanding what people’s motivations are and how they might respond to public messaging campaigns. We don’t always know how people perceive punishment and how fear of punishment shapes their conduct. We rarely think about how much people take cues from others, how practical obstacles might influence misconduct, or how automation takes over even when we think we are making conscious, rational decisions.

All of this means that we have only a very limited understanding of how law comes to shape human behavior. This is alarming because when the law fails to protect us, which it does quite often, its failures come at a high cost. Just consider the decades of the lost war on drugs, including the ongoing opioid epidemic that continues to ravage our communities. Or consider how the law has failed to keep people safe from harassment at work with the surge of new #MeToo cases. Or consider the many cases of corporate malfeasance and fraud, like Volkswagen's emission cheating scandals that were actually uncovered decades ago. Or think of how our criminal legal system has not protected us from police brutality and discrimination, nor saved us from the ongoing surge in shootings and violent crimes.

Laws, rules, and regulations are destined to fail if they continue to rely on our intuitions rather than behavioral science. Any time we hope to change behavior, we need to learn to debug the Behavioral Code. The Behavioral Code blog will show you just that. Leveraging cutting-edge social science, it will provide an accessible, deep dive into the many ways the law does or does not function to keep us safe from harm. It will provide commentary on current events and dig into the behavioral mechanisms underlying crime, everyday misconduct, governmental wrongdoing, and corporate misbehavior. This blog will catalyze conversations about how the law can improve human behavior and respond to some of the most pressing issues today, from police misconduct to environmental destruction. It will help you form your own opinions on how we should create a more effective and more just legal system that is rooted in social science rather than intuition.