Why doesn’t anyone go for the balls in street fights?
I derive a lot of pleasure from watching street fights (on YouTube, obviously, not live fights in the streets). So I’ve watched a lot of them. I also enjoy professional martial arts, but street fights have an incomparable raw quality to them, a feeling that anything is possible. Yet if you watch enough of them, you will notice it’s not really true that anything is possible. For an illegal activity, street fighting is generally very rule-bound.
For instance, a kick in the balls is what most people think of as an effective blow to incapacitate an opponent. But you rarely see anyone trying it in street fights. As a matter of fact, you seldom see any kind of kicking whatsoever, and it’s even rarer to see any nasty moves like bites, scratches, hair pulls, or eye gouges. What you see is mostly ugly swing punches and maybe some grappling. How could that be?
A common explanation found on the internet is that groin kicks are not as effective or easy to land as they seem. I don't find this to be very convincing. I mean, that may be true, but that wouldn’t explain why people don’t even try them. All that is needed for someone to try a groin kick is for the person to believe that it would end the fight, and most people seem to believe so.
(You could argue here that due to selection bias most fights that I end up watching are fought by experienced fighters, who know better than to try a kick in the balls. Although this is partially true, if you go deep enough on the YouTube rabbit hole you will see lots of videos of clearly inexperienced fighters who also don’t aim for the crotch.)
But if you pay attention to the people claiming the above-mentioned reasons, you will notice that they also say something else. On Reddit, user jayman419 says:
… And if you do land the kick, and you don't put them down, all you've done is pissed them off and escalated things even further. Now it's not just a fight, you're a ballkicker.
That’s interesting. On Quora, Timothy Singleton (suggestive name) says:
I think it hurts a guy's ego to fight that way. It is seen by most people as cowardly and unfair.
Finally, Hoo-doo writes in a forum discussion on NeoGAF:
Man's got to have a code.
There are several responses similar to these. For people engaged in illegal, dangerous activities, street fighters seem to be too worried about things like honor, unfairness, or being called a ballkicker.
Honor codes
As a kid, I always found pitched battles – when opposing armies choose a time and place to meet, then go there and patiently wait for the time to engage in warfare, like in medieval movies – to be puzzling. Why would anyone respect the arrangement? It's a war, dammit. It was as if the kings were saying: “I can excuse brutal murder and torture, but I draw the line at not respecting appointments.” My recurrent thinking was: if I were a king in medieval Europe, I’d be the greatest there was. I’d arrange pitched battles and then I would just go about killing everyone independently of what was arranged. Sounded like a great plan.
Turns out it’s not. In your first battle, it works superbly: the opposing army believes in your word and is completely destroyed by an unexpected attack. Maybe in the second or third battle you still manage to fool some dumb kings. But other armies quickly catch on, and the next time you pitch a battle, no one believes you. You start to get known around the lands as a man with no honor, something like “Oh here he comes, the ballkicker king.”
This simple model illustrates how reputation systems or honor codes emerge. If there is a single interaction between two persons or groups, neither will care about the other, and thus have no reason to follow rules or cooperate in any way. But in repeated interactions, such as medieval battles, going against the rules may work once or twice, but it sucks for you in the long run.
More interestingly, a system emerges to enforce those rules independently of any agents’ self-interest. Yes, a rational agent would understand it’s not in their best interest to ignore battle arrangements, but people may not always be rational, or they may want to do it for some other reason. Moreover, although it sounds great to ignore rules or honor in favor of your own army, it’s awful when it’s the opposing king who has the same idea. So it would be better for everyone if there was some kind of social rule like “When you see a king who does not respect the rules of pitched battles, call him a ballkicker.” That guarantees that it’s not only repeated interactions that are keeping you from betraying everyone, but also the social reprobation of being considered a traitor. To the surprise of no one except probably economists, social mores can be a much more powerful tool for shaping behavior than rational arguments.
Thank you for not smoking on TV
One thing you may notice in the pitched battle example is how the honor code limits what a king can do – obviously; this is the whole point of rules. Yet this is very good for the kings: yes, it limits what they can do in the short run, but in the long run, it prevents the situation from becoming a dog-eat-dog world where kings just stab each other in the back. It’s still warfare, it’s nasty, but it has rules. Well, that sounds better than wars with no rules, right?
This also shows that the average libertarian knee-jerk reaction to any regulation – “regulation limits people’s freedom to do things and people only do things that are good for them, therefore regulation is bad” – doesn’t make that much sense, at least not on utilitarian terms. After all, some laws are just ways to formalize “honor codes” and other cooperation-producing institutions.
A curious example is the ban on TV ads for tobacco products by the US government in the 1960s. If you are a cigarette company, that sounds really bad: you make money by selling cigarettes and ads allow you to sell more cigarettes, so banning them is bad for business.
But then you realize your competitors won’t be able to display ads either!
Imagine that before the ban there were two major cigarette companies, each with roughly 50 percent of the market. Then each spends millions and millions of dollars in ads… and both end up with 50 percent of the market anyway. This sucks. You spend millions of dollars and accomplish nothing in market share. Maybe one of the companies decides to spend even more on ads and ends up getting 60 percent of the market… but then the competitor has a strong incentive to also spend extra to balance out the difference. Both end worse off, having spent millions and achieved nothing.
Then the US government comes with all its regulatory wisdom and prohibits ads. First you are pissed, and tobacco lobbyists go full “muh freedom” mode trying to repeal the ban with clever libertarian arguments that appeal to the American mindset. After a few months, however, cigarette companies start to see that nothing has changed much. They haven’t lost market share and, “Hey, look at this, we are saving millions of dollars in ads!”
Of course things are not that simple. For one, with no ads on TV, it becomes harder to convert new customers, people who have never smoked before. Besides, this works for cigarettes because they are pretty much a commodity. In markets in which a company can really differentiate itself, ads help them show how different they are (think Apple), and may be beneficial overall. Still, the cigarette ban helps illustrate the terrible logic of competition, where sometimes selfish behavior leaves everyone worse off.
Target’s Price Match Guarantee
Most of the major retailers have a low price guarantee policy. For instance, Target’s Price Match Guarantee assures you that if you find a lower price in a competitor within 14 days of your purchase, they will reimburse you the difference. On the surface, this seems like a simple marketing gimmick: consumers like low prices, so they’ll prefer shopping at Target where they can guarantee they will always get the best deals.
From a strategy perspective, however, price match policies are much more powerful than that. Imagine that another retailer, say Walmart, decides to lower its prices in an attempt to outsell Target. Due to its price match policy, Target will immediately have to lower its prices as well. Now both Walmart and Target are selling their products at lower price points, but neither gets a larger share of the market because well, both are asking the same price. Walmart doesn’t gain anything and both stores end up worse off.
So low price guarantees are as much market gimmicks as they are credible threats to competitors: “If you lower your prices, I will too, and it will suck for both of us.” No wonder both Target and Walmart have price match policies in real life, as do Best Buy, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Staples, and many others. At the end of the day, price match guarantees end up being bad for consumers, because they allow stores to collude in silence, by making everyone afraid of lowering prices. If retailers explicitly agreed to maintain high prices, it would be considered a cartel, which is illegal. Price match guarantees offer retailers a neat and pretty legal way of doing the same thing.
By the way, by implementing policies like this, retailers end up with fewer options, just like the medieval kings and the tobacco companies, because now they have committed to always lower prices. Yet this commitment is precisely what makes their threat credible, thus discouraging competitors from offering discounts.
What was this essay about anyway?
Oh yes, kicks in the groin in street fights. I hope you have realized by now that the logic I’ve been describing applies to a whole range of conflicts and interactions, and street fighting is no exception. A street fight is like a repeated interaction, even if it’s the only fight you will ever engage in, because you get multiple attempts to attack your opponent, and similarly, they get multiple attempts to attack you. If you decide to aim for the balls, there is a high chance, even if you land it, that it’s not going to end the fight. But now you’ve expanded the realm of what’s permissible, you’ve opened the Box of Nasty Moves. Now, kicks in the balls are okay in this fight. Your opponent will certainly try them, and may even try some nastier stuff if they get really pissed with your dishonor.
Calling people ballkickers or saying that aiming for the crotch is against “street rules” or “men’s code” or whatever is just a way of assuring an agreement that both parties can follow. In fact, you don’t even have to say anything: as long as neither fighter goes for the balls, the other won’t too. It’s simple self-preservation: you don’t get to attempt groin kicks, but you also don’t get them attempted against you. That sounds better than boundless street fighting, right?
In case it’s not clear yet, this essay is not actually about kicking people in the balls but rather about nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons are the groin kicks of international warfare: they hurt a lot, so everyone wants to use them, but they hurt so much no one wants to risk it being used on them.
What do you do, then? Well, first you establish a credible threat that if someone deploys a nuclear weapon against you, you will deploy one against them. This is known as the mutual assured destruction doctrine in military strategy. If they bomb you, you bomb them. Then you employ the international relations equivalent of shaming people and calling them names: the international community will sanction and condemn any country that even thinks about using nuclear weapons.
Does this guarantee no one will ever use nuclear weapons again? Not really. But it’s all we have for now and it has worked well so far. In the end, Putin just doesn’t want to be considered a ballkicker.
Thanks to Felipe Germanos and William Radaic for reading drafts of this.