Why are we still reforming not the courts, but our own prejudices about them

Courts have been reforming for decades, but each new attempt ends with the fact that we are reforming not the court again, but our own ideas about it.

Society is used to living with the idea that laws can be “fixed”, and fateful decisions are made not in the courtroom, but in the “secret room”. This disbelief, which is quite often presented as fact, is not a rational assessment, but an ingrained cultural phenomenon of “obviousness” fueled by post-totalitarian trauma, populism and targeted media attacks. This “obviousness” creates a vicious circle: it justifies chronic underfunding of the system, meager salaries of the apparatus and inhuman workloads, which, in turn, worsens the quality of justice and “confirms” the initial stereotype – “the system is rotten”.

We will now dissect in some detail the architecture of exactly how perception changes and new “obviousness” is formed at the individual level, integrating the effect of selective attention, the effect of primacy with the addition of the illusion of frequency, and biased confirmation. Mostly metaphorical, rather than dry and scientific, but none the less true and effective. After all, what society notices becomes politically possible and important, and these processes also show how the illusion of change is formed without real change.

Advertising:

Errors periodically creep into the process of reform preparation. Their authors proceed from their own idea of ​​how it should be, what is correct and what processes take place in the community. During such forecasting, a desirable, convenient model of ideas about a person, a slice of his thinking, and processes within the community is often taken. At the same time, the situation in which people are actually may not be taken into account at all. Such a vision is fragmented, selective, patterned, but it seems to be predictable and controlled, and this always bribes.

Projecting can take place based on the author’s hypothetical views on the problem and the community for which the project is designed, and are mostly based on general ideas about people, which are equally “true” even for Afghans, even for Ukrainians. Projects like this are often born in such efforts: if you compare a cow and a tree, it turns out that the cow is a tree, or vice versa, because both “drink” water, grow and die.

The populist reformer acts not as an anthropologist or sociologist, but as a preacher who carries the “correct” vision, ignoring the local context. This leads to childishness and caricature in decision-making, behind which we do not always see the real changes taking place.

Any change ceases to be an illusory sermon when we see the structure of the processes that create our ideas about reality. It is important not just to preach something and pass it off as facts, but to understand the mechanisms of how it becomes “obvious”, what structures of thought make them self-evident, legitimate, convincing or, on the contrary, how something loses its meaning, becomes meaningless. That is, not just to fill old words with a new meaning, but to create an environment in which a new meaning can occur. But, let’s figure out how we are being sold sermons time after time.

Conditionally, if someone needs to sell a cup, then he must write that it has a unique property – a handle, so that you don’t get burned. They will say that this is solely because our responsible business is important to the safety of people. The cup not only has a handle, but also retains heat well, because we are for energy saving. That is, some everyday things are sold to you, not just as unique, but as involvement in political trends and protection of your rights, and the brain clings to them as a norm, and then pushes them away when making decisions and interpreting new data.

Why does this work?

The effect of selective attention. It is our ability and need to focus on one particular stimulus while ignoring others. Our brain physically cannot process all the information that comes from the senses, it constantly filters out “unimportant”. Conventionally, before you directly encountered a court, or even came across an emotionally charged message on social networks that everyone was raving about, it was something peripheral to you, you could walk past the courthouse and not pay attention to it, your neighbor could be a judge, but you did not know it, did not attach importance to it.

As soon as you saw the emotional message “corruption all around, aaaaaah, maximum repost”, your brain puts a kind of “important” tag on it. From now on, your attention is focused on him, as if you received a new instruction. That is, the information around and its frequency remained unchanged, but the focus and prism changed, you suddenly begin to notice these “corrupt idlers” in the public space.

The effect of primacy with the addition of the illusion of frequency. It is our tendency to rely too much on the first information received, a certain marker, when making decisions or forming judgments.

When we first learn about a court, for example, it is a corruption scandal, or a campaign to discredit a judge on anonymous websites, the brain puts a marker – you did not notice or pay attention to these messages before. Also, at this stage, a base is formed, from which the brain pushes back, to understand the normality of the process, that is, if the first report is about corruption in the courts, then this becomes a “tag of normality”.

When your selective attention latches onto that word the next time, and then again, even though it may be the same message, just in different channels, the brain compares the new frequency not to reality, but to the original marker: never heard of it. Which makes one think that corruption is really everywhere.

Confirmation bias. It is our tendency to pay attention to, interpret and remember information that supports our beliefs. After selective attention has noticed a word or an event, and the illusion of frequency has caused surprise at the “large number” of reports, a new normal is formed: corruption in the courts has suddenly become very abundant. Now, confirmation bias actively looks for new evidence, ignoring all instances where it is disproved. In fact, the frequency has not changed – the focus of attention, which forms a semantic bubble, has changed.

The difficulty is that in the conditions of a post-totalitarian society, this bubble becomes almost the only source of stability. People rely so much on their ideas because the social structure that used to give a coherent picture of the world has been destroyed. And these distortions create the idea of ​​constancy, stability and comprehensibility of what is happening, what we talked about at the beginning, stereotyped but manageable ideas about reality, which are also supported by modern media technologies, social networks and algorithms.

In a healthy society, reliable examples of normality are provided by stable institutions, but if these institutions are broken or distrusted, the bubble itself becomes almost the only source of stability. And this is not stupidity, but a rather rational choice, which does not remove responsibility for being in a warm bath of one’s own prejudices, lack of critical thinking and trust in various kinds of “preachers”.

For example, it can to look like this: “in my environment, no one listens to the radio – therefore, no one listens to it at all!” or “who even listens to the radio?”, “all my friends use Facebook – therefore, no one uses other social networks”, etc., accordingly a decision is made to use certain communication channels. “Everyone in my circle considers judges to be corrupt, so they should all be fired and new ones recruited” and another strange decision is made.

Moreover, for example, studies of human interaction with LLM show that users trust and return more to models that agree with them. In test conversations, people considered snooping answers more “high-quality”, believed such models more, and wanted to communicate with them again more often. That is, we don’t just put up with our bubbles – we actively strive to be in them, the same rational choice. And willing to pay for an LLM that will be a “snitch” and confirm our biases, even if the answers are actually less accurate.

Therefore, anyone who throws simple emotionally charged slogans into the public space, from “I looked here to see what salaries are in…” to the classic “there are only corrupt people” becomes a new preacher. This mythical “there” is constructed in such a way that the broadest possible insults fit under it, accordingly, public “righteous anger” is very easy to unleash on almost anyone. The main thing for them is to get into the focus of your attention first.

But the preacher does not solve problems, but performs a performance of solving them, his product is not a result, but a feeling of involvement in a mystery that perfectly fits into the “blind spots” of our understanding of complex systems. It seems to open a window to a world of simple solutions where problems accumulated over decades of inefficient management can be overcome by taking someone’s salary, firing old people and hiring new ones, etc. Then this simple and easy idea is repeated by the media, neighbors, passers-by, and over time it becomes a “common fact”. So that a populist could squint his eyes and somewhere on the air say: “well, it’s obvious”, but you really heard it from “all” 3-5-7 people with whom you interact during the day.

The irony is that often both the populist and the reformer act in the same way, the former knowingly selling a simple solution to gain power, the latter sincerely believing that his simple solution will work.

Instead of giving a chance to something new, when an old idea dies, for example, to take it from someone so that others feel better, it is not hidden, but they start to “modernize”, conduct improvements, strategic sessions, invite experts. A whole infrastructure grows around this, where maintaining a comfortable bubble becomes more important than any reality, because it leads to the survival of the entire previously created ecosystem.

This text is not a whitewash of reputation, but an incentive to social action: so that citizens begin to see the court not as an enemy, but as a tool of protection, their common insurance policy, and begin to demand for it adequate resources, funding, equipped apparatuses, workload, realizing that a weak court is a direct threat to their own rights.

Volodymyr Gurzhy

A column is a type of material that reflects exclusively the point of view of the author. It does not claim objectivity and comprehensive coverage of the topic in question. The point of view of the editors of “Economic Pravda” and “Ukrainian Pravda” may not coincide with the author’s point of view. The editors are not responsible for the reliability and interpretation of the given information and perform exclusively the role of a carrier.