From the Vault: The Cobra Effect

In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick explore the perverse world of unintended consequences and the cobra effect. (Originally published Sept. 13, 2016)

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
We're going into the vault for a classic episode from September.
What was this episode about, Robert, Well, this is yeah.
This one was titled Scalp Hunters and the Cobra Effect,
and it basically dealt with the unintended consequences um of

(00:25):
of of of putting value on certain things. What we're
referencing with the title, of course, is what happens if
you say, all right, we want to deal with the
cobra problem, so we're gonna put a price on bringing
in cobra's or in the one of the more you know,
horrific stories of of American colonialism putting a price on
the scalps of Native people. But then what happens when
you do that? What kind of how does that shift

(00:49):
the quota of violence? What do people start doing then
to cheat the system? And in both of these cases
you see people doing things to cheat the system. Well,
it's sort of In the episode, we explore the nature
of incentives and what what incentives due to address problems
people think they're trying to address and then to create

(01:09):
other problems people don't predict. Yeah. I can't remember if
I've discussed this example uh in the episode, but it
reminds me of when we're trying to potty train our
child and we know you give did I give this
this explanation? All right? Save it for the episode? Okay, alright,
but it involves I'll just say it involves peepy nuts
and poop candy and uh and and everyone can enjoy

(01:31):
the either enjoy it a second time or you can
enjoy it for the first time. Welcome to Stuff to
Blow Your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is

(01:52):
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. In this episode, we're
gonna we're gonna be talking about some darker content towards
the end, as the time all the episode implies, and
indeed even the darker the less dark elements that we're
going to talk about are kind of a crash course
in the the the Misadventures of colonialism. But before we

(02:14):
get into all of that, we thought we'd we'd kick
off with maybe some lighter content. Yeah, Robert, I understand
that you want to tell me about peep nuts. Yes,
I would love to tell you about not only peep nuts, Joe,
but poop candy as well. Poop candy that's what the
dog believes comes out of the cats. But oh, now
you've taken into darker territory, Joe. But no I'm not.

(02:36):
I'm talking about the rearing of human children as opposed
to dogs here. Um, and this ties into the overall
theme here, the use of the often the use of
bounties and bribes, and then what happens when the economics
of that spirals out of control. So my son is
for now, but there was a time not too long
ago when we were trying to potty train him, to

(02:56):
get him to actually um urinate and aivocate in the
toilet when he needed to go to listen to his
body and follow up. So it's apparently not enough just
to say that is where you go do such business
and point to the toilet. You actually you need to
introduce some incentives to motivate this behavior, right and there.
There there are as many different schools of parenting as

(03:19):
there are parents. So some some people have a real
problem with using bribes in any situation. But hey, that's
what we did in work for us. Then you've also
got the poop anywhere parents, who I hear a real trouble.
Well that's now I know people who are using that
technique and that that seems to work for them. But
I was just kidding. Wait, that's a real parenting philosopher.

(03:40):
I thought you were anywhere. Well, there's there are different
toilet training techniques that imply it's not so much a
poop anywhere. Um, what it means is like the kid
will go around without pants on and then when they
need to go, you scoop them up. Um, that's sort
of thing. So that's what I thought you were, ok there,
believe me, there are a lot of different techniques there.
And uh, and and that one in particularly, I know

(04:02):
some people have used that and it made work for them.
In our case, though, we we issued a strict bounty
for every successful urination in the potty. Um, he would
get one honey sesame nut from this little bag honey sesame. Yeah,
like you buy a Trader Joe's and they had that.
Oh they're they're delicious. Um. I had to stop eating
them for a while when they were when they became

(04:24):
peepy nuts for me and kind of there by association.
But they're great. Uh And on the other hand, for
every successful poop in the toilet, which is was even
more important to us at the time, he would get
a single fruit gummy and that was the poop candy.
So the policy proved effective for us, but it also
led to a period during which he began to make

(04:45):
a case that each piece of feces was surely a
separate poop and should then result in additional poop candies
as well as the is any interruption in the stream
of urine would result in two or more instances of urination,
and each would require a separate reward. Okay, well, this
this is smart bargaining. Actually yeah, yeah, and it's I mean,
it's it's crazy too when I look back and realize

(05:08):
that he hadn't and he still hasn't really discovered the
power of lying. Uh So, but there was still this
tendency to bend the rule and even break the spirit
of the rule for greater rewards. Now, after that we
clarified the policy and then luckily we were able to
phase it out shortly after that. But how might things
have escalated if if we hadn't you know, that's that's

(05:30):
something to think about, and I've been thinking about in
researching this topic. Well, Robert, I want to tell you
a story. It might not be a true story, but
but it's an interesting story with some very true analogs
about the power of incentives and the sometimes unintended consequences
of incentives, and about serpents of course, asps very dangerous. Now,

(05:54):
the story goes something like this, In colonial India, you
had a British colonial administrator who decided there were too
many cobras in the city of Delhi. You know, I
got cobra's coming out of my ears. We gotta get
rid of all these things. Though I wonder what that
actually looked like. I mean, if this really happened. I
imagine we're all picturing that scene in Raiders of the

(06:15):
Lost Arc exactly, but it was probably more like, I
saw one cobra and that was too many. We've got
a cobra problem in the city. But anyway, so he
wanted to get rid of the cobras in the city,
kill them all, get him out of here. So he
came up with a solution. Put a bounty on the cobras.
That makes sense, So if you kill a cobra, just
bring the dead snake to the government office and receive

(06:38):
a cash award. Yeah. They're making it worth your while
to take time out of your day to kill a
snake or two. Yeah. And at first it seemed like
this was working great. They're collecting plenty of cobras. But
before long the local administrators discovered a problem. The people
have figured out a way to game the system and
turn the snake bounty into free money. They weren't catching

(07:00):
cobras from the city and killing them. They were farming
cobras at home, killing them once they were mature, and
then bringing them in to get the bounty. Now, obviously
they couldn't allow this kind of mischief to continue, so
the administrators ended the cobra bounty. But now you had
all these snake breeders who had been farming cobras in
order to get the bounty, and they're they're stuck with

(07:22):
hundreds of worthless snakes. So what do you do with them.
We'll just release them so they have no incidive for
keeping them. They release them into the streets, and the
cobra population in the city drastically increases. This leads to
the principle that's now known to economists as the cobra effect,
and it's when a strategy implemented to solve a problem

(07:46):
directly makes the problem worse. And the story about cobras
and Delhi, as I mentioned, might be nothing more than
a modern folk tale. I haven't come across any evidence
that it actually happened, But there are plenty of examples
where exactly this type of thing has definitely occurred in
the real world, that's right. And one of them occurs
with another colonial situation, another infestation in Hanoi, Vietnam. Al right,

(08:12):
this would have been the nineteenth century. So you have
French colonial authorities in Vietnam, and you know, there are
various problems to focus in on, but the one they
choose to really apply their attention to is the city's
rat problem. Now, I can imagine the rat problem was
probably a real problem, probably a real problem that you know,
like the cobra thing. You can imagine a colonial administrator

(08:34):
sees one cobra and decides that there's a cobra problem
in the city, right, Yeah, because I can't think of
a situation where another city has had a had a
snake infestation problem off hand. But rats. Of course, rat
problems have been an issue throughout human history. Yeah, it's
quite common to have rat problems in any large population center.

(08:54):
People produce a lot of garbage. Garbage is tasty. They
have sewers that are great places to to dwell in
and have your little breeding grounds. Yeah, they're smart and
they're successful. And as was learned, and this is the
other key thing, this is one of the reasons that
they focused in on rats so much, is that in
eighteen nine four, that's when Alexandra Yearson discovered that debonic

(09:18):
plague was caused caused by little fleas that wrote on rats.
So that so you can see why they were concerned.
So what did they do. Well, they did what what
often happens in these cases. They assigned some professional rat
catchers to take care of everything. But then that's not enough,
so they turned to volunteers. They turned to two mercenary

(09:39):
rat catchers, and they offer a bounty of one cent
per rat tail. And the idea here was that, especially
since the disease was an issue, asking the rat catchers
to handle the body was going to be too much
to ask would be a burden and just a little
growth right from what I've read. You know, they'd catch
thousands of rats in the sewer in in a very
short period of time. Lugging all those dead rat bodies

(10:02):
would actually be really heavy, yeah, and then discussing, so
just to prove how many you killed, really, just take
the tail, right, So that's yeah, that's exactly what they did,
brought in the tail, and it seemed to be working
at first, But then the authorities began to notice something
curious in the streets. They noticed a bunch of rats
running around without tails. So they quickly realized that some

(10:24):
of those enterprising rat catchers out there were simply lopping
the tails off of the wild rats when they caught them,
perhaps out of laziness, but more likely so that tail
is rats could go forth breed and produce more rat
tails to harvest. Yah know, they were being economically smart,
they were they were trying to you know, if you
are living off the land, you don't want to destroy

(10:46):
all of the vegetation in the land, so you only
pick from some of the plants. You don't kill every plant. Right.
It's like the policy or the policy that's supposed to
be in place with stone crabs. You harvest one of
the of the clause and then you let the each
your good. You don't harvest them both. So that that
was one of the ramifications of the bounty. But much
like our cobra example, this the exact same thing took place.

(11:09):
Um others took advantage of the law by establishing rat farms. Yeah,
because rats are are easy to breed. I mean, you
don't even have to try. I really don't have to try.
Just to collect some rats and let them do their thing,
and you're gonna have more rats, which you can then
lock their tails off and collect your bounty. So the
French were horrified that their efforts to curb the rat

(11:31):
population was actually increasing it, and they scrapped the bounty
program entirely, and in bubonic plague broke out in Annoy.
So no, yeah, so there's there's a lot more there are.
There are a number of more angles to this story.
There's a great paper out there that ties all of
this in with this sort of the doom nature of
French rule in Vietnam, and it's titled of Rats, Rice

(11:55):
and Race. The Great Annoying Rat Massacre, An episode in
French colonial History by Michael G. Van yeah, And there's
an older episode of Freakonomics Radio actually the deals exactly
with the Cobra effect that I listened to, and it's
a good episode. It's worth checking out. So we won't
rehash everything they cover in their show, but just to
mention a couple other interesting examples they bring up. One

(12:16):
is a very similar situation to the rats in Hanoi,
but this is with Ferrell pigs in Fort Benning, Georgia.
So it's a local tale. Right. Have you been to
Fort Benning. I've been through there, I believe yeeah, did
you see any pigs? No? No, I saw. I saw
an interesting overpass, and I believe that's that's the extent
of it. Okay, Well, anyway, it's in I think southwest

(12:37):
Georgia's right. Yeah, So there are a lot of wild
pigs in this area. They're they're invasive Ferrell pigs, and
they do a lot of damage. They dig everything up,
they get into your garbage, they eat everything. They cause
damage to government property and buildings. So people wanted to
do something about this Ferrell pig problem. So there was
a cash bounty exchange program or pigtails established to fight

(13:02):
the feral pig problem, but same problems we've encountered before.
There's a lot of suspicion that some of these pigtails
people were turning in for a cash reward came from
illicit sources, maybe some meat processing, We're not exactly sure.
And then in the end it looks like baiting practices
established by the pig bounty hunters actually probably increased the

(13:25):
number of wild pigs in the area. So people claim
all these cash rewards because they put out a bunch
of food to attract pigs and then they shoot some
of them. But you know, you were feeding the pigs,
fattening them up for breeding and producing more pigs, because
you're you're trying to put a value on the elimination
of the animal, but in doing so, you've put a

(13:46):
value on the continued life of the animal. Exactly. Yes,
it's interesting how that how that plays out, And this
brings me to a thought about the nature of incentives,
because it's sort of highlights that you can't have an
incentive that's just sort of logically associated with the outcome
you want. In order to try to prevent the gaming

(14:08):
of the system, you really need to make incentives as
closely aligned to the actual desired outcome as possible. So
what I mean by that is, if you want to
eliminate cobras from the city, don't offer cash rewards for
dead cobras because you don't want dead cobras. That's not
the outcome you're looking for. You want an absence of cobras.

(14:30):
So ind but that's a lot harder to incentivize, right, Yeah,
you have to somebody come along and investigate for cobra
free spaces exactly. Yeah, you need more complex systems to
try to incentivize that. So for example, maybe you could
establish a cobra control authority and then the employees of
this organization are given a cash bonus that's proportional to

(14:53):
how few cobra bytes are reported in local hospitals in
a given year. But even with that, you run into
some some problems, right like without strict controls on that,
what if you have members of the cobra control authority
intimidating people not to report their cobra bites or not
to go to the hospital, or intimidating people at hospitals

(15:13):
not to report them to the government. Uh So, it
just seems like whenever you introduce incentive programs to to
a wide ranging you know, a group of participants to
the public. Essentially, you you introduce the problem that people
are going to find ways to access the reward without
helping you achieve your goal. It's it seems like it

(15:36):
should be a Doctor Seuss book or kind of um,
a Sourcer's Apprentice kind of tail, right, just as it
spirals out of control on these examples, UM, I can't
help but think of quotas that are set forth for
law enforcements. Sometimes, you know, like you know, you've got
to get so many speeding tickets out there, and so
you end up having a police officers setting up and

(15:59):
speed traps to to hit those quotas, which in that case,
I guess it's not a clear it's not necessarily making
the problem worse, but it's also just kind of like
we're not really stopping it. We're just kind of like
setting up a system to continually collect the bounty on speeding. Yeah, Like,
I guess I can see where there's a balance there, right,

(16:22):
So if if it depends on how the quota is
and how aggressive you are and carrying it out, because
if there's a balance to where all right, You're just
people know not to go above a certain speed or
they should know and and if they don't, they get
a ticket. So like both in that is going to
make the roads safer. But I guess the more the
focus is on hitting the quota, getting the essentially the bounty,

(16:45):
and losing sight of the purpose of the law entirely,
that's where things get out of whacking, you end up
with like notorious speed traps, right. And I think this
gets into a concept that's very closely related to the
Cobra effect, though I think technically the Cobra effect wouldn't
have to be just in incentives and economics if you're
talking more generally about anything where an attempt to solve

(17:06):
a problem makes the problem worse. You can even go
to the example of of like aka Homo. You know
that that great story of the person who is trying
to touch up this this classic painting of Christ in
his passion moment had some damage to it over the
years trying to touch it up, and he ends up
having this kind of wailing monkey face. Yes, which is

(17:27):
one of my favorite images from the whole Internet. Yes,
but and she wasn't working for a bounty, but imagine
if there was a bounty out there on restoring old
works of art, right, you could end up with with However,
many of these strange little monkey faces just completely obliterating
art history. Yeah. I guess the problem there is that
you are you are giving people who don't have proper

(17:49):
training in an area and incentive to participate in the area,
and thus they're probably going to make things worse. But
another way of framing the issue is just the concept
of perverse incentives, meaning, specifically, in the Cobra effect, you're

(18:11):
the intended solution to a problem makes that problem worse.
Perverse incentives can just mean incentives that cause unintended negative outcomes,
especially if they're contrary to the benefit of the people
who offer the incentives. This all also reminds me of
a moment in one of my favorite books, uh Cornman
McCarthy's sentry. Oh yeah, we talked about this the other

(18:34):
day where there's a bounty on I think rabies bats
in that book in there, Yeah, like the local university
there there they want to or is it the health department,
I can't remember. It's been amber there, but interested official
parties would like to see the bodies of local bats. Uh,
you know, I think it's because of rabies. Yeah, there's

(18:54):
a very enterprising young character in the book named Harrogate.
At the beginning of the book is a tested for
having illicit relations with watermelons that did not belong to him.
But then later on he comes up with some just
ingenious schemes for collecting bats. I think far more bats
than was really than he was intended to collect. Yeah,

(19:16):
he ends up strolling into town. Was just a sack
of dead bats, which he gets. But I believe he
buys some poison and he poisons little pieces of meat
and slingshots them into the air because the bats are
accustomed to praying on insects that are flying through the air.
I believe that's the scheme. That's a great book. It
is this is that makes me want to read it again.
But at any rate, they end up kind of the doctor,

(19:38):
the scientists confronting him when he brings this bag in
and he's says, look, we know you you did not
just find these bats, but we can't figure out how
you did it. You've got to tell us how you
actually killed these bats. And then he he relates the
story of the slingshot Oh, yeah, that's it. He was
supposed to be collecting dead bats. When I said he
was killing, he was making dead bats. So you know,

(20:01):
in a sense they were I guess the effort here
was to protect humans, protect health, but also you know,
not eradicate bats. That was not the intended outcome, but
Harrogate did his best to do just that in order
to get the sweet bounty. But of course that is
not the only book by our great brutal novelist Cormick
McCarthy to feature bounties. That's right, there's also Blood Meridian,

(20:27):
great novel, horrific novel um in large ways I think
unfilmable novel, and I kind of hope it's unfilmable. It is,
uh would you would you call it nihilistic? Yes, it is.
Uh yeah, there's just not much redeemable in the world.
And it is a book of uh, brutal and cruel

(20:47):
people doing brutal and cruel things. Yeah. And one individual
who might not be a person at all, who might
be an embodiment of of awfulness, Judge Judge Holden, who
himself is probably based very loosely on a real individual
who was in a gang of scalp hunters led by

(21:08):
an actual historic individual, one John Galton, who was indeed
a superstar in the vile trade of scalp hunting um harvesting.
By some accounts that two and fifty scalps in a
single raid once, and fittingly, his group was eventually ambushed
and scalped by a band of Quichian tribes people. So um,

(21:30):
so we shouldn't dwell too much on the nasty details,
but we do need to discuss what scalping is and
and scalp hunting, what what this practice consists of, and
where it came from? Yeah? So uh, I mean, most
of you probably don't even need to be told, especially
if you've consumed much in the way of American Western
history or fiction. Not only Blood Meridian, but Larry mcmurtry'

(21:52):
is a Lonesome Dove novels instantly come to mind as well,
but actually never read Lonesome Dove. Oh it's it's quite
it's quite good. Uh. Comanche Moon is another one in
that series that I read that was really good and
really bizarre in many ways. But both of these authors
really really gaze deep into the gruesome spectacle of the act.
It entails the slicing, fling, ripping away of a portion

(22:13):
or all of the human scalp um and then then
then you have this resulting trophy. The victim can be
living or dead. And there are plenty of tales of
scalping survivors, including in eighteen sixty four. Probably the most
famous is a thirteen year old Robert McGee UM. And
he's famous because there's a wonderful, gruesome photograph of him

(22:36):
as an adult showing off his scalping scars scars so um.
And in this case, he was scalped by a band
of uh Sue Indians. So I look up that photo
online if you really want to see it. Um. But
where did the act come from? That's actually something that
has been uh there's been a kind of a debate

(22:56):
on that over the years, right, because we definitely do
see it practiced by by both sides in the American frontier, right. Yeah.
So it's it comes down to, is this uh an
ancient Native American act that various cultural groups took part in,
or is this something that Westerners introduced, that the colonists

(23:17):
introduced to the New World. Um. Now, certainly scalping was
long attributed as a purely Native American act, and indeed
we see plenty of examples of of scalping, both between
tribes and against the colonial invaders. Yeah, and that that's
something I think even when I was a kid. Just
my idea of where this came from. I guess if
you watch old cartoons or something like that, you get

(23:38):
the idea that this is something that Native American tribes,
that their warriors would do to the enemies, not something
that was done by European settlers. But in fact, it
was done by European settlers. Yeah. Yeah, and we'll see
some plenty of examples of that to come here. But
it was I think it is often presented as this
kind of savage thing that savage tribes people do. Um

(24:00):
eurocentric view of it. Yeah, Now, there was certainly a
backlash against that view has pointed out in a wonderful
article titled The Unkindest cut Or Who Invented Scalping by
James Axtell and William C. Struvan in Night and if
you want to blow by bloody blow account of the
history of scalping, that's a good article to seek out.

(24:20):
But they say that the the quote unquote savage Indian
take on scalping was replaced during the twentieth century for
a spell there by Native American activists who who really
pushed for the view that all that it was basically
bloodthirsty colonials who introduced the practice to the native peoples
of the America's by encouraging them to do so by
instituting bounties on on other on other tribes people and

(24:46):
essentially teaching them to take these head skins from others. So,
under this revisionist view, the scalping practice came from the
European settlers and was transferred to the frontier tribes correct time. However,
after this a lot of you know, a lot of
people on the other side of the the issue they
waged in. And really, when you do look at the
history and look at the historical accounts, you see that

(25:08):
the practice of taking scalps goes back way through colonial
invasion to pre Columbian times, okay, and it was quite
widespread through North America even parts of South America. There's
there's archaeological evidence that shows evidence of postmortem scalpings and
skulls that showed evidence that the victim survived the mutilation
long enough for the bone tissue to regenerate. And another

(25:31):
point it's often brought up is that certainly Europeans had
had plenty of ways to torment and torture and mutilate
the body, trying to make them look good by comparison, right,
But for all their drawing and quartering and hanging and
hacking and what have you, you really don't see much
in the way of scalp taking in European tradition prior

(25:54):
to this point, and even in even language itself, um
So scalping as a word. The word itself scalp predates
the seventeenth century. It arises from a Scandi Navian route
and uh, and it was featured in a in a
sixteen o one edition of Plenty of the Elder's Natural History,
though the explorers in the New World tended to be

(26:15):
unversed in Latin classics, so they probably weren't exposed to
it now. Instead, such trophies were described as head skins
or hair scalps. They just talked about skinning and flying
um until scalps and scalping became a popular term in
sixteen seventy six, during King Phillip's War between Uh Native

(26:35):
American tribes and the English colonists and their Native American allies.
And meanwhile there's a On the other hand, though there's
a fairly robust vocabulary for scalps in many of the
native tongues. The the Ojibwa language distinguishes between scalp and
sioux scalp. There's a separate word for each, while Eastern
Abenaki language has special terminology for enemy scalps that are

(26:58):
already taken as trop thieves, for scalps that could be taken,
and scalps from the living and the dead. So it's
kind of like those uh the Old World where the
old saying that Inuits have all these different words for
snow because there's so much of it. You could make
the argument that the scalping was enough of a practice
that there were uh specific terms that were used in

(27:19):
some of these cultures for specific types of scalps. Yes,
but of course, as we see with the European invaders
of the American continents, Uh, they they had all of
their own barbaric and violent practices, and even though scalping
doesn't traditionally appear to be strongly represented among them, they
took to it quite rapidly. Yeah, you could definitely say that.

(27:39):
I mean, they were kind of like, well, the way
we did it back home is we just tore a
person into four pieces with horses. But hey, if you
want to just take the scalp, we can do that too. Um.
And that's the crazy part, because it's one thing to
to look at these native tribes who had who had
this in their culture and their tradition, and there may
even be certain, you know, supernatural role elements that are

(28:02):
factored into it, but the columnists had none of that.
You just had a bunch of in most cases Protestants
showing up in the New World and and readily getting
into the act. Right, It's not a part of their
traditional cultural war practice. It's more just sort of an
adopted act of violence, and violence, of course, becomes a
standard in relations between columnists and the native inhabitants of

(28:27):
the America's pretty much pretty much from inception, pretty much
from that first outside context event when the two met,
violence just continues to be a part of their history.
Um and uh. And that's where the scalping really begins
to to pick up. So it seems, based on most accounts,
all right, it's a pre existing thing that happens between
tribe members in their tribal wars, often as as a

(28:50):
way to take a trophy and then travel a long
distance back with it, kind of getting back to the
idea of taking the tail of a rat, right. But
then the Protestants, the Colonials here they begin um, they
begin to perpetuate the practice by putting putting a bounty,
say ten shillings worth of truck cloth on native scalps, uh,

(29:13):
that are taken by your native ally, So take the
scalps from the enemy tribes people to people that we
don't have alliances with, and we will pay you in
some cloth, all right. But then in the midst of
kings King Philip's war, which we mentioned earlier, which went
from about six to seventy eight, they extended the bounty
to mercenaries thirty shillings per scalp um. And you you

(29:35):
end up with plenty of horrific cases. There's there's this
case of Puritan kidnappy Hannah Dustin Uh. She and her
fellow kidnappies, they were held by by by a band
of tribespeople, and then they escaped and they went on
to execute two men to women in six children and

(29:57):
they received fifty pounds as a as a reward for
that act. And there's actually a statue of this woman
in uh Boscowen, New Hampshire, just a statue of a murderer. Yeah,
I mean, because that's it really kind of sums up
the weird ways we we have historically made sense of

(30:18):
this violence between these two people. Well, yeah, I mean
talk about perverse incentives. So so you've got a rat
bounty system where you assume, well, there's a rat problem,
so we need to do something about it. So let's
just collect rat tails and that will let us know
there's at least some significant amount of rat killing going on.
This seems like exactly the same principle being applied to

(30:39):
human beings. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's the thing. We
see this this bounty system spiral ever more out of control.
Um the French engaged in it, the English engaged in it,
and it eventually becomes not only this thing that you're
asking other tribes people to do, like hey, you guys,
take scalps, right, take the scalps of our enemies and
we'll pay you. Scalps become the become a valuable item

(31:03):
for for colonial individuals as well, hunters and trappers, etcetera. Yeah,
it's just evidence that you are carrying out the genocide
that we're encouraging. Yeah, the first Massachusetts Act of sixteen
ninety four encouraged a bounty for Indie any Indian life,
while a seventeen or four renewal of that act amended

(31:24):
it so you only got a hundred pounds for adults,
ten pounds for children ten and older, and nothing for
kids under ten, which sounds semi decent at first. And
to realize that those children would be sold as slaves
or transported out of the country. Now, as early as
seventeen twelve, some folks were uneasy about that, And this
is this is kind of a sobering thought to realize

(31:46):
that not everybody was just completely on board with this. Yeah,
I would hope not. I mean, this is straightforwardly encouraging
a bounty for murder, right, I mean though, at the
same point, you have to acknowledge that, like this was
a this was a tough time to be alive, Like
it's there's a lot of fear going on in these
communities and among these lawmakers. But but even even then

(32:10):
there were people who said, I'm not sure about this.
Massachusetts Judge Samuel Sewell spoken a session of the Massachusetts
General Court, and he said he he laid out that
he really thought that that this was it was only okay.
It should only be done if you're doing it to
protict your family, and if it's becoming something that you're
doing for commerce, then that's that's bad. Wait, so it's

(32:31):
okay to murder a Native American, collect their scalp and
turn it in for money, as long as the reason
you did it wasn't the money so much that it
was out of love for family. Yeah. I mean, that's
just the basic Protestant ethos, right, that's the that's the
I'm kidding. Yeah, but I mean, obviously that's the horrible

(32:52):
situation here is that you have it becomes the practice,
and then people have to people in positions of power
and authority have to find ways to support it and
rationalize it in their own mind. Yeah, but these rationalizations
seem to be coming indirect conflict with the economic incentives
being offered. If that's the case, why are you still
offering the bounty? Yeah? Yeah, I agree, Um, and then it, uh,

(33:17):
it gets ever more out of control there, especially when
ministers are are speaking about it, and they're not condemning it.
There's this wonderful quote here from actual Instruments Peace it
goes when ministers not only look the other way but
shared in the profits from Indian deaths, the moral barometer
of America dipped dangerously low. At the bottom, however, lay

(33:39):
the American Revolution, in which Englishmen scalped Englishmen in the
name of liberty. Scalping and other techniques of Indian warfare
placed in the hands of a larger European population eventually
sealed the Indian's fate in North America, but not before
wreaking upon the white man a subtle form of moral vengeance.

(34:03):
At this point, I think when we think about the
Cobra effect in relation to scalping, is this an example
of the Cobra effects, right, Because on one hand, it's
kind of doing exactly what the bounty is supposed to do,
just bringing about genocidal violence against the native population. Then again,
I guess if you interpret the purpose of such a

(34:26):
bounty on on Indian scalps as to be, I don't know,
to pacify the border, you know, to make the frontier
less bloody, you're obviously having a perverse incentive there. I mean,
you're you're causing murderous havoc, right, And there are plenty
of examples to where the scalp trade just intensifies the violence. Uh.

(34:47):
And you end up with with with various native chiefs
in some cases who are putting bounties then for their
own people upon the white man. And and so you
have this this kind of a war of extern a
nation from both sides. There are examples, um, some of
the like in the Mexican examples will get to in
a second, where Galton and his gang in that specifically,

(35:10):
they would roll into an area and violence would just
intensify because they're just stirring up all of this hatred. So,
of course scalp hunting continued, um and uh. And falsified
scalping also pops up as an inevitability weight. So maybe
just like collecting pigtails from a meat processing plan saying yeah,
I shot all these pigs, you might have people getting

(35:32):
scalps or parts of scalps from illicit sources, a sort
of yeah, there's a there's a quote that I ran
across these materials from nineteenth century American historian Francis Parkman,
and he said the hunting of humans would constitute a
profitable occupation if only the prey was not so shy
and nimble. So I mean, well, you can't just with

(35:53):
the rats. You can just raise them, right, and rats
are everywhere. People are can prove a little harder to kill,
even if you're a ruthless gang of mercenaries roving about.
And people are gonna inevitably to figure out how can
I get the most out of this kill? Uh? If
you would read this next quote for us. It comes
from twentieth century German ethnologist of European colonization George FREDERICI. Okay,

(36:19):
it says this, along with the high profits of the
fatal business, soon taught the shrewd tribes people and their
quick learning students, the lawless backwoodsmen and hunters the art
of skillfully making two, three, or even more scalps from
one scalp and selling them. People were not always very
particular about where the scalp came from, because it was

(36:41):
difficult or impossible to distinguish between a French scalp and
an English one. Members of friendly tribes and even fellow
countrymen fell victim to greed and the scalping knife. Not
even the dead were spared. Yeah, so you could This
is interesting. It goes even beyond what what what Farci
was talking about here, because you could apparently take a

(37:03):
single adult scalp, you could stretch it as you dried
it out, and you could cut it into a dozen
different things that you could pass off or try to
pass off as scalps, which is is quite You can
see the financial possibilities there. This is one of those
moments where it comes up every now and then. You
just imagine aliens coming in and observing our behavior and

(37:26):
they're seeing somebody take the skin off the top of
another human's head and stretch it and cut it into
a bunch of pieces. Yeah. Yeah. And it became such
a problem in Mexico where you had the Mexican States,
they're paying mercenaries to go around and hunt for scalps um.
They had to demand that scalps include one or both

(37:47):
ears or the crown, and they even set up regulatory committees.
But the thing here is that and I guess you
kind of have to put yourself in their their their shoes,
or try to imagine the kind of individual who ends
up take from the job as a scalp inspector. Uh,
your job is to inspect these grizzly trophies of of
human murder and genocide. Uh, and then uh, you know,

(38:09):
reject it if it's the wrong type of scalp, or
if it's been falsified. Apparently they were easily bought off
and you could so you just bribe them, and then
they'll accept a child scalp as an adult. And therefore,
you know, there's even more incentive to kill a bunch
of children. And that's exactly the type of behavior you
saw from individuals such as John Glanton earlier. Yeah, we

(38:32):
said Galton, but it was Glanton, the Glanton Gang. I
think I had him confused with the The Eagles song
about the Dalton's very different view of the American West.
But still, the scalp trade continued, and in many cases
it seemed to escalate and uh so like July four,
eight sixty three, in response to raids by Dakota in
southern Minnesota, the state issued twenty five dollar bonus pavements

(38:55):
to scalps who brought back a scalp, a hundred dollars
for non soldiers, and this later hit two dred Bucks. So,
needless to say, a lot of scalping ensued. Uh And
in between eighteen thirty five and the eighteen eighties, Mexican authorities,
as we already mentioned, they paid private armies to hunt
Native Americans, specifically targeting apaches and comanches. And I always

(39:15):
find the inclusion of comanches, um and stuff like this
to be interesting because the Comanches in large part were
um you know, there were the people of the horse.
And where did they get this horse technology, this biotechnology?
They got it from the Spanish who introduced the horse
in North America. Yeah, so you you know, they encountered
this this outside context problem. They survived it and and

(39:38):
really became the the notorious uh warring people of the
horse because of our interference. Um. But that's kind of
a that's kind of a separate tangent. But Commanche history
is very, very fascinating. But wherever these uh these bounties persisted,
you just saw genocidal violence persist and it really really

(39:59):
continue you until the balance was successfully tipped completely in
favor of the colonials and then was replaced by new
uh Anti native activities such as relocation programs and re
education centers. Yeah, so that the horrible history um did
not stop there by any means. So in one sense,

(40:20):
this might not be an example of cobra effect at all.
If you, just as we said, think of the the
ultimate goal of the scalp bounty as being, well, just
where we want to exterminate the people who live here
so we can make room to uh to occupy the
land ourselves. It seems like that's sort of worked. Yeah,

(40:41):
I mean, the the unintended consequence, if there is one here,
aside from having to deal with with individuals who are
falsifying scalps and and getting more money than they should have, UM,
is just the like the backwash of bloodshed and the
fact that we just the idea that that the colonists
bloodied themselves, bloodied their souls and really just created this
this stain of shame for all time. Yeah. Well, perhaps

(41:04):
we should leave the realm of scalp hunting, human bounties
and genocide and and uh come back to the idea
of uh backfiring incentives in general. Yeah, it's on a
lighter note. All right now, Robert, I want to talk
about the idea of negative incentives. So we've seen the
idea that positive incentives can backfire. Sometimes they backfire in

(41:28):
just ways that produce unintended negative consequences. Sometimes they backfire
in a way that completely contradicts your intention setting out,
you know, makes the problem worse. But there are also
negative incentives. Sometimes you want to take steps to prevent
something from happening and discourage it. But what about when
that makes the thing you're trying to discourage more likely

(41:50):
to happen. Here's one model. What if a punishment for
a discouraged behavior itself becomes desirable in some way, especially
like a symbol of coolness. So I can think of
one good potential example of this, And there's a New
York Times article from two thousand and seven I came

(42:13):
across describing a problem within the Bangkok Police Department at
the time. So department officials were, according to this article,
trying to put a stop to misbehavior among the rank
and file officers. So if you park in the wrong spot,
if you show up for work late, if you get
caught littering, etcetera. You know, there's some bad behavior among

(42:34):
the cops and they're trying to disincentivize it. And the
disincentive they came up with to stop this behavior was
a form of a badge of shame, you know, like
the red letter. You get to wear something that lets
people know that you have behaved badly, and what they
chose was a Tartan arm band. Unfortunately, this policy seemed

(42:54):
to backfire and the officers ended up regarding the disciplinary
arm band as collectible souvenirs to take home with them,
So the badge of shame became a minor badge of honor.
And in in trying to work around this problem, They're
there chief of the crime Suppression division at the time,
came up with Instead of Tartan arm bands, they used

(43:17):
these Hello Kitty arm bands, hoping this would be seen
as sort of a humiliating affront to the officer's sense
of power and masculinity. I'm not sure how well that
worked out in the end, but anyway, this one very
small example illustrates the principle that a poorly conceived disincentive
can not only fail to provide discouragement of a target behavior,

(43:38):
it could potentially even increase the behavior if the disincentive
comes to be seen as having some kind of value. Now,
maybe that could be some kind of monetary or material value,
or maybe it could just be some kind of cred
or social capital coolness. There's certainly a sense of countercultural coolness, right,

(44:00):
you know, like if if a certain kind of shaming
can be taken with pride. Yeah, like, oh it's too
extreme for TV, too hot for for prime time. If
it's too hot for prime time, I've got to see it.
How hot could this be? Right? But then, of course
there are also examples where you could maybe have a
material advantage. For example, I think I think about supposed

(44:25):
tax schemes that reward people for making failed business investments,
you know, supposedly like you can you can if you
finance a really bad movie that bombs or something, you
can end up manipulating your taxes in such a way
that you end up with more money because the thing
you financed bombed. Kind of a producer's scenario, right, yeah, exactly.

(44:48):
I don't know if that's really the case in any
country today, but I've at least heard accusations that that
is how some very bad films of the past few
decades got financing. Don't know whether it's true. But there's
another version of this I want to talk about, and
that is the case of censorship. I think censorship is
a classic example of attempts to stop a problem causing

(45:14):
the opposite of the intended effect of the problem. Is
there is a message or a meme or an idea
or you know, anything that is spreading content that you
don't want disseminated, and attempting to stop the dissemination of
that content very very often seems to have the opposite
of the intended effect. Yeah, it just makes you want

(45:35):
to see it or hear it or read it. If
the man's telling me not to consume it, I kind
of want to consume it, at least to see what
the fuss is all about exactly. So there is a
I found a Mercury News article from way back in
two thousand three describing the event that inspired what's now
known as the Streisand Effect. I assume you've heard of this, Robberty.
I had not. Actually I'm familiar with Barbara Streisand, but

(45:58):
I wasn't familiar with the streisand effec. Well, that is
indeed the title celebrity behind this effect. So here's how
the story went. So there's an environmentalist photographer named Ken Edelman,
not the same as the political operative, but he was
operating a website that I think at the time was
called California Coastline dot org. California coastline dot org dot

(46:20):
org is still up, I checked. And the purpose of
this was to photograph many, many miles of the California
coast to have before and after pictures of coastal development projects,
to tract sort of coastline erosion and other potentially destructive
effects of building projects along the coast. So it's almost

(46:41):
kind of like a Google Maps scenario where they're just
gonna take a whole bunch of pictures to give an
overall visual impression of something. Yeah, And I think the
reasoning was that, so if you know you have a
project come in build a bunch of stuff on the coast,
you might think that they have been destructive to the
coastal ecosystem, but you don't exactly no, because you don't

(47:01):
have a picture of what it looked like before they build.
But now you've got before and after photos. But apparently
in two thousand three, the actress Barbara Streisand discovered that
the site featured a photograph of her ocean front home
in Malibu, and she felt this was an invasion of
her privacy and filed a ten million dollar lawsuit to

(47:22):
to have the photograph and references to her removed from
the site or taken down. And before her lawsuit, it
appears that the photo of her home was not not
a big hit. It was accessed by only a handful
of site visitors. But in the month after the suit
was filed, according to this two thousand three article, more
than four hundred and twenty thousand people visited the California

(47:44):
coast Line site, presumably to see what all the fuss
was about. Now, I I don't know what their traffic
was before that month. It was a you know, coastal
Coastal Photographs project in two thousand three, I can guess
that it was not anywhere near fo any thousand visitors. Yeah,
probably only the hottest websites out there, right. So, Yeah,

(48:05):
that's one example. But are there any other examples of
this strisand effect where the attempt to shut down discussion
or or to hide evidence of something just draws more
and more attention to it. I can definitely think of
the example of Boycott's movie. Boycott's So, let's say we've

(48:25):
got a new awesome demonic Possession movie coming out, and
it's got tons of graphics, sex and violence and blasphemy,
just wall to wall, and you get a bunch of
church groups who call for a boycott of the film.
They go stand outside theaters to protest it. Does this
end up hurting the film's ticket sales or discouraging filmmakers

(48:46):
from making movies like this in the future. Well, it's
almost impossible to say, because you can't go back in
time and compare the film success under a boycott and
protest with the success of the same film under normal conditions.
Like you can't run the experiment with a control It
happened in reality, um, and there's no way to control

(49:07):
the experiment, but it is widely speculated. And I'm quite
sure I'd agree that these kinds of responses more often
have the opposite of the intended effect, generating more publicity
for an interest in the movie. Yeah, Like, I can
definitely think of films that were considered video nasties in
the UK that we became underground hits, and we're the

(49:32):
kind of things you go to kind of great links
to get on video casset back in the day. Uh,
And you look at them today now that kind of
the you know, you can get anything. You can actually
find these films that you heard about and having such
notorious histories, and you you watch them. In many cases
they're just they're they're horrible. There's just nothing. They're not
even that shocking. But the mere fact that they were

(49:52):
labeled as such, that they were banned, that they were
prohibited and made this video nasties list, they they end
up surviving, end up becoming far more famous than they
had any right to be. Yeah. Uh yeah, the insistence
that you must not look at a thing really increases
your curiosity. Yeah. I mean there's plenty of people today
who are seeking out and watching some really terrible, low

(50:13):
budget Italian horror films and finding themselves very disappointed because
they don't match up to the reputation they had acquired
over the years. So here's the idea I have about
how to how to turn the strisand effect into money. Okay, uh,
if there aren't marketing and pr firms that already specialize
in this, I suspect actually maybe there are, we just

(50:35):
don't know about them. There should be, and what they
should do is you come to them with a movie
or you know, any kind of media property that you're
trying to generate interest in, and what they do is
put that thing in front of people who they know
will hate it, and our activist in nature who start
to generate a boycotting or censoring, calling for censorship kind

(50:57):
of reaction to it. And then that of course draws
in you know, all this curiosity. Oh, people are saying, well,
I shouldn't look at this thing. I wonder what it is.
So you're saying, send out screeners of the Exorcism film.
You're talking about two church groups. Yeah, to to whoever
is the most conservative and censorious person who would hate it?
Or you could do it the other way around. Really
you could be uh, I guess use using something that

(51:19):
would be offensive to any group, and almost anything might
be offensive to somebody, right, Yeah, I mean I can.
I can think of several cases, none of I'm not
going to mention any of their names because they don't
deserve any more publicity. But there are several individuals who
have who you know, continue to seek out that notoriety
for their creations, to create things purely to just sicken

(51:39):
and piss people off. And that that's there the whole
appeal like that there's thinking about a film about a
mini segmented creature. Uh, yeah, that's one that comes to mind,
Like that's I think that's a clear case of a
guy who like, there's nothing at the heart of anything.
There's nothing artistically pure, there's nothing creative, there's nothing nothing
even fun, not nothing fun or even all that shocking

(52:02):
per se. In a grander scheme, there's certainly more shocking
pieces of cinema out there that have been created by
by by actual artists, but it's just the storm that
they're able to to to raise up around those creations
and then make it like a part of our culture,
you know, just empty cynical bids for attention. Yeah, exactly.

(52:24):
But yeah, so I think the takeaway from this is
that there does seem to be almost no surer way
to draw attention to something than to try to prevent
people from seeing it, almost like any attempt to manipulate
the attention that we give to something, be it negative
or positive, Like it's just it's so easy, Like we
think that it's going to be easy to economically manipulate

(52:44):
something or even you know, through censorship, manipulate the scenario,
manipulate the way we interact with something. But it's just
such a complicated affair. It's just we're gonna, we're gonna
over flow the tub either way. I think people do
just have a sort of contrarian they tore where we
want to try to uh upset the narrative of the
institutional authority. I think about this with so the strisand

(53:08):
effect definitely occurs with brands. You know, you'll have a
an article or a meme or something like that that
makes Coca Cola or Pepsi or McDonald's or something look bad,
and they'll they'll try to shut it down, you know,
no more than this, and that just doesn't work, right. Yeah,
it just draws more attention to it. And it especially
happens when you see these uh you know these like

(53:30):
social media crowdsourcing message campaigns, like I can't remember what
any of these hashtags are, but you know what I'm
talking about. It will be like hashtag uh coke feelings,
and Coca Cola is trying to get you to do
free advertising for them on your social media page. But
of course people respond to it with stuff, you know,
diabetes or whatever. And I can just tell any time

(53:53):
a brand tries to shut down those sort of mischievous
responses to their campaign. They're just gonna make people want
to do it more. Yeah. Indeed, you see that almost
on a weekly basis these days. Yeah. All right, so
there you have it. We went from cobras and rats
and pigs to the horrors of scalp hunting, and then

(54:14):
back into the world of censorship. Um. So hopefully we
gave you a lot to consider in terms of the
cobra effect here. I think this makes me want to
hear what your thoughts are you out there, the listener,
What what your thoughts are about the nature of incentives?
How do you actually guide people's behavior in a reliable

(54:34):
way that doesn't produce these unintended and perverse consequences? Yeah?
I mean really, we can hear from just about anybody
on this. Are you a pet owner? Are you a parent?
Are you a boss? Are you at all involved in
or at least a close follower of politics? Are you
a government policymaker? Yeah? Yeah, what happens when you start

(54:55):
trying to push an issue with a you know, stick
with some money stuck on the end of it to
get the results you need? YEA, let us know I'm
sure some carrots work better than others. Yeah. Yeah, there's
so many different types of carrots, so many different types
of sticks. Sometimes you just end up with no carrots
or a horse that likes to be poked with the stick.
I don't know how do we get there? Okay? Sorry, alright?

(55:18):
So hey you wanna you wanna get in touch with
us you want to share your thoughts on this topic
or others. First of all, head on over to stuff
to Blow your Mind dot com newly redesigned. It's looking great.
Um easy to interact with. You'll find that again. It's
stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Along with the
various links out to our social media accounts such as Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter, Instagram.
We are Blow the Mind on most of those, and

(55:40):
if you want to get in touch with this directly
to let us know feedback on this episode or any others,
or to give us a suggestion for a topic we
should cover in the future, you can email us directly
at blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com

(56:02):
for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com? Pay bigger, I think
the biggest man. I do