Antisocial punishment is behind the hatred of Father Júlio – 01/06/2024 – Reinaldo José Lopes

Apparently, a considerable part of the São Paulo council has nothing better to do with their time in office than to intimidate a priest who tries to give food to those who are hungry. The declaration of war by radical right councilors against Father Júlio Lancellotti and his work with homeless people is just another chapter in the long tradition of hatred towards homeless people in our country. But it can also be embedded in a much broader, sad and all-too-human phenomenon. Write it down: this is called antisocial punishment.

The term comes from a large body of studies on the chess of human behavior. This research has important implications for understanding how societies evolve and become less or more self-destructive. In short, antisocial punishment seems to emerge with force in contexts of inequality and distrust, in which people are convinced that it is necessary to punish the “good guys”.

Quantitative descriptions of this phenomenon, which you may have already experienced anecdotally (that is, in sporadic situations in your everyday life), appeared for the first time in economic cooperation games. It is a tool widely used by social psychology laboratories around the world.

Imagine, for example, that each of the volunteers recruited by one of these laboratories receives five R$2 bills. This money can stay with the person or can be contributed (in whole or in part) to a common fund. In this fund, it will “yield”, as if it were a real investment, and then be divided among the participants.

The game can continue for several rounds and, in some variants of it, people can spend part of their money to punish other participants, taking money from them, for example.

Now notice the following. From an exclusively individualistic perspective, what makes sense is to keep all your money and let others “invest” in the common fund, because you will receive part of the “income” anyway. On the other hand, if (and this is a huge “if”, of course), everyone invested their R$10 in the game, the “interest” would be calculated on the total amount and, therefore, everyone would receive more money. The problem is trusting your fellow players enough to risk that.

Decades of research have shown that:

1) In developed countries with relatively low inequality, high investment in the group is more common;

2) Also in these countries, it is common for “disciplinarians” to spend money to punish those who do not cooperate. It is pro-social punishment.

However, in more unequal and authoritarian countries, anti-social punishment is common: some people prefer to punish those who contribute “too much” to the common fund. “Enough of this nonsense of being nice” seems to be the message conveyed by these individuals. Guess which country category Brazil usually falls into?

It’s true that the mental mechanisms behind antisocial punishment are not 100% clear. It can be a “rational” response to uncertain and unequal environments, where trust between members of a society is low and institutions appear to function poorly. It may also be an attempt to expose certain hypocrisies or to prevent the generous and cooperative from appearing superior to those who punish.

And of course this is not the only mechanism behind the campaign against the Catholic priest. The rise of an extreme right-wing electorate among conservative evangelicals and Catholics certainly contributes to this regrettable situation, as well as the situation of insecurity and degradation in the center of São Paulo. Out of fear, people look for scapegoats.

These are natural impulses, unfortunately. But it is up to legislators not to let themselves be carried away by this type of predatory and self-destructive instinct, especially if they beat their chest to claim to be Christians.

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