My acting that way will be influenced by exactly what I am caught up in. There’s a lot of room between a riot and the Holocaust. I like to think my morals would overcome my reason before I went too far down the line. But I don’t assume everyone has the same stops along the way.

Either way, the decision to join in for personal safety is an exceptionally rational decision. Much more rational than clinging to one’s moral beliefs without regard to circumstance, whatever they might be. Morals are awesome and we should all have them, with luck similar ones. Morals one sticks to in the clutch can be a spiritual anchor and certainly demonstrate a profound form of courage. But they aren’t the same as rational decision-making.

And that’s actually pretty closely related to the boys’ status problem that Granovetter cites. Or at least it’s the version of it that involves just a few seconds of conscious choice.

A larger implication is for society to stop assuming that we know what the moral beliefs of all our members might be or that they are being honestly described when asked for. Plenty of people will describe their moral thresholds falsely. Plenty of others may think they are being honest in describing them but haven’t given much thought to what conditions might change their outlook, or at least their actions.

And I’m not sure your average school shooter was always asked in advance what he thought was right or wrong. Why should we assume that they all thought it was wrong to kill people they disliked, but something changed their minds? Maybe they always thought it would be acceptable to do that. The threshold they passed may not have been moral so much as merely their max tolerance for whatever irritated them about their fellows.

In other words, why are we to blithely assume that every crime involves good people with the same morals as those doing the research, who suddenly adopted new morals? Maybe these were always their morals.

But, hey, at least those evil old-school chemistry sets have been banned.