When Doing Right Feels Wrong

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you ever had one of those conversations where half the people in the room have a very strongly held opinion and the other half feel just as strongly in the opposite direction? This happened to me a few years ago. I was having dinner with friends in Washington, D.C. Everyone was talking about some shocking news that had just come out. Tens of thousands of top secret documents from the National Security Agency, or NSA, Since at least 2008, the National Security Agency has been using secret technology to hack into— Secret and far-reaching, and it's been going on for years. The government can compel a phone company to provide this metadata, as it's called, for millions of customers. The man who released all these documents was Edward Snowden, a computer security consultant at the NSA. The documents detailed extensive secret U.S. surveillance of people and governments across the globe. Edward Snowden was a whistleblower. Snowden believed that what the NSA was doing was wrong and that the public had a right to know.

I don't want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded.

Fearing, correctly, that he was in the crosshairs of U.S. security agencies, Edward Snowden fled the United States and found refuge in Russia. Back at the dinner table with my friends that night, someone asked a simple question: Edward Snowden, hero or traitor? One side of the dinner party was certain. This man was a hero. He had acted in the public interest, alerting Americans to heavy-handed surveillance by their government. The rest of the group? They were equally certain. Edward Snowden was a traitor. Who shares national security secrets that embarrass your country, endangers the lives of U.S. intelligence agents and service members, and then finds refuge in Russia? Vladimir Putin's Russia. What fascinated me about this debate was how quickly people came to their conclusions. How certain they were that they were right. What explained it? Today we explore what happens when 2 core moral values are pitted against each other. Loyalty versus honesty, this week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

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I know these companies.

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—comes a new series critics are calling compelling and insightful.

Is anybody not paranoid? Now we just gotta win.

Cupertino is all new, CBS Thursday, 10/9c, and streaming on Paramount+.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. Darwin Rocher grew up in Detroit, Michigan in the 1970s and '80s. His father was a millwright. He dismantled, repaired, and reassembled huge pieces of machinery in a steel factory. Darwin's mom stayed at home to raise him and his sister. She'd help them with their homework and give them life advice. She'd also whip up big family dinners every Sunday evening.

My childhood was pretty good. I can't recall any, like, really adverse childhood experiences that I went through as a kid and as well as a young adult and a teenager. So I had a pretty good lifestyle. I really enjoyed being a kid.

Darwin's parents were loving, kind, churchgoing folks. They tried to impress the right values on young Darwin.

Doing the right thing for the right reasons, being a person of honesty and integrity, doing the best you can, and doing it right the first time in everything that you do.

When Darwin was around 12 years old, he violated his parents' moral code. One day, he snuck into a neighbor's yard and picked some of her flowers. As he was walking home with his freshly assembled bouquet, the neighbor called his mom and told her what he'd done.

My mom really got after me about doing that, and she was telling me how important it is to respect other people's property. So the punishment, or I guess the reward, would be that I had to do yard service for her for the remaining summer. I had to cut her grass and everything like that.

Darwin said this lesson taught him what kind of person he wanted to be. At home, he became the model son. At school, he got good grades. But when he was 16, he received a different kind of lesson, a lesson that taught him what kind of person he didn't want to be. He was driving to pick up his sister from school. 2 friends were in the car with him. All of the boys were Black. Suddenly, in his rearview mirror, Darwin saw the flashing lights of a police car.

And so I didn't think anything of it because I've never had any negative encounters with law enforcement at all.

There were 4 officers in the squad car. All of them got out. One approached Darwin.

So the officer approached the driver's side door and he asked me for my driver's license.

Darwin knew his license was in the car, probably in the side pocket of the door. Something told him not to reach for it.

So I said, my driver's license is here, but I just don't know where it's located. And so at that point, he ordered all 3 of us out the car, and then he told us to put our hands on the trunk of the car, of my car, while they searched the interior of the vehicle. And then the officer walked back to me and said, hey, I found your driver's license. And he held it in his left hand and he showed it to me. And I smiled because I was happy because I didn't know where it was at. And then he slapped me in the face very hard and told me to wipe that smile off my face. He took his hand and did, like, a clamp around my throat, squeezing my Adam's apple.

At one point, Darwin looked at the other 3 officers.

And the other officers kind of— they were Black males, and they kind of just kind of shrugged away. And I was kind of looking at them like, you know, are you going to allow this to happen? Are you going to allow someone And so at that point, they kind of just kind of went along to get along and didn't do anything to intervene. And then the encounter lasted for about 5 minutes, but that 5 minutes, I thought that they were actually going to kill me because he told me when he choked me, the only reason I won't kill y'all here is because it's daylight.

I was in a state of shock.

I was in a state of fear.

After the incident, Darwin thought about what had happened. He thought about the officer who had choked him, but he also thought about the other 3 officers who had watched and done nothing. Why did they hesitate to speak up? Did they not want to break ranks with their fellow officer?

I was hoping and thinking maybe one of those officers would have the courage to, you know, stand forth and say, okay, this officer's out here assaulting You know, teenagers in broad daylight for no crime whatsoever.

The encounter left Darwin with a concussion, but the injustice of what had happened stayed with him long after the physical pain had eased. He sometimes asked himself what he would have done if he had been one of the 3 officers who had witnessed the assault. If a situation arose where he had to choose between loyalty and honesty, would he hesitate to speak up? He was soon to find out the answer. After a stint in the Air Force, Darwin eventually became a police officer in Detroit himself. He rose in the ranks and gained the respect of his fellow officers. Soon, work and life began to blur together. Colleagues became friends. Darwin felt especially close to one of his scout partners. They'd go out and patrol together almost every day.

I consider him a friend. He was at my house, I was at his house, and he really taught me how to be a street officer. He taught me how to detect crime, drug narcotics trafficking, those sort of things. He was a street cop and he was very good at his craft.

On weekends, they'd watch sports together. They celebrated milestones with their families.

He was just a good guy. And when he would come over to my house, I had a young child at that time, he would kind of, you know, ask me about the kid and ask me did I need anything, because he knew I was a newer officer. And he just kind of took on a big brother role for me in certain aspects.

Darwin had another scout partner he was close to. For reasons that will become clear later in the story, We are not naming Darwin's fellow cops. Darwin felt he had a real bond with his second partner.

He was more quiet, soft-spoken, a good partner. We were more adventurous when we worked together. We would go and investigate things on a deep level because we were anxious to get out there on the streets, and we wanted just to patrol and have fun.

There was a third colleague Darwin respected enormously. When they worked together, Darwin always felt he came away with a better understanding of what it meant to be a Detroit police officer.

Me being a new officer, they kind of tell you, write a lot of tickets, get a lot of citations, get some stats. And he kind of explained to me that these tickets that you write these people have a, you know, monetary impact, adverse impact on them. He said, you know, it's okay to give out a warning, you know, at certain times. So it was those intangibles that you didn't learn in the academy. on how to be a patrol officer for the city of Detroit.

The brotherhood he formed with these officers gave Darwin a sense of security. The cops knew each other's families. When they were out on dangerous calls, Darwin felt like he could trust these men to watch his back, to keep him safe. And of course, he knew he would do the same for them. One night in 1998, the 4 men got together for a beer at a dive bar on the east side of Detroit.

We had drinks, we talked about sports, we talked about police work, we talked about women and things that people do at that age group.

And then the conversation went in a new direction. One of his scout partners asked Darwin a question.

Do you want to make some money? And I said, well, of course. I mean, what do you want to do? And he said, well, I got an idea.

The officer told Darwin about a bookie who had just been released from prison for tax evasion and illegal gambling. The bookie had stashed $1 million in a safe at his house.

And we're going to go in there and we're going to get it. And I know that you're a young officer and they don't pay well. You have a young child and you can put some, you know, some coins in your pocket. And this is a one-time shot. We go in, we go out. It's a one-day thing. And then we can be set for a very long time to come.

It was like the plot of a movie. Darwin sat there, stupefied.

And at first, I thought it was a joke. I thought it was, aha, very, very funny. But as the conversation continued, he started to draw a diagram of the target house and how we would approach this house. And I remember, Shankar, I remember You know, drinking the alcohol but not getting the desired effect. It was just I was so shocked and so numb.

The plan his friends laid out went like this. The 4 cops would dress up as FBI agents and conduct a fake raid on the home. It wasn't like the bookie was going to call the police. He'd have to explain how $1 million came to be sitting in his safe. Unspoken was the idea that even though breaking into the bookie's house was obviously illegal, It could also be the right thing to do. The money they'd be stealing was from a crook. In a way, they'd be righting a wrong. Darwin's friends told him the first step was to stake out the house. Then on the day of the raid, they'd call 911 and report there was an officer in trouble far away from the house.

And that would distract all the local units to that location.

Free and clear of any interruptions, the cops would break in, tie up the bookie, spray him with mace, and force him to reveal the code to the safe.

And if he, you know, refused or, you know, in any way didn't allow us to get the money out, then we would take any means necessary, up into including death.

Wow. So they actually talked about killing the guy if he didn't cooperate?

Yes, absolutely.

Darwin felt a battle start to rage inside his brain. The scheme felt wrong, but he also felt a deep loyalty to these men.

These are the people that I work with every day. I put my life in their hands, and hopefully they put their lives in my hands. These were people that I looked up to for, you know, aspiration and what kind of cop I wanted to be. with the Detroit Police Department.

After they laid out the plan, Darwin's friends looked at him and asked him a question that would shape the rest of his life: Are you in or are you out? You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

I need a lawyer. New CBS Thursday. We're taking on Silicon Valley lawsuits no one else will. The fight—

Objection! Overruled.

—is real. I know these companies. You're being surveilled. From the creators of The Good Wife—

These tech bros need guardrails. We're the disruptors now.

—comes a new series critics are calling compelling and insightful.

Is anybody not paranoid?

Now we just gotta—

Win.

Cupertino is all new, CBS Thursday, 10/9c, and streaming on Paramount+.

Support for Hidden Brain comes from Progressive. Whoever says saving money is hard doesn't know that new customers who bundle and save with Progressive save hundreds. Because switching your home and auto insurance is better than cutting down on those iced lattes you love. Switch to Progressive and see if you could save. Get your quote today. At progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company, affiliates, and other insurers. Not available in all states. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. At Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, psychologist Adam Waitz has long been fascinated by the kind of dilemma Darwin Roche experienced at that bar in Detroit. What happens in the mind when someone has to make a choice between 2 competing ethical priorities?

My first interest in the topic of whistleblowing came from hearing about a news story in Chicago. It was a terrible story, something about someone getting shot, and as they were dying, the police actually approached the person who got shot and said, can you help us? You know, do you know who did this? And the person essentially said something along the lines of, I know who did this, but I'll never tell you.

I know who did this, but I'll never tell you. Adam was struck by the story. Here was a man who was dying, and he was trying to protect the person who'd shot him.

Out of kind of a code of silence, a code of don't snitch. And I remember talking to someone who was leading an anti-gun violence organization And this person had worked with communities as well as the police. And this person who I relayed the story to said, well, you know, this is very interesting because there's a similar code of silence within police departments as well.

As a psychologist, Adam asked himself what the connection could be. Why would the victims of crimes and the people trying to catch the perpetrators of crimes Follow the same code.

There seemed to be something about a code of loyalty, and so I started talking about that with Leanne Young and James Dungan, and we said, well, you know, this could be something interesting to study from a psychological perspective.

Adam and his colleagues decided a good place to start their analysis was in the field of what's called moral foundations theory.

There are these 5 or 6 kind of basic moral intuitions or moral foundations or moral modules that people use intuitively to determine whether something was right and wrong.

When we ask ourselves what's right and wrong, we usually don't realize that beneath the surface of our reasoning, we're actually drawing on a deeper set of moral feelings. These feelings form the foundations of our moral reasoning. Moral foundations theory was first put forward by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham, who hypothesized that people don't realize they are unconsciously drawing on different moral foundations. This, in turn, is a central reason why people are bewildered when others reach different moral conclusions. The people who thought Edward Snowden was a traitor may have felt that those who called Edward Snowden a hero needed to have their heads examined.

What was so interesting to us was that 2 of those foundations can very easily come into conflict with each other.

Cultures around the world understand that one way to be a good person is to stand by those who stand with you. We defend our families, communities, and nations And we expect our families, communities, and nations to defend us, even when the going gets tough. Flaking out doesn't just make you a coward, it makes you unreliable, disloyal, a bad person. Simultaneously, however, many of us also intuitively feel that being a good person means standing up for fairness and justice. Stealing from someone, is unjust. Hurting someone is unfair. One place these 2 moral foundations come into conflict?

It just so happens that these kind of core intuitions, that is, the desire for loyalty and simultaneously the desire for justice, really come into conflict with each other when people are put in situations where they have to decide whether to blow the whistle or not.

When we think about Darwin Rocher, it's easy to think his choice was either to be loyal to his colleagues or to do the right thing. But this is a mistake. The moral foundation of justice is not superior to the moral foundation of loyalty. It's just that different situations can make different people lean in one direction or the other. We all face balancing acts between honesty and loyalty. Let's say you see a colleague stealing toilet paper from the office supply closet. Do you report it? What if they were embezzling money from the company? Or let's say you have a very kind neighbor who brings you soup when you're sick. But this person also posts fake news on social media. Do you call him out? What if you see him abusing a dog? How does the gravity of the act change the equation?

It's not clear what the right thing is. And this is where we landed in our hypothesizing that many people And many cultures feel like the most right thing you can do is be a loyal citizen to your community, whatever that is, whether that's a police department, whether that's a neighborhood, whether that's a place where you work. That is the ultimate in morality, is being loyal. On the other hand, you have this competing, you know, moral intuition where you want to do what's just and what's fair and what prevents the greatest amount of harm to others more broadly. And so if you look at it one way, whistleblowing is the most moral thing you can do. But if you look at it another way, it feels like the ultimate betrayal.

Adam and his colleagues have shown that our inner moral calculations can be tipped in one direction or another. In one study, they recruited 2 groups of volunteers. The first was asked to write an essay on the importance of fairness and honesty. The other was asked to write about the value of loyalty. All the volunteers were then told to evaluate the work of previous participants in the study. In reality, however, there were no previous participants, and the research team was asking the volunteers to evaluate poorly done work that they themselves had fabricated. The researchers asked the volunteers to blow the whistle about poorly done work. Here's researcher James Dungan from the University of Chicago.

And the question for the participants in our task was, would they report this shoddy work or not?

The researchers told the volunteers that if they reported shoddy work, the previous participant would be banned from working on any future studies.

And what we see is that whistleblowing behavior was affected by the essay prompt that they wrote. So people writing about the importance of fairness, who were made to remind themselves of how important it is to be fair, were more likely to report the participant's shoddy work. People who were focused on loyalty were less likely to report the participant.

What this shows is that our internal moral compass is not static. It's also not just about what happens inside our own minds. Social factors and the context can alter how we feel about profoundly important moral decisions. So when some of us think Edward Snowden is a hero and some of us think he's a villain, it may be useful to ask how different social norms and social ties are shaping those conclusions. At a larger level, the cultures in which we find ourselves can also play a powerful role in nudging us to prioritize honesty or loyalty. Researchers have found that different cultures prioritize different moral foundations, perhaps because of their unique historical circumstances. Here's Adam on that topic.

Work by Michele Gelfand and others has suggested that when countries experience crises, whether due to war or famine or natural disaster, they tighten up. And to the extent that tightening up or promoting sort of tighter social norms is going to weaken whistleblowing, I think in the aftermath of crises, people are going to be less likely to break with their fellow country people.

I'm wondering if you or anyone else has done research looking at organizations that believe they are doing the right thing, so police departments or the army or medical workers. You have a sense that partly what motivates you to join this profession is a sense of mission, a sense of duty, a sense of responsibility to higher things. I'm wondering if there's been any research looking at the likelihood of whistleblowing in those contexts, partly because I'm wondering if the conflict in some ways becomes more acute. In other words, if I'm working for let's say Doctors Without Borders, and I think that I'm working for a humanitarian organization that's doing really wonderful things. Now, if I blow the whistle, I'm not just potentially hurting the organization or hurting the people within the organization. I'm hurting all the people that the organization could have helped. And now that makes the moral dilemma, at least the way I'm seeing it, even more acute.

Well, you gave me just the perfect testable hypothesis. I want to run out and do this research tomorrow. And I think you're really onto something where To the extent to which you believe that your organization has a bigger social mission, and this could be true of police departments, the military, again, other examples I've used are Boy Scouts of America or the Catholic Church, and indeed these are mission-driven organizations, the conflict might be lessened for you because you might say, well, the reason why I'm not going to report wrongdoing is that that would weaken our organization. And so really, what the greater good is for me is that our organization thrives so we can do the good work that we do. And so, you know, that might explain why within those organizations, you know, you're saying that your purpose is partially socially driven. And that then gives you license to engage in potentially less ethical behavior. It's a phenomenon called moral licensing, the idea developed by psychologists Benoit Monin and Dale Miller, where if you think of yourself as having a certain level of morality, then it licenses you to be less moral on other dimensions. And so that might also occur in the whistleblowing context.

I mean, in some ways, the idea is that if you're basically already Putting money in your moral piggy bank by doing a good thing, by being part of a mission-driven organization or a humanitarian organization, it now becomes a little easier to take money out of that piggy bank when you're called upon to do so because you say, well, my piggy bank is already pretty full with all of these moral coins.

Absolutely. You're still morally wealthy even if you take more coins out.

Adam can think of a moment in his own life when he was torn between the moral impulse of loyalty and the moral impulse of honesty. He was a senior in high school and his brother David was a sophomore, and they had gone to a classic high school party. Think cheap plastic cups filled with bad beer. At some point in the night, one of the partygoers took a picture of the scene, and the next week, the photograph started making its way around the school.

And in our public school system, You know, there's nothing you can do to a student who is drinking alcohol off campus. But there was some rule in place that if you were an athlete, a high school athlete, you could be suspended if you're found consuming alcohol, even if it was outside of school grounds.

Adam was on the basketball team. David did cross-country. They were going to be called in for questioning. Adam had a choice: lie and protect his brother and his teammates, or tell the truth and get everyone in trouble. Of course, Adam was not the only one confronting this choice.

Everyone who knew they were going to get called in for questioning had this decision to make: Do we all, you know, basically lie and say? I wasn't drinking at the party, or what you see in my cup is apple juice and not beer. You know, do we maintain that code of silence, or do we tell the truth?

Before Adam or David got called into the office, they rendezvoused and came up with a plan.

Let's just say we were drinking apple juice if anyone asks.

Slowly, each of his teammates was brought in. Eventually, it was Adam's turn.

And I was asked, was I drinking at the party? And I said I was not.

Adam chose the moral foundation of loyalty over the moral foundation of justice, of honesty. But then, in an almost comical demonstration of what happens when moral foundations come into conflict with each other, He immediately felt torn about his decision.

I walked out of that office and I just felt bad. You know, it did not feel good to tell a lie. After walking about 50 feet, I turned around and I recanted my statement.

This is the thing about our moral foundations. We don't notice them most of the time because they are hidden beneath the surface. Yet when we ignore them, we experience what Adam calls moral stress.

Which is the stress brought on by having to stretch the truth or do something that feels immoral. And that's what I felt. It was, you know, momentarily debilitating. It was very stressful to know that I had And not only that, but yeah, I could get away with it, but I think plenty of people in the school knew the actual story, and that was going to be embarrassing.

When we come back, moral stress in a situation with the highest of stakes. We return to that bar in Detroit and Darwin Rocher's dilemma. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Stripe. Stripe is built for whatever comes next, because as your business scales, so does the complexity of fraud. New customers, new markets, new AI-driven attack patterns. Stripe Radar protects your business as it scales with the scale of the Stripe network. The more payments Stripe sees, the smarter its AI gets at detecting these patterns as they emerge. Stripe's network is so vast, it has seen $1.9 trillion in payment volume across millions of global businesses. In fact, when a card is used, there's a 90% chance 92% chance the Stripe network has seen it before. All of this means fraudulent patterns across payments, accounts, and customer abuse can be detected, flagged, or blocked more easily, based on the rules you set up, of course. Blocking bad actors, welcoming good customers, keeping more of your revenue your revenue. Learn more about fighting fraud with Stripe at stripe.com/radar. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Instagram. Instagram Teen Accounts' automatic protections limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Teens are automatically placed into Teen Accounts. Teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of those settings to be less strict. Learn more about Teen Accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online Working as a dedicated Fidelity advisor, I always ask, what's important to you? I'll look at those priorities and goals alongside your full financial picture to build a comprehensive plan designed to help grow and protect your wealth. With proactive portfolio insights and an eye on taxes, I'm here to help you make the most of your money. I'm Laura Macklin.

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I'm Alex Wells, and I'm a dedicated Fidelity advisor. Learn more at fidelity.com/wealth. Investment minimums apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC, member NYSE SIPC. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. The events that change our lives don't always look monumental from the outside. To a stranger who might have seen Darwin and his colleagues in that dive bar, They probably looked like 4 friends drinking beer, talking about life. But as his fellow police officers asked him to help them carry out a crime— break into a house and steal $1 million— Darwin felt his head spin.

It was just one of those things that regardless if I said yes or no, now, you know, I still have to have a relationship with these officers. I got to get in the scout car with them 2 days from now.

As he made his way home, Darwin thought about the decision he had to make. No answer he landed on felt good. If he went along with the plan, he'd be helping perpetrate an injustice, the kind of injustice he had sworn an oath to prevent. But if he turned on his buddies, turned them in, Darwin knew he would feel like he had betrayed them. If he got them convicted, He would feel responsible for taking their lives away, for creating that empty chair at the dinner table that their wives, girlfriends, and kids would have to look at each night. When he got home, Darwin was distraught. He called someone he trusted and asked her to come over.

And so I told her what happened, and she said, well, you know, what are you going to do? You know, she kind of advised me, well, just don't say anything. And I said, well, no, I can't do that because I have to put myself in the situation of that person in that house, and allowing something bad to happen to him for something that I had prior knowledge of, it just couldn't resonate with me. I just could not wrap my head around doing that.

As they talked, it became clear to Darwin which moral choice felt better to him and which one felt worse. As much as loyalty to his friends mattered, As much as it broke his heart to turn away from them, he knew he could not take part in the crime. And he could not sit idly by as the bookie was robbed and maybe killed.

I reached out to the chief of police, the only person I knew that, you know, that I felt that I could have trusted with this information. Told him what had happened, told him what I knew. And he said, okay, well, stand by the phone. Someone will be calling you.

A short while later, Darwin got a call from the FBI. They arranged to meet at a park the next day.

They brought me in, and they, they kind of said, okay, well, walk us through what happened.

With a knot in his stomach, Darwin told them everything. When he was done, they gave him a choice.

They pretty much directly said, hey, do you want to participate in helping catching these guys, or do you just want to give us the information and go about your life.

Darwin felt that if he had made the choice to come down on the side of justice, he had to take the plunge. If he didn't, and his fellow officers got off scot-free, showing up at work as usual, he would have to quit.

If I don't participate in this, if I don't see it through, if I don't get this to conviction, they may walk. They may be found not guilty. So all my dreams and aspirations are gone. Everything I went to college for, Everything I believed in, serving the community, serving the citizens of Detroit, that is done if they don't go to jail. And at this point, I had to go where the odds are more favorable for me and my career, my name, my family, my belief systems. And I said, well, I'm here to help.

So the thing that I just want to spend a moment talking about is that I feel like for many people, this would have been a difficult decision, you know, because again, you're not just reporting on something that you saw happen. You're reporting on people who you work with, people who are your friends, people who know your kid, you know, people who looked out for you, people who have— you know, you look up to. I would think for most people, there would be at least a moment of emotional conflict where you're deciding what the right thing is to do.

Emotional conflict is an understatement. This was gut-wrenching. It was very painful to make that decision. And, you know, I love these guys. I mean, we really shared a lot of time together. It was very emotionally draining and very traumatic for me to go through that. Those days after that initial contact with them and subsequent contact with the FBI and Internal Affairs were probably one of the darkest days Darwin kept going to work each day, except now he was consumed with anxiety. I had to, you know, actually work with the authorities and continue my day-to-day activities as nothing's changed. Because anything— if I changed anything, a day off or left work early or anything like that, it could have possibly alerted them that, you know, something's wrong. Darwin was so afraid of the authorities Something is afoot. So on the outside, I appeared normal, but on the inside, I was really, like, shattered in pieces and conflicted.

Instead of blurting out that he'd betrayed them, that the FBI was following their every move, Darwin met up with his colleagues. He told them he was in, fully in. They would do drive-bys of the house, trying to figure out the best way to get in. They started gathering supplies and weapons. Throughout all of this, Darwin either wore a wire or wrote extensive notes that he'd pass along to the FBI. Now, besides the conflict he felt as a whistleblower, Darwin realized how terrifying it was to be an informant.

I was in an altered state. I was in one of those where I had to really step outside myself who I was and kind of get into almost a role play where I had to, you know, pretend that I was an active participant. I had to pretend that I was, you know, enthusiastic about conducting this criminal activity, you know, while at the same time always paranoid, always emotionally on edge.

He became hypervigilant and suffered frequent panic attacks. And then one cold afternoon, Darwin had just come off a lunch break when a coworker showed him the Detroit Free Press. Plastered across the front page was this headline: Cops Planned Heist. 3 Detroit police officers charged with plot.

And so that's how I found out that they had actually made the arrest earlier that morning.

It's typical for the FBI to withhold information from informants about the progress of an investigation. They don't want informants to get cold feet and warn the group they've been investigating. Darwin knew this, and he tried to prepare himself for the moment it all came out. It was still a shock, but nothing compared to what came in the weeks and months that followed. That's because the tension between loyalty and honesty was not just a question to be resolved in Darwin's heart. His community was weighing the very same questions. Was Darwyn Roshea a hero or a traitor?

I would get calls, we're going to kill you, you're not going to make it to trial. And the calls were frequent throughout the day or night. I actually had a security detail assigned to my home just based upon those threats. After a while, The death threats, they became so prevalent. It was just like, just do it. Stop calling. Just, you know, just do it. And one thing I always said is just I would not want to be shot in the face or the head so I can have an open casket funeral. And that was my only thing. And so it was very— it was very trying, very traumatic.

The pressure slowly mounted on everyone in Darwin's life. At one point, the house where his ex-girlfriend and 12-year-old daughter lived was firebombed. Thankfully, Darwin's ex and daughter came away from the incident physically unharmed. But knowing that his decision to blow the whistle had put his child in jeopardy pushed Darwin over the edge.

I had reached my emotional Bottom, I was isolated. I don't have the ability to go to the store without worrying if someone's going to come up on me and take my life away, or answer the phone without fearing that someone is going to put me in that emotional state of fear and discomfort, or the ability just to have friends over and just to say hi. Because if someone's trying to kill you, or someone has threatened to kill you. It's not a lot of people that want to be around you.

Darwin was transferred to desk duty. While many of his colleagues supported him and held him up as a model of good policing, others were angry about his decision. This is a common experience for many whistleblowers. The people for whom the moral foundation of honesty and justice is paramount will view your actions in one way. The people for whom loyalty is a core moral foundation will see the same actions very differently. As the trial grew nearer, Darwin felt like he was in a race, a race for his life.

We always talk about, you know, crossing the finish line, but very seldom do we talk about the work that goes after you cross the finish line. And in this situation, you know, the hard work was just to survive, emotionally survive this, and hopefully stand alive. to participate in trial and testify against the actions that they did. And so I just got up every day and treated each day as if it was my last. And that was the mindset I had to have in order just to kind of, you know, stay sane, for lack of a better word.

Darwin made it to the trial alive. He testified against his former friends in court and told the truth. about what he'd heard and witnessed. The 3 men were found guilty, although the conviction of one officer was overturned on appeal. All served some prison time. Given that the events in this story happened decades ago, and the other cops either served their time or, in one case, had his conviction overturned, we have chosen not to name them in this story. After the trial, Darwin's life moved on. The threats subsided. He was taken off desk duty and went back to patrolling the streets of Detroit. He retired in early 2022 as a lieutenant. There are people who still disagree with the choice he made. He still occasionally hears people refer to him as a snitch. But Darwin says he'd make the same decision again if he had to, even with all the pain it caused.

I mean, if you don't stand up for what is right and what is just and your own moral beliefs, then how do we change society? We have a society right now that's so willing to kind of duck into the shadows and hope that someone else will handle it. And that problem causes a lot of issues, you know, in our lives.

When we're forced to choose between loyalty and honesty, it can feel agonizing. Yet psychologist Adam Waits says there is a way to reduce the agony, at least in an organizational context. The way to do that is by reframing the underlying tension between loyalty and honesty.

When we talk about How to overcome the tension between, well, doing the just thing versus being loyal to my group. The answer we don't try to put forth is, well, you should just forget about loyalty. I mean, first of all, it's impossible. Loyalty is sort of baked in all of us. It's part of human nature to want to be loyal. But loyalty is something that I think can be reframed as loyalty to your fellow human beings, or loyalty to the greater good, or loyalty to society. And so there's a way to, I think, blow the whistle, which might be calling out someone in your circle or your organization for wrongdoing while still feeling a sense of loyalty. For some people, the most loyal thing you can do for your organizations is call out bad behavior. when you see it. And I wish more organizations and CEOs put forth that message, which would be something along the lines of, part of what it means to be a good citizen is we call each other out. You know, you don't take it personally, but we call out bad behavior. And, you know, I think that's a way to communicate a loyalistic message without curbing people's desire to do the right thing and blow the whistle.

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. This week, we turn over our Unsung Heroes segment to a listener with an episode from our sister podcast, My Unsung Hero. Today's story comes from Veeg Berry. Veeg has mild cerebral palsy. Because of the disease, she occasionally trips and falls. One day in 2017, She was in Washington, D.C., for an important meeting.

That morning in June, it was bright and beautiful. I felt very confident in what I was wearing. I was walking along L Street toward my meeting, and without warning, I fell. I fell badly. I fell on my face. My glasses cut into my eyelid. My cheeks were torn up. I was bleeding. All I wanted to do was jump up and grab my glasses and avoid any further embarrassment. I heard a voice from the man I had noticed earlier standing in a garage. I thought he was a garage attendant. He ran over to me and picked me off the sidewalk, and he walked me rushed me, actually, into a building and down an office hallway. And I heard him yelling, Mary, Mary, come! It's an emergency!

Vij later found out the man's name was Kevin.

And he rushed me into a bathroom, and Mary appeared. And Mary was the building concierge. Mary took over, and Kevin ran for a first aid kit. And Mary just automatically, even though I had left a trail of blood, she took over washing me, washing my face, washing my hair, trying to get the blood off my clothes, soothing me. I was babbling. I was so embarrassed. But more than that, I was deeply demoralized that this had happened to me yet again. And at what an awful moment. I needed to be somewhere very important, and yet here I was, a mess. What would have happened had they not picked me off the sidewalk? And here she was, trying to bandage me to make me look somewhat presentable and encourage me that it was going to be all right. Between the two of them, Kevin and Mary, they put me together and I was mildly presentable. They didn't think about cleaning up the hallway first. They thought about me.

In the end, Vij made it to her meeting. Afterwards, she wrote a letter about Kevin and Mary's actions and sent it to Mary's boss, a woman named Linda.

She told me I made her day. But it was uplifting to me just to write that letter as it is, to make this recording right now and remember the kindness and the real care and the love that was expressed by those 2 people. Linda told me that she put my letter in the top concierge annual employee awards file for Mary, and I certainly hope Mary got that award that year.

Episodes like the one we brought you today take months of research, writing, and fact-checking. If you enjoyed today's episode, please consider making a contribution to support our work. You can do so at support.hiddenbrain.org. Again, that's support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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