Normalization of deviance

Earlier this year, I was sitting outside the hotel where I have my morning filter coffee. There’s a small granite slab built around a tree out front, right at the edge of the road. I usually sit on the side facing the pavement, but that morning the place was packed and every side of the slab was taken.

A man was standing barely a foot or two away from me while I was looking at my phone. Suddenly, he spat. It was a feat of biological precision engineering: the spit landed two or three centimeters from my feet. Not on them. Just next to them.

I looked up. He looked at me. Our eyes locked. And he said, “It’s okay, at least it didn’t fall on your feet.”

I was too grossed out to say anything. I kept replaying it on the ride home, and a phrase popped into my head: small tyrannies.

What I was trying to say with that phrase was that small acts of tyranny, left unchecked, metastasize. A small pathology becomes a life-threatening disease. I wrote a short post about it.

Somewhere around then, maybe while googling, maybe during one of my voice-typing sessions with Claude, I came across another idea: the normalization of deviance. It stuck instantly. It isn’t the same idea as small tyrannies, but they’re close cousins, and it’s far more evocative. (Small tyrannies is still cool, though.)

Once I’d written that post, I started paying more attention to the state of civic life in Bangalore. Every time I saw someone riding on the wrong side of the road, a missing, broken or occupied footpath, someone spitting, or someone creating fine art with gutkha stains, that phrase jumped to the front of my mind. I’ve come to think it’s a profoundly useful lens for understanding why our cities suck.

I’ve lived in Bangalore all my life. Maybe I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses and looking back at an edited, embellished past, but the city was beautiful. Then, in the early 2000s, Bangalore’s growth went vertical. The city expanded at an unreal pace with no planning and no thought about the cost of all this “growth” and “development.” People built wherever they found an empty plot, and infrastructure built for a hundred people suddenly had to carry thousands. The growing economy attracted people from all over India, mostly from the poorer parts of the country, where economic opportunities were limited.

And as the city’s prosperity grew, something else went the other way. If you were to plot two lines, one for prosperity and the other for civic sense, you’d see them diverge and start traveling in opposite directions. Honestly, if these were asset classes, every asset allocator in the world would be salivating, because you almost never find things this negatively correlated.

I don’t know why it happened. I don’t think it’s simply because the population grew, or because of easy, caricaturable explanations like migration. It isn’t education either: half the people I see doing dumb things have half a kilo of degrees between them.

So I don’t know the origin. I don’t know why things started going to shit, or why so many people started acting like uncouth, uncivilized, ignorant barbarians. But whatever the reason, things did start going to shit. And while I don’t have a theory for why it started, there is an idea that explains why things continue to go to shit. And that is the normalization of deviance.

The term was coined by the sociologist Diane Vaughan in her 1996 book about the Challenger space shuttle disaster. To understand it, let me take you back in time.

So it’s 28 January 1986, at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A beautiful, albeit chilly morning. Actually, chilly is an understatement. Florida, of all places, was in the middle of a freak cold snap, and overnight temperatures had dropped below freezing. Challenger was scheduled to take off that day with seven people on board, and the launch had already been pushed back several times.

The engineers at Morton Thiokol, the company that built the shuttle’s rocket boosters, were freaking out, and with good reason. The boosters were built in segments, and the joints between them were sealed with rubber O-rings. There were already warning signs. On earlier flights, these O-rings hadn’t held up and had let hot gas leak through, and one of the worst incidents happened on a particularly cold day. The problem is that rubber gets stiff in the cold and loses its springiness. So when the joints flex at ignition, the O-rings don’t expand fast enough to plug the gap. It’s the same reason a rubber band feels stiff after you leave it in the freezer overnight.

The night before the launch, the people at Thiokol and NASA got on a call. Thiokol’s engineers told NASA not to launch if the temperature was colder than 53°F (about 12°C). NASA didn’t like that. Instead of proving it was safe to launch, they asked Thiokol to prove that it wasn’t. Thiokol’s managers went off to deliberate, and after a lot of back and forth among themselves, they overruled their own engineers and gave the green light.

At 11:38 a.m., Challenger lifted off. It was around 36°F (2°C), and there was ice on the launch pad. About a second in, cameras caught puffs of dark smoke coming off the right booster, a classic sign that the O-rings hadn’t sealed properly. Then, somehow, burnt propellant plugged the leak, and for the next minute or so, things looked fine. But at 58 seconds, the seal failed, and a jet of flame shot out like a blowtorch, straight into the strut holding the booster and into the fuel tank. At 73 seconds, the tank failed, the shuttle was ripped apart, and all seven people on board died.

Now, the popular version of the story blames reckless managers who overruled the engineers and cost seven people their lives. But what Vaughan found when she looked closely is actually more depressing.

There was plenty of evidence that the O-rings had been unreliable for years. There were cases of erosion and leaks, but somehow all the previous flights had escaped disaster. So every time there was a leak, the people at NASA and Thiokol looked at the damage, concluded it was within the margin of error, and moved on. And with each incident, that margin kept widening, until what should have been an unacceptable risk became an “acceptable flight risk.” There was no single villain here. These were smart, conscientious, well-meaning people who worked hard and more or less followed every procedure in the book. But somewhere along the way, tiny little compromises piled up into a big disaster.

Now, you’d assume one cautionary tale would be enough for NASA to learn its lesson. Nope. In 2003, the shuttle Columbia broke apart while re-entering the atmosphere. This time the problem wasn’t the O-rings but a chunk of foam insulation that had broken off the fuel tank during launch and hit the wing. And there had been previous instances of foam falling off and hitting shuttles. Just like the O-rings, it had become an acceptable flight risk. Until one day, the risk came due.

The real lesson of Vaughan’s book is that this isn’t a story about individual malfeasance, ignorance or carelessness. It’s an organizational and cultural problem.

Now replace NASA and Morton Thiokol with a city like Bangalore, and you see the same pattern.

Take wrong-side driving. There’s a narrow stretch of road near my house that chokes up every morning. It only takes one or two people riding the wrong way to set the ball rolling. Others follow, and before you know it, a one-way street has become a two-way street. The irony is that the right route is only slightly longer. People would make it on time anyway.

The same goes for spitting, littering, broken footpaths, bad infrastructure and foul air. The trigger is immaterial; it’s always hard to trace why something started. But once a behavior takes root, yesterday’s shitty behavior becomes today’s acceptable behavior, and it escalates from there.

The good news is that it works in reverse too. Near my office, there’s a signal at an odd spot on an otherwise wide road, very close to another signal. Poor design aside, it guards a critical junction where an important inner road branches off to the right. I’ve rarely seen anyone stop there. Being me, with my guilty conscience, I usually do. And here’s the peculiar thing: when I stop on my bike, the cars, trucks and buses behind me stop too. I’m not saying this to pass myself off as some traffic crusader. I’m saying it because monkey see, monkey do is real, and setting the right example can change a norm.

Another example: near the same hotel, I recently saw a woman spitting on the road again and again while chewing gutkha or paan. I asked her what she was doing. She came over and apologized.

So the normalization of deviance can be reversed. But it’s on us, and I use “us” deliberately, because an individual can only do so much. We have to get other people rowing in the same direction.

Take civic infrastructure. I love walking. I’ve always been a walker, and I firmly place myself in the lineage of Henry David Thoreau. But Bangalore has become increasingly hostile to walkers. As I wrote in an old post, to walk Bangalore’s streets is to roll the dice on staying alive.

Where footpaths exist, they’re often wonky enough to break an ankle. Some stretches have missing slabs, which at night, on an unlit stretch, can be the difference between life and death. And plenty of important roads have no footpaths at all, so you’re forced to walk on the road itself, which is basically an invitation for some moronic driver to hit you. I’ve had multiple near misses over the years.

Why does this happen? Again, normalization of deviance. We, the citizens, have become passive. We’ve given up demanding change. And I get it: we can shout and scream all we want, and nothing changes.

That’s because of yet another normalized deviance: the kind of people we keep electing, to our local bodies, as MLAs, as MPs. I don’t want to generalize, but a lot of them are more interested in getting their cut than in doing any work. You can see it in their bellies and their assets, both spilling out of clothes that strain every day to contain them.

Zoom out to the national level and it’s the same story. If you’re wondering why your dear leader is a giant fucking moron, well, you elected him. You fell for whatever brand of poison he was selling, whatever string of sweet-sounding nothings, and you got played. And it’s not you, it’s me. I’m the same schmuck in the same boat. I’ve voted for many of the same morons. Left or right, it doesn’t matter. Their ranks are full of specimens too incompetent to be hired as dishwashers.

A caveat. There’s a strain of social and political commentary that takes one lens and stretches it to explain everything. I’m not doing that. I work in finance, where I watch a complex adaptive system called the market every day, and I know the sins of monocausal reasoning. But as a lens for why the quality of urban life in India keeps getting worse, and why nothing changes, the normalization of deviance is a damn useful one.

It’s the system, sure. But what is the system, if not you and me? We do the same idiotic things as the next person, then wake up in the morning and bitch and moan about the quality of life. Have we looked in the mirror?

I did. I’ve done all the same stupid things: littering, spitting, riding the wrong way. But at least I’ve realized I was being a giant fucking moron, that I’m part of a system, and that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. I have to do the right thing before I start giving sermons. Hypocrisy is easy. Doing the right thing is hard.

So I’ve started complaining, and I’ll complain more. Since walking is so close to my heart, I created letmefuckingwalk.com to document and immortalize the spectacularly sorry state of Bangalore’s footpaths.

If you think life in Bangalore is going to shit, what’s stopping you from speaking up? What are you doing to make it better? I’m not asking from some position of moral superiority. I’m asking because if we want to stop this slow slide, not into tyranny but into a squalor so familiar we’ve stopped seeing it, we have to stem the tide of the normalization of deviance.