Dr. Fleming's latest installment on jerks

Land of the Rude, Home of the Jerk

According to Robert Axelrod’s Theory of Cooperation, most people can be expected to play life’s little games by the rules, so long as they count on interacting in the future with the same people. But, if you are leaving town—or have even thought about leaving town—the incentives to cheat rise quickly. You can bounce a check, defraud a partner, abandon a wife and escape at least the social consequences by skipping off to greater Los Angeles.

Jerks are not tolerated in small-scale societies: they are talked about or driven into exile or sent to Coventry. But imagine if you constructed a city of 10 million people, most of them from out of town, who spend a good part of each day in the company of total strangers they will never see again. This city would not operate according to a single moral code, because it would include large numbers of Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Muslims, atheists and skeptics. There might be some common agreement against murder and theft but not on such large social issues as marriage, divorce, and abortion, much less on public drunkenness, proper behavior in public places, and the tone and volume of conversations in a restaurant.