Trial by Fury: Internet Savagery and the Amanda Knox Case (3 page)

A fight started, with information being added and just as quickly removed. The anti-Amanda faction prevailed, blocking and banning at least eight editors. They also blocked the creation of a separate “Amanda Knox” entry in Wikipedia, with queries re-directed to the Kercher article

One of the banned Wikipedia editors, PhaneulB, posted an open letter and petition to Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. “The Murder of Meredith Kercher article,” the letter said, “in its present form is not written from a neutral point of view and bears little resemblance to what reliable sources have said about the case.”

Not long after Bishop submitted the petition, Wales himself showed up at the “Talk” page of the “Murder of Meredith Kercher” article — the page in which editors can engage in freewheeling discussions. Wales had researched the history of the article and he weighed in decisively against the anti-Amanda edits. He particularly objected to the systematic exclusion of reliable sources. “
Is it true that people have been banned for completely neutral edits? Yes. Is it true that reliable sources have been systematically excluded? Yes. None of that is acceptable.
” He accused some of the editors of censorship, the gravest of Wikipedia crimes. An acrid online discussion followed, with some of the anti-Amanda editors attacking Wales himself. Wales finally wrote, exasperated, “
I am concerned that since I raised the issue, even I have been attacked as being something like a ‘conspiracy theorist’ … Whenever we see outrage in the face of mere questions, it is good to wonder where the truth lies.
”
Wales, who takes a democratic view of his organization, was loath to throw his weight around and block or unblock editors. The “Talk” page for the article ballooned as editors fought tooth and nail over every turn of phrase. The war over the article went on for months. Finally, around the time Knox was finally acquitted and the evidence against her revealed as bogus, the troubled article was junked and rewritten completely by one of Wikipedia’s top editors, SlimVirgin, who produced a neutral, factual piece.

“These hard core editors,” PhaneulB told me, “were tough as nails. These were not stupid people. They had been involved in Wikipedia before us, which was why they defeated us initially.” He noted that within twelve h
ours of his posting the letter, anonymous bloggers outed him.

Want to see what this despicable man looks like? Meet PhanuelB otherwise known as Joseph W Bishop.

In addition to photographs, they posted many personal details, his place of employment, his home address, and even a photograph they found online of his family Bible. When they discovered that Bishop had served as an engineer in dangerous areas of Iraq, they went wild with speculation that his stint there had left him “mentally damaged.”

Bloggers at PMF also went after Jimmy Wales, seeing a more sinister motive in his intercession than merely trying to maintain Wikipedia’s neutrality. They latched onto a sexual controversy in his past and used it to claim he had a sexual interest in Knox.

Right now, Jimbo is on the verge of losing any sense of respect as a new media entrepreneur … just for a chance to catch a peek of some tender young sex killer flesh.

Jimbo is precisely the profile of the aging Lothario looking for access to tail through his powerful media connections.

Somebody should give Jimbo a cold shower. He's really lathered up and ready for brunette sex killer action

Skeptical Bystander added her own quip. “In all seriousness, what is it with these wiki guys and their wicks?”

The anti-Amanda group attacked many others who expressed pro-Amanda opinions, often by going after them at their places of employment. They did this in ingenious ways, sometimes by finding out who their supervisors were and attacking them, posting pictures and personal details of their lives, along with insults and threats. Such victims included a high school teacher in Hawaii, a professor at Leeds University, an employee at the Committee to Protect Journalists, a judge in Seattle, criminologists, attorneys, and scientists who did pro-bono work on behalf of Knox. The pro-Amanda bloggers fought back, often anonymously themselves, outing whenever possible the more active bloggers and turning nasty research back on them. Peter Quennell was exposed for harassing a New York City ballet dancer and had a restraining order placed against him. BRMull turned out to be Brendan Robert Mull, a doctor in California who, they discovered, was on probation for attempting to strangle a female psychiatrist who had been treating him for drug and alcohol abuse. Pro-Amanda bloggers posted Skeptical Bystander’s real name and personal information online, her husband’s name, details of her life and shopping habits. They sent her emails threatening enough that she took them to the police, who conducted an investigation. Going after Amanda Knox turned out to be a risky business.

The fundamental question remains: Why did these many people, with no connection to the case and at potential risk to themselves, devote their lives to attacking Amanda Knox and all those who supported her? The answer to this baffling human behavior lies, as many such answers do, in evolutionary biology.

* * *

Katrin Riedl from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, performed a curious experiment with chimpanzees. She set up a situation where a chimpanzee, using a set of pulleys and traps, could steal food from another chimp. A third chimpanzee, observing the theft, could then “punish” the thief by pulling on a rope, depriving the thief of its ill-gotten food. The idea was to see if chimps engaged in “third-party punishment” — that is, if a chimp would punish another chimp for wronging a third chimp.

But the third chimp never punished the thief — not even when the victim was a close relative. This experiment and others showed that chimpanzees do not engage in third-party punishment. If a chimp steals food or commits a wrong against another, the victim will retaliate. But bystanders, even close relatives, will not intervene.

This is starkly different from human behavior. Other researchers at the Max Planck Institute did an experiment with three-year-old children. The experiment ran like this (I’ve simplified it a bit): A child was brought into a playroom, where there were two hand puppets of a cow and an elephant, manipulated by actors. Cow, Elephant, and the child then made their own sculptures out of clay. Cow made a flower, Elephant a snail, and the child created whatever she liked. Then Cow left the room. Elephant said to the child, “I don’t like Cow’s flower. I’m going to break it now.” And Elephant destroyed Cow’s sculpture and put it in the trash.

Almost all the children observing this protested, sometimes tried to intervene, and tattled when Cow returned. After that, the children were friendlier toward Cow, seeking to comfort it, patting and stroking, while turning a cold shoulder on Elephant.

The experiment and others showed that by three years of age, children already demonstrate a strong, innate, and sophisticated propensity to react to and punish third-party transgressions.

Some anthropologists call third-party punishment “altruistic punishment.” Why “altruistic”? Because an individual who punishes a third party who has not harmed him directly, but has transgressed the norms of the group, does so altruistically — that is, for the good of the group with no personal gain. He also does so at personal risk, as the targeted individual may retaliate.

This behavior is unknown in chimpanzees. Which suggests that altruistic punishment is a unique product of human evolution.

One man who has spent the last decade studying the evolution of altruistic punishment is Samuel Bowles, former professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts and now research professor and director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute. Bowles has a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard. His research challenged the standard economic assumption that people are motivated entirely by self-interest, and this led him to study human evolution and the development of altruistic behavior.

Bowles has looked at this profound question by mathematically modeling the evolution of small human groups and comparing these models with studies of hunter-gatherer societies. He essentially asked the question: how did altruistic behavior evolve? Altruistic behavior on the surface would not appear to be adaptive. Someone who sacrifices or puts himself at risk for the benefit of the group isn’t going to pass on his genes as readily as a selfish person who never sticks his neck out. So why aren’t human societies made up entirely of selfish people acting in their strict self-interest?

The reason is group evolution. A group that cooperates, in which some individuals act for the benefit of the group, will prevail over a group of totally selfish people. But when Bowles mathematically modeled the evolutionary benefit of straight-up cooperation, he found it to be almost nonexistent. Groups of merely cooperative individuals don’t evolve in a strongly cooperative direction, because of the problem of slackers. In such a group, it becomes everyone’s best interest to be a freeloader — that is, a person who benefits from group cooperation without contributing. The slacker is the guy who sleeps under a bush while the rest go out hunting the mammoth, but then partakes in the feast afterwards. To counteract freeloaders, the group needs punishers. It needs someone to say,
Hey, pal, you didn’t hunt, you don’t eat
. Bowles then modeled the evolutionary benefit of punishment to enforce cooperation. That had a powerful effect on the evolution of cooperation. Without punishment, cooperation in human society would not have evolved.

Here’s how it works. Take a group of, say, two hundred people. Let’s assume the group is composed almost entirely of cooperators with a few slackers. The slackers do nothing, contribute nothing, but use up resources. They are a detriment to the group. If no one in this group is a punisher, the slackers get away with it and drag the group down. They weaken the group, make it less “fit” in evolutionary terms.

If you throw in a few “altruistic” punishers, a dramatic change happens. The freeloaders get punished. The number of slackers drops almost to nothing, the group benefits, and cooperative behavior evolves in a strongly positive direction. And as the number of slackers declines, the risk to the punishers for punishing also drops. The altruistic punishers have made the group stronger, better able to survive, and have done so at a diminishing risk to themselves.

Now assume another situation: Everyone in the group is a rabid punisher. Common sense tells us that this is a toxic situation and the group suffers. An ideal group, then, has a certain percentage of altruistic punishers in it. In such groups, cooperation evolves rapidly.

In other words, one of our most treasured of human qualities — cooperation — evolved only because of the existence of punishment.

Bowles cites many psychology experiments that show human beings are avid to punish wrongdoing, even at expense to themselves. In one well-known study, college students were divided into pairs, A and B. A is given a hundred dollars and told that he can share as much or as little of that with B as he wishes. If B accepts the division, both get to keep the money. If B does not accept, both lose the money.

Logically, B would accept any amount of money from A — after all, it’s free money. Not so. B will gladly accept half and will almost always accept forty dollars. But when A offers B say, twenty dollars, B almost always refuses. Why? Because B wants to punish A for an unfair division, even though that also deprives B of money.

The experiment was extended. Now A shares money with B, with C as a witness. C has the option of punishing A if she thinks the division is unfair, but doing so costs C money. In chimp society, C wouldn’t give a damn about A and B’s sharing problem. But in human society, C will avidly punish A when the division starts to look “unfair,” even at a cost to herself.

Other experiments showed that when people punish, the dorsal striatum, a reward part of the brain, lit up. Those subjects who sacrificed the most to punish got the biggest charge from it.

Bowles mathematical simulations showed that an optimal society has a significant percentage of punishers. “There’s quite a bit of evidence,” he said, “that people really enjoy admonishing, inflicting harm on and punishing other people who are breaking social norms. They
love
to punish.” This, he points out, is a good thing. “A lot of the people who serve voluntarily in the military, or in criminal justice, are driven by motives of concern for other people. These are
good
people. If you look at history, what did liberal Europe create? It created a specialized group of people, wearing uniforms and badges, to enforce social norms” in a fair, evenhanded way.

As Bowles delved deeper into the mathematics of cooperation and punishment — particularly when he added warfare to the equation — a darker picture emerged, something he calls “parochial altruism.”

If you run the same simulations, but now set groups against each other in warfare, with the weaker groups experiencing extinction, the mathematics run toward a situation like this: Within the group, slackers are dealt with harshly by punishers. Punishment is even more important, because a slacker in war can seriously endanger the group. Cooperation and altruism evolve even more strongly. “Groups with lots of altruists,” said Bowles, “win wars.” The losers die; they don’t pass on their genes.

Let me pause to emphasize this disturbing point: Warfare in human history was essential for the evolution of cooperation and altruism.

“To call this controversial,” said Bowles dryly, “is an understatement.”

In the warfare scenario an additional, sinister effect becomes evident: Altruism within the group does not and must not extend to outside groups. The members of the other group must be demonized — otherwise, why would you kill them? They are bad to the bone and they must be punished. The altruism applies only within the group, not between groups. It is “parochial.”