by Bruce Hood
Figure 7: Asch test of compliance. Which line (A, B or C) matches the test line?
The Lucifer Effect
Do you consider your self evil? Could you inflict pain and suffering on another human being or a defenceless animal for that matter? Consider how likely it is that you would do any of the following:
• Electrocute a fellow human until they were dead
• Torture a puppy
• Administer a lethal dose
• Strip-search a co-worker and make them perform a sex act on another worker
Most readers are appalled by such suggestions. However, the Stanford psychologist Phil Zimbardo forces us to think again in his recent book, The Lucifer Effect,32 about how to make good people become evil by putting them in toxic situations that generate a downward spiral into degradation. Zimbardo convincingly argues that all of us are capable of doing the despicable deeds in this list, even though none of us thinks we ever would. This is because we believe that we are essentially good and that only bad people do bad things. Our whole legal system is based on this assumption that individuals are responsible for their own moral choices. But Zimbardo argues that the situations we can find our selves in and the influence of those around us determine how we behave and treat others. If we believe our self illusion has a core morality then it is one that is at the mercy of those around us.
Zimbardo, who rather resembles a popular portrayal of Lucifer with his goatee, is known for his infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, where he investigated the consequences of simulating an incarceration scenario using ordinary students playing cops and robbers. It was to be a two-week study of the effects of role-playing in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, which had been turned into a makeshift prison. Like Tajfels’s Bristol schoolboy study, on the flip of a coin, the volunteers were divided. Half of the student volunteers were to be the guards and the other half were to be their prisoners, each earning $15 a day for fourteen days. Most thought it would be easy money to loaf around for a couple of weeks. However, what happened next shocked everyone involved and has left a legacy in the literature on the psychology of evil that now explains many unbelievable examples of human cruelty.
To simulate authenticity, the prisoners were arrested on a Sunday by real policemen, handcuffed, blindfolded and taken to the prison where they were stripped and put in smocks without underwear. This was only the beginning of the humiliation. Then the ‘guards’ – uniformed fellow students wearing mirror shades – met them. When they wanted to go to the toilet down the hall, the inmates were led out with bags on their heads. Their guards gave them a long list of rules that they had to memorize and failure to do so led to punishment. Within a very short time, things began to deteriorate. Even though they had never been instructed to harm the inmates, the guards began to spontaneously torment and torture the inmates. In this authoritarian atmosphere, the inmates became psychologically distressed while their guards were getting increasingly out of control.
From a scientific perspective, this was exhilarating. Even though everyone involved knew the set-up was not real, the situation was creating real cruelty and suffering. Thrilled by the speed and ease at which morality seemed to be deteriorating, Zimbardo pushed on, largely as the scientist overseeing the project but also as his role as the Superintendent in charge of the prison. He was becoming a player immersed in his own fantasy story.
His girlfriend at the time, another psychology professor, Christina Maslach, visited to see how the experiment was progressing and was shocked by what she observed. She told Zimbardo, ‘What you’re doing to those boys is a terrible thing!’ A heated row between the lovers ensued and she would later recall, ‘Phil seemed so different from the man I thought I knew. He was not the same man that I had come to love.’ Zimbardo had lost the plot. He seemed unable to see what cruelty he had created. After six days, largely at the bequest of Christina, he terminated the experiment. He married her the following year.
For the next forty years, the Stanford Prison Experiment has remained a controversial study both in terms of the ethics of putting people in this situation as well as the interpretation.33 Zimbardo thinks that the devil is in the deindividuation whereas others claim that all that was demonstrated was over-enthusiastic role-playing. That may be true to some extent. Maybe some of the students had watched too many prison movies like Cool Hand Luke where the guards also wore the same mirrored sunglasses and behaved sadistically.34 One of the student guards even adopted a Southern American accent indicating a well-formulated stereotype of the typical correctional officer. They behaved as they thought the officers and prisoners should. But even if it was all acting, one is still left wondering what is the difference between role-playing and reality. What does it mean to say: that I may act in a terrible way but that’s not the way I really am? Who is the real me, or self?
The Man in the White Coat
Some questioned the authenticity of the Stanford Prison Experiment. What would happen in a real situation of authority? This is where the work of Stanley Milgram is so relevant. Milgram was one of Solomon Asch’s research assistants, and in the early 1960s he wanted to take his mentor’s work further. In what has become one of the most notorious psychology studies, Milgram demonstrated the power of authority when compliance becomes blind obedience.35
It began with a simple advertisement in which participants were asked to volunteer and would be paid $4 an hour to take part in an experiment on learning and punishment to be conducted at prestigious Yale University. When each of the volunteers arrived at the laboratory, they met with the experimenter, wearing a white lab coat, and another middle-aged man, who was introduced as another participant but who was actually a trained actor. After a supposedly random decision, the experimenter explained that the volunteer would play the role of teacher and the actor would play the role of learner. The learner was led off to another room and it was explained that the teacher would read words to the learner over an intercom. The learner would then repeat the words back to the teacher. If the learner made a mistake, the teacher would press a button that delivered an electric shock to the learner in the other room. There were thirty levels of shock rising in 15-volt increments from an initial 15 volts to 450 volts. Each switch had the level and a description of the shock, ranging from ‘mild’ at the start, through the tenth level (150 volts), ‘strong’; thirteenth level (195 volts), ‘very strong’; seventeenth level (255 volts), ‘intense’; twenty-first level (315 volts), ‘extremely intense’; twenty-fifth level (375 volts), ‘danger, severe shock’. The final two levels of 435 and 450 volts had no label other than an ominous ‘XXX’. To give them an idea of what it felt like, the participant teacher was given a taste of the third level (45 volts), which induced a very real, tingly pain.
Initially the experiment began fairly well as the learner repeated back the correct answers. However, when the learner began to make errors, the teacher was instructed by the man in the white coat to administer punishment shocks. Of course, the actor in the next room was not really receiving any shocks but duly gave a more and more distressing performance as the intensity of the punishment shocks increased. At first, he started to complain that the shocks hurt. Then they were painful. As the punishment voltages increased, so did the intensity of the screams. Soon the learner was pleading with the teacher and telling him that he had a heart condition. Many of the participants protested that they could not go on but the man in the white coat replied impassively, ‘Please continue.’ At this point the teachers were clearly stressed, shaking and sweating, and yet they went on. Even after the intercom went silent and they reached the twentieth level of 300 volts, they were told that the learner’s failure to answer the question was an error and that the teacher must proceed with the punishment.
What do you think you would do in such a situation? Before Milgram had started his study, he consulted a panel of forty psychiatrists and asked what they predicted that members of the public would do. As experts on human psy
chology, they agreed that fewer than one in 100 participants would go all the way to the end. How wrong could they be? It turned out that two out of every three of the participants in Milgram’s shocking study went all the way to the end at 450 volts. They were prepared to kill another human being at the request of the man in the white coat.
Maybe the participants knew that this was all a trick and that no one was being hurt. I doubt it. I have watched the early recordings of this study and it is fairly disturbing viewing as the teachers are clearly distressed as they become resigned to administering the lethal shocks. In a later study that would never get ethical approval today, researchers conducted the almost identical experiment using puppies punished with real electric shocks.36 This time there was no charade. The animals were clearly suffering (although they were not receiving lethal shocks and the voltages were way below the descriptions the teachers thought they were administering). Half of the male teachers went all the way to the maximum punishment and, surprisingly, all of the female teacher participants obeyed the order to give the maximum shocks.
The authority figure does not even have to be in the room. In another study with real nurses in a hospital,37 the participants received a telephone call from an unknown doctor who asked them to administer a 20-millilitre dose of a drug, ‘Astrogen’, to a patient that he was on his way to visit. The label on the drug indicated that 5 millilitres was a normal dose and it should not exceed 10 millilitres. All but one of twenty-two nurses knowingly gave the dose that was double the safety limit. This is a very old study and guidelines have changed over the years to prevent exactly this sort of blind obedience operating, but Zimbardo documents more recent examples where people working in hierarchical organizations succumb to the pressure of their superiors even when they know that what is requested is wrong.
Outside of the workplace, the power of authority is most evident in law enforcement. Whenever we have been pulled over by men in uniforms, most of us become obedient. I know I do. In an incredible account of blind obedience, Zimbardo describes how he served as an expert witness in one case of a spate of sixty sexual assaults that had taken place in fast-food chains across the United States during the late 1990s and early 2000s. In a typical scam, the caller asked to speak to the assistant manager and then informed him that he was a police officer and that one of the recent employees had been stealing money and concealing drugs. The assistant manager was asked to cooperate by restraining the suspect employee and performing a strip search while the police made their way to the restaurant. Of course, this was not a real police request but a pervert who wanted the manager to describe the intimate search in detail into the phone. In the case with which Zimbardo was involved, a terrified eighteen-year-old female employee was stripped naked and then commanded to perform oral sex with another male co-worker, simply because they were told to so by an anonymous phone caller who they believed was ‘the law’.38
The Banality of Evil
Much of the research on compliance and obedience was conducted in a period of history still recovering from the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps. Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo were Americans of Jewish descent who wanted to know how the Holocaust could ever have taken place. It was a question to which the world wanted the answer as well. Even today, we still ask the same questions. How can ordinary people perform such extraordinarily cruel acts on other people?
Perhaps the Milgram experiments were products of the era – when authoritarianism ruled the day. We are much more liberated today and wary of the corrupting power of authority in the post-Watergate years. However, in 2007, the ABC News Primetime TV show in the US decided to recreate the Milgram study to see whether a sample of forty men and women would go as far as to administer the highest level of shock.39 Again two-thirds of them obeyed a man in the white coat and went all the way to the end of the dial. We are fooling our selves if we believe we can resist the influence of others. We can all become the instruments of torture.
We still question how people can be so evil whenever we hear of another example of human atrocity inflicted on fellow human beings around the globe. One example that was so surprising was the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by US professional soldiers. In 2004, images of naked male Iraqi detainees piled high on top of each other in a human pyramid were circulated around the world’s press. Alongside their victims, grinning American guards posed, with smiling faces and thumbs up gestures, for trophy photographs. The images also showed the psychological torture of hooded detainees balanced on boxes with outstretched arms, who were told that, if they fell, they would be electrocuted with the dummy wires attached to their fingers. The pictures bore a shocking resemblance to those of hooded prisoners in Zimbardo’s prison experiment. Others detainees were forced to wear women’s clothing or simulate fellatio with other male prisoners. All of these images showed that Abu Ghraib prison, originally used by Saddam Hussein to torture his opponents, continued with the tradition of sadistic human behaviour under the occupation of the coalition’s liberating Army.
At first, US Army generals dismissed the scandal as the work of a few ‘bad apples’ – disturbed sadists who had managed to infiltrate the honourable corp. In particular, the most upsetting images were of a young female guard, Private Lynndie England, who was photographed grinning as she led a naked male prisoner around in a dog-collar. There was nothing out of the ordinary about Lynndie England’s upbringing to suggest that she was a sadist. One of her ex-teachers described her as ‘invisible’. If anything, it appears that Lynndie England was just a simple woman who followed others and was under the influence of her lover, Charles Garner, who instigated the abuse and took many of the photographs. But it is the cherub-like smiling face of twenty-one-year-old England, and not Garner’s, that will forever be associated with the atrocities.40
This is probably the most disturbing thing about evil. When the philosopher Hannah Arendt was commissioned by the New Yorker to cover the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s, she reported that the trouble with Eichmann and his ilk was that they were neither perverted nor sadistic, but simply ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’. Seemingly ordinary people had committed extraordinary crimes. It was as if, as she called it, the ‘banality of evil’ was proof that the self had capitulated to the cruelty that war and conflicts engender and that people were generally incapable of resisting the will of others.41
The Human Chameleon
When you consider the power of groups in these studies, it seems unlikely that anyone was totally unaware of their behaviour in the conformity and obedience experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. People were also probably aware of their actions in the real-life examples of blind obedience described by Zimbardo. They simply don’t feel responsible for their actions. They may still believe in their self illusion, that they could do otherwise should they wish, but rather they prefer to suspend their decision-making in order to fit in with others or obey authority figures. It’s not a pleasant realization, but then we can always justify it later by weighing up what is in our best interests in the long term. It is our old friend cognitive dissonance, again.
Sometimes our behaviour can also be hijacked unknowingly by the influence of those around us. This is when the self is covertly manipulated. In these situations we are not even aware that we are being shaped by social influences. For example, Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis recalls the time when he and a few members of the Nijmegen Psychology Department went to watch a soccer match.42 On their walk to the stadium, the academics behaving calmly and orderly were soon surrounded by hundreds of yelling and shouting soccer fans and hooligans. At that point something odd happened. One of academics saw an empty beer can and, in what seemed to be an impulsive act, he kicked it violently as far away as possible. For a moment, he stood there, transfixed and aghast at what he had just done. He was no longer an individual – he had become like the crowd around him.
This change in behaviour to match others around us is known as the �
�chameleon effect’43 after the exotic lizard that can change its skin colour to blend in with its surroundings. It is not a deliberate effort to change but rather reflects the automatic way that we mimic others around us. This can be anything from simple postures, expressions and gestures to more complicated patterns of behaviour such as speech or moods. Simply the way we move about can be influenced by others without us even being really aware. The brain’s mirroring system that is activated during our own movements that can also be triggered by the goal-directed actions of another when we observe them performing the same goal. These mirror neurons provide a convenient way of mapping the behaviour of others directly into our own brains through a process much like resonance. It’s like when you are in a guitar salesroom and strike the ‘G’ string loudly enough on one guitar, all the other ‘G’ strings on all the other guitars will eventually vibrate in synchrony.