A Mind of Its Own

by Cordelia Fine

  Although such denial is not normally quite so transparent, I am not alone in this cowardly practice. The myriad injustices of the world are simply too much for our delicate psyches. Faced with some wretched prey of fate, we struggle against the conclusion that life is savagely, mercilessly unfair. If it is impossible, too difficult or too much trouble to fight for a victim’s wrong to be righted, to recompense them for their suffering or to relieve them of their burden, then we succumb to another, easier strategy. We persuade ourselves that they have brought their misfortune onto themselves. So strong is our need to believe in a just world (since otherwise we, too – through no fault of our own – might lose our job, our home, our health, our sanity, our child), that we yield to the more comfortable delusion that bad things happen to bad people.

  Evidence of our stubborn belief in a just world comes in part from a series of experiments which cleverly expose how our feelings towards people alter, for the worse, when we are forced to watch them suffer. In this devious experimental set-up, several volunteers are ushered into an auditorium. They are told that they will watch on CCTV a fellow volunteer in a learning experiment. Their task is to rate her behavioural cues. The researcher, Dr Stewart, arrives and leads her experimentee from the room. As they make their way out, Dr Stewart comments that this session’s learning experiment will involve strong electric shocks as punishment for errors on the learning task. The unfortunate student is led from the room like a lamb to the slaughter, and shortly afterwards the observers see on the TV screen the volunteer being attached to the electrodes. By way of helping her to learn pairs of words she is shocked, painfully, every time she makes a mistake.

  As you have guessed already, the unlucky volunteer is in fact a stooge; and the CCTV image of the learning experiment is a previously recorded tape. The researchers are not really interested in the learner’s behavioural cues at all. That’s simply a cover story both to explain why the observers have to watch someone in pain, and to make the observers somewhat complicit in the ethically dubious research. Before the observers watch the tape, the experimenter manipulates what they think will happen to the victim after the first round of electric shocks. For example, the observers might be told that the victim will go on to receive (in increasingly tolerable scenarios), nothing, a modest payment, or a generous payment for her participation in the experiment. But in a different, even more unpleasant version of the ruse, the observers might be told that the poor victim will receive yet more shocks in a second stage of the learning experiment. And in the ‘martyr’ script of the cover story, the observers learn that the shocked student will be suffering so that they might gain. On hearing that she is going to be electrocuted, the stooge nervously proclaims that she is terrified by the idea, and could she please withdraw from the experiment. But the steely Dr Stewart admonishes her, pointing out that, if she backs out, all the students who are supposed to be observing her won’t receive their reward for taking part in the experiment. Reluctantly, the martyred victim agrees to carry on for the sake of the observers.

  After watching the film of the learning experiment (an obviously distressing experience for those looking on, who jerk in sympathy with the writhings of the stooge), the observers are asked to rate the victim’s personality. They have all seen exactly the same tape of her participating in the learning experiment. Yet their perception of what kind of person she is turns out to be surprisingly sensitive to what they think will happen to her next. Remarkably – and horribly – the less monetary compensation the observers think that the victim will receive for her suffering (in other words, the more unfair the experiment), the more they dislike her. Disparaged even more is the woman whom people think will go on to suffer more with a further bout of electric shocks. And what of the martyr, who selflessly sacrificed herself in order to benefit others? She, I am afraid to say, is the most despised of all.

  The conclusion of this research – that a person’s misfortune is compounded by the commensurately undeserved censure they attract – is chilling indeed. Nor do we have to search our souls too deeply to find examples that fit suspiciously well with the belief in a just world hypothesis. Why, after Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans, were so many unsubstantiated rumours of rape and violence so widely disseminated?6 Could it be because it is easier to believe that people get what they deserve? Nobody wants to imagine the frail and impoverished stranded in a devastated city – it tugs less on the heartstrings if we suppose those left behind to be rapists and thugs.

  The immoral brain does not just serve our craven psychological need to feel that life is fair and secure. It also competently assists in maintaining that all-important sense of moral superiority. As the brain plays amateur psychologist, speculating as to the reasons and explanations behind why people behave as they do, it is careful to apply double standards whenever necessary. We are, for example, quick to call upon people’s personalities as a way of explaining their slip-ups. While at first glance this might seem reasonable, now try considering how often – rather than take this broad-brush tack with yourself – you prefer to make specific excuses for your own behaviour when it falls below par. You’re never late on your deadlines because you’re inconsiderate and disorganised – it’s just that other unexpected and pressing matters arose. You’re not ratty and rude – only a saint doesn’t occasionally snap at their partner after a long and tiring day. And it’s not because you’re selfish and uncaring that you haven’t yet got round to making that charitable donation – you’ve had a lot of other things on your plate. When your conduct falls short of your intentions, calling upon mitigating circumstances keeps you safe from the uncomfortable conclusion that you might really be incompetent, unkind or uncharitable.

  Do we bother to extend to others the same benefit of the doubt? No. When we muse upon shortcomings in our own conduct, it’s obvious that our troubling circumstances conspired to hide our true potential, our good character and our virtuous intent. But we are strangely blind to how the subtleties of other people’s situations might affect them. Our sensitivity to the context, so sharply tuned when we apply it to ourselves, becomes sloppy and careless when we focus on others. To our neglectful eye, what other people do reflects what kind of person they are; simple as that. We saw in ‘The Vain Brain’ how students, asked to predict when they would complete an assignment set by the researcher, failed to take into account their past difficulties in finishing work on time.7 We have a tendency to blame our past failures to meet deadlines on disruption by unexpected and unforeseeable events, a habit that leaves fresh and unsullied our confidence that this time – yes! – we will get things done on time. But when we are forecasting task completion dates for other people, bygone failures suddenly seem much more germane. In the same study, volunteers who were given information about another student’s previous failures to finish work on time were much more pessimistic in their predictions about when that student would complete the assignment. Indeed, presumably concluding that they must surely be in the presence of a chronic procrastinator, the scathing onlookers actually overestimated how long it would take the person they were judging to get the job done. Our own cargoes are delayed in the choppy seas of circumstance. Other people’s ships sail into harbour late because of their shilly-shallying.

  It’s cheering, in the midst of all this disquieting research about our self-deception and hypocrisy, to learn one positive thing: we are, it seems, good enough to extend to those we love the same forgiving style of explaining behaviour that we use on ourselves. In fact, much of the time we interpret the reasons behind our partner’s behaviour even more benignly than we do our own8 (perhaps because, as one cynical relationship expert put it, ‘being involved with a wonderful person is much more flattering than being involved with an inadequate person’9). Indeed, this benevolent fog surrounding the whys and wherefores of our partner’s actions seems to be an important characteristic of happy relationships. By contrast, couples teetering on the brink of divorce each judge themselves
morally superior to their partner, and observe each other’s behaviour with the harshest suspicion.10 Even kind and thoughtful acts are dismissed as unusual aberrations set against a background of inadequacy. Yet even among couples who are reasonably satisfied with the state of their marriages, the softening haze that shrouds our partner’s behaviour can be quickly dispersed just when we need it most. Couples interviewed individually about a conflict they had experienced in their marriage furnished the usual self-serving explanations as to why the circumstances of the quarrel justified their own behaviour.11 As in the school playground, ringing with cries of ‘He started it!’, although both spouses were describing the same row, almost everyone claimed that it was the other person’s fault. As if their life-partner were no more to them than a stranger, they were mostly oblivious to ways in which the particular situation might vindicate their spouse.

  Our appraisals of others also fail to take the same generous account of good intentions that we allow ourselves. Researchers asked volunteers to hold their arms in buckets of icy water for charity, and fifty cents was donated by the researcher for every minute the arm was kept submerged.12 The volunteers were then asked to rate their own altruism. Mopping the icy droplets from their frozen limbs, the volunteers’ measure of their virtue was based less on how much they had actually earned for their chosen charity, than on how much they would have liked to help the charity. In other words, they generously judged themselves by what they wanted to do, rather than by what they actually did. But while our own philanthropic thoughts are clear as paint to us, the sheer invisibility of other people’s intentions make them all too easy to overlook when we form our opinions of their actions. We give others less credit for their good intentions that we give ourselves for ours. Another group of volunteers in the cold water submersion experiment, asked only to look on as others sacrificed themselves for charity, were not interested in mere motives. When asked to rate the altruism of the person they were watching, they were indifferent to the sufferer’s virtuous intent. They judged purely by results. And even those of us who are joined together in holy matrimony have a hard time bringing our spouse’s commendable motives under the same strong spotlight that our own enjoy. The married couples I described earlier, who were interviewed about past disputes, were four times more likely to call attention to their own laudable intentions than to those of their partners.

  Our indulgent self-approbation, together with our belittlingly imprecise estimations of others, leaves pretty well all of us with the pleasant, though misguided, sense of being holier than thou. Yet in truth, the manipulations of social psychologists show that our moral backbone can be snapped like the flimsiest reed. One of psychology’s most famous landmarks, the Milgram obedience studies, exposed just how powerful social situations are in controlling our behaviour. In the original Milgram obedience study, forty ordinary and presumably decent men (teachers, engineers and labourers, for example) were recruited to take part in a study of ‘memory and learning’ at Yale University.13 The cover story was that, together with another participant, they would be taking the role of either teacher or learner in an experiment designed to look at the effects of punishment on learning. In a rigged random draw, the unsuspecting man was deputed to be the teacher. The other participant – a pleasant-mannered stooge – drew the role of learner.

  The level of detail devoted to deceiving the volunteers in this infamous experiment was extraordinary. First, the stooge was strapped into an electric chair (to ‘prevent excessive movement’, they were told), and electrode paste applied beneath the electrodes that were attached to the learner’s wrists (so as to ‘avoid blisters and burns’). The real participant, brought into a different room, meanwhile learned that, as the teacher, his job was to deliver increasingly powerful electric shocks whenever the learner made a mistake on a word-pair learning task. The sham electric shock generator (professionally engraved with the words ‘Shock Generator, Type ZLB, Dyson Instrument Company, Waltham, Mass. Output 15 Volts–450 Volts’) included a panel with 30 switches labelled from 15 to 450 volts, in 15-volt increments. The intensity of the different levels of shock were helpfully described on the control panel. For example, the 15- to 60-volt switches were categorised as ‘Slight Shock’, while the switches from 375 to 420 volts were labelled ‘Danger: Severe Shock’. The final two levels of shock, 435 and 450 volts, were simply and ominously marked ‘XXX’. To add a final touch of authenticity to the faux shock generator, at the start of the experiment each teacher was given a 45 volts shock, supposedly from the generator but actually from a battery hidden within it.

  The scene set, it was time for the ‘learning experiment’ to begin. The teacher was told to move the switch up 15 volts every time the learner made a mistake. At 300 volts the learner pounded audibly on the wall of his experimental prison, and made no response to the teacher’s question. Generally, the teacher would ask the experimenter what to do at this point, to which the experimenter would reply that he should treat the absence of a response as a wrong answer, and increase the shock level another 15 volts. There was another desperate banging on the wall at 315 volts, and from then on there was nothing but sinister silence from the learner – not even the reassurance of a frenzied hammering. Back on the other side, the teacher participants showed signs of extreme agitation: sweating profusely, trembling, stuttering, biting their lips, groaning, digging fingernails into their flesh. Some men even began to smile and laugh nervously – uncontrollably so, in three cases. Many of the participants questioned the experimenter about whether they should continue, or expressed concern for the damage that they might be doing to the learner. In response to their anxieties, the experimenter politely, but increasingly firmly, responded that they should continue.

  What Milgram famously (and repeatedly) found is that about two-thirds of ordinary men (and women) will obediently electrocute a fellow human being, all the way up to a highly dangerous 450 volts, because a scientist in a lab-coat tells them to do so. And nearly 90 per cent of the participants in the original experiment administered at least one more shock after hearing the learner pound on the wall. The experimenter had no special power to enforce his strictures to continue. Nor would the men have been punished in any way for defying the experimenter. Yet despite the clear signs that the learner was suffering against his will, the authority of the situation was too much for most people to withstand. The majority of participants broke the simple moral tenet, learned at mother’s knee, not to hurt other people.

  The morally stifling effect of being at the bottom of the authority gradient, as it is known, is certainly nothing short of remarkable. The reluctance of a co-pilot to pipe up and challenge his captain’s judgment has been estimated to be significant in as many as one in five airline crashes.14 So powerful are the psychological pressures of a hierarchical environment that a co-pilot may sacrifice himself – as well as passengers and crew – rather than question his superior’s authority. On 1 December 1993, Express II Airlines Inc./Northwest Airlink Flight 5719 to Hibbing, Minnesota, descended too steeply, missing the runway altogether. Everyone on board was killed. The cockpit voice recording revealed that the co-pilot knew that the plane was at too high an altitude for the descent. ‘Just … you just gonna stay up here as long as you can?’ was his single tentative attempt to alert the captain to his error. Even as the plane was brushing the treetops, moments before the crash, the co-pilot was deferentially answering the captain’s questions.

  In another notorious and sobering experiment showing that the murmur of internal virtue is easily drowned out by the noisy demands of our circumstances, researchers Darley and Batson put unsuspecting divinity students into a moral bind.15 They were told that the experimenter was interested in how well scholars of God could speak off the cuff. In another building (so the cover story went), a research assistant was waiting to record them making an impromptu talk. Half of the duped participants were told that they should discuss the value of seminary experience for occupations other than t
he ministry. The others were asked to offer some thoughts on the parable of the Good Samaritan (you know, that exemplary fellow who helped a stranger in need at the roadside). The researchers then manipulated the urgency of the students’ mission by telling them either that they had a few extra minutes, that they were right on time, or that they were already late. As the innocent student set off for the other building, what did they encounter in the alleyway but a person slumped wretchedly over a wall. (Sound familiar?) With that flawless feeling for theatrics so necessary for success in social psychology, the researchers arranged for the distressed man to cough (twice) and groan as the student passed him.

  What the researchers were actually interested in was which divinity students would stop to help the ailing man. Assessing the flavour and motives underlying the students’ religiosity using various questionnaires, they looked to see whether this had any impact on whether students practised what the Bible preached. It did not. Indeed, their findings are hard to credit. The only factor that influenced whether the student helped was whether they thought that they had time to spare: people who thought that they had a few extra minutes to kill did generally offer assistance, but people told that they were running late almost all hurried by. Ironically, even those theologians busily making mental notes on the lessons to be learned on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho were no more likely to show compassion to the stranger. Indeed, as the researchers wryly noted, several students on their way to talk about the Good Samaritan literally stepped over the victim as they hurried on their way.