Unfair summary

Consider the story of Juan Rivera, an Illinois man who falsely confessed to the rape and murder of an eleven-year-old girl. His semen didn’t match the sample in the police evidence and he had an alibi, but he was still sent to prison. Although he was eventually freed after wrongly spending over 15 years in prison, the question remains: why do people confess to crimes they didn’t commit?

One key factor is that we automatically assume people believe what they say, even when we have evidence to the contrary. For instance, in one famous study, researchers asked people to evaluate various essays about Fidel Castro. Even though participants were told that the authors had been randomly assigned pro- or anti-Castro positions, readers still believed the pro-Castro writers were genuinely committed to their stances.

Few people are born evil. Rather, there are certain behavioral or situational circumstances – like poverty, social pressure or even brain trauma – that can lead people to criminality.

The brain is naturally what controls our thoughts, emotions and behavior, but it is also hugely complex, and different parts of the brain each have a massive impact on how we act.

Dishonest behavior is far more common than we’d like to believe; almost everyone breaks rules from time to time. Some people illegally download movies, others fudge the numbers to pad out their expense accounts and students sometimes cheat on tests or assignments.

But here’s the interesting part: we lie to ourselves to justify this kind of unethical behavior, all in order to preserve a virtuous self-image.

Any time a politician denies the existence of climate change, people rush to call him an idiot – but is that actually fair? It can be hard to accept, but other people might have a reasonable justification for holding different views from one’s own.

Ultimately, our disagreements reflect differences in our backgrounds, not character flaws.

We like to think otherwise, but eyewitness accounts are extremely unreliable, and this can have tragic consequences.

This was the case for John Jerome White – an elderly woman wrongly identified him as the man who broke into her home and raped her.

We tend to trust experts, believing that their training and experience allows them to detect lies and unravel the truth. But unfortunately, that’s just not the case.

For starters, regular people and experts alike usually fail at detecting lies, as numerous studies have confirmed. Generally, most of the conventional wisdom we hear about spotting lies isn’t borne out of fact; an averted gaze doesn’t necessarily indicate a fib, and liars tend to fidget less than truth-tellers, not more.

Blind justice is one of the foundational principles of democracy. Accordingly, we expect judges to remain objective and unbiased by keeping their personal views out of the courtroom.

But, of course, that doesn’t always happen. How else would you explain the fact that judges who have a daughter, rather than a son, are 16 percent more likely to decide gender-related civil rights cases in favor of women’s rights?

Nobody wants to admit it, but a central goal of the US justice system is not only to deter potential offenders and incapacitate dangerous people – it also punishes out of vengeance.

To illustrate this point, psychologist Geoff Goodwin looked at public responses to shark attacks in order to determine the extent to which people were motivated by retribution.

Compared to other countries, the United States’ justice system is unique – and not in a good way. Minor crimes are penalized far more harshly than in other places, and the United States is the only Western country where capital punishment is still legal.

Plus, the prison system continues to embrace solitary confinement. Though proponents argue that keeping inmates in isolation leads to self-reflection and remorse, that’s simply not the case. As we’ve seen in earlier blinks, criminals aren’t necessarily rational people who made bad decisions based on clear reasoning or deliberation.

We’ve learned all about the fundamental injustice of the United States’ justice system. If citizens take action, they can reform the justice system to make it fairer. But in doing so, they will face three challenges:

First, they will need to eliminate the establishment-supported notion that simple self-reflection can eliminate bias. Overstating our own objectivity entrenches our most deep-seated biases, which leads to unfair sentences.

As we’ve established, the United States’ justice system has a lot of problems. But the biggest problem of all is the fact that Americans have gotten used to it! This needs to be the starting point for all reform efforts.

In this way, instead of accepting the status quo, Americans can restructure the system on the basis of scientific evidence rather than conventional wisdom.