15. Perry, Behind the Shock Machine (2012), p. 164. See also Gina Perry et al., ‘Credibility and Incredulity in Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Reanalysis of an Unpublished Test’, Social Psychology Quarterly (22 August 2019).
16. Stanley Milgram, ‘Evaluation of Obedience Research: Science or Art?’ Stanley Milgram Papers (Box 46, file 16). Unpublished manuscript (1962).
17. Quoted in Stephen D. Reicher, S. Alexander Haslam and Arthur Miller, ‘What Makes a Person a Perpetrator? The Intellectual, Moral, and Methodological Arguments for Revisiting Milgram’s Research on the Influence of Authority’, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 70, Issue 3 (2014).
18. Quoted in Perry, Behind the Shock Machine, p. 93.
19. Quoted in Cari Romm, ‘Rethinking One of Psychology’s Most Infamous Experiments’, The Atlantic (28 January 2015).
20. Stephen Gibson, ‘Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: a Rhetorical Analysis’, British Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 52, Issue 2 (2011).
21. S. Alexander Haslam, Stephen D. Reicher and Megan E. Birney, ‘Nothing by Mere Authority: Evidence that in an Experimental Analogue of the Milgram Paradigm Participants are Motivated not by Orders but by Appeals to Science’, Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 70, Issue 3 (2014).
22. Quoted in Perry, Behind the Shock Machine, p. 176.
23. Quoted in S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher, ‘Contesting the “Nature” of Conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo’s Studies Really Show’, PLoS Biology, Vol. 10, Issue 11 (2012).
24. Quoted in Perry, Behind the Shock Machine, p. 70.
25. Quoted in Blum, ‘The Lifespan of a Lie’.
26. Ibid.
27. Quoted in ‘Tape E’ (no date), Stanford Prison Archives, No.: ST-b02-f21, p. 6.
28. Ibid., p. 2.
29. Perry, Behind the Shock Machine, p. 240.
30. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 276.
31. Quoted in Bettina Stangneth, Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer (London, 2015).
32. Quoted in ‘The Adolph Eichmann Trial 1961’, in Great World Trials (Detroit, 1997), pp. 332–7.
33. Ian Kershaw, ‘“Working Towards the Führer.” Reflections on the Nature of the Hitler Dictatorship’, Contemporary European History, Vol. 2, Issue 2 (1993).
34. See, for example, Christopher R. Browning, ‘How Ordinary Germans Did It’, New York Review of Books (20 June 2013).
35. Quoted in Roger Berkowitz, ‘Misreading ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’, New York Times (7 July 2013).
36. Ibid.
37. Ada Ushpiz, ‘The Grossly Misunderstood “Banality of Evil” Theory’, Haaretz (12 October 2016).
38. Quoted in Perry. Behind the Shock Machine, p. 72.
39. Matthew M. Hollander, ‘The Repertoire of Resistance: Non-Compliance With Directives in Milgram’s “Obedience” experiments’, British Journal of Social Psychology, Vol. 54, Issue 3 (2015).
40. Matthew Hollander, ‘How to Be a Hero: Insight From the Milgram Experiment’, Huffington Post (27 February 2015).
41. Quoted in Bo Lidegaard, Countrymen: The Untold Story of How Denmark’s Jews Escaped the Nazis, of the Courage of Their Fellow Danes–and of the Extraordinary Role of the SS (New York, 2013), p. 71.
42. Ibid., p. 353.
43. Ibid., p. 113.
44. Ibid., p. 262.
45. Ibid., p. 173.
46. Ibid., p. 58.
47. Peter Longerich, ‘Policy of Destruction. Nazi Anti-Jewish Policy and the Genesis of the “Final Solution”’, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Annual Lecture (22 April 1999), p. 5.
48. Lidegaard, Countrymen, p. 198.
49. Ibid., p. 353.
9 The Death of Catherine Susan Genovese
1. For this first report of the murder, see Martin Gansberg, ‘37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police’, New York Times (27 March 1964).
2. Nicholas Lemann, ‘A Call for Help’, The New Yorker (10 March 2014).
3. Gansberg, ‘37 Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police’, New York Times.
4. Peter C. Baker, ‘Missing the Story’, The Nation (8 April 2014).
5. Kevin Cook, Kitty Genovese. The Murder, The Bystanders, The Crime That Changed America (New York, 2014), p. 100.
6. Abe Rosenthal, ‘Study of the Sickness Called Apathy’, New York Times (3 May 1964).
7. Gladwell, The Tipping Point, p. 27.
8. Rosenthal said this in the documentary The Witness (2015), made by Kitty’s brother Bill Genovese.
9. Bill Keller, ‘The Sunshine Warrior’, New York Times (22 September 2002).
10. John M. Darley and Bibb Latené, ‘Bystander Intervention in Emergencies’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 8, Issue 4 (1968).
11. Malcolm Gladwell says 85 and 31 per cent in his book, but the original article makes clear that these are the percentages of people who ran to help before the ‘victim’s’ first call for assistance had ended (after seventy-five seconds). Many people responded after this but still within two and a half minutes.
12. Maureen Dowd, ‘20 Years After the Murder of Kitty Genovese, the Question Remains: Why?’, New York Times (12 March 1984).
13. Cook, Kitty Genovese, p. 161.
14. Rachel Manning, Mark Levine and Alan Collins, ‘The Kitty Genovese Murder and the Social Psychology of Helping. The Parable of the 38 Witnesses’, American Psychologist, Vol. 62, Issue 6 (2007).
15. Sanne is a pseudonym. Her real name is not known to me, but it is to her four rescuers.
16. ‘Mannen die moeder en kind uit water redden: “Elke fitte A’dammer zou dit doen”’, at5.nl (10 February 2016).
17. ‘Vier helden redden moeder en kind uit zinkende auto’, nos.nl (10 February 2016).
18. Peter Fischer et al., ‘The bystander-effect: a meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies’, Psychological Bulletin, Vol. 137, Issue 4 (2011).
19. Ibid.
20. R. Philpot et al., ‘Would I be helped? Cross-National CCTV Shows that Intervention is the Norm in Public Conflicts’, American Psychologist (March 2019).
21. This account is based on three books: Kevin Cook, Kitty Genovese (2014); Catherine Pelonero, Kitty Genovese. A True Account of a Public Murder and Its Private Consequences (New York, 2014); and Marcia M. Gallo, ‘No One Helped.’ Kitty Genovese, New York City and the Myth of Urban Apathy (Ithaca, 2015).
22. She said this in Bill Genovese’s 2015 documentary The Witness.
23. Baker, ‘Missing the Story’.
24. Robert C. Doty, ‘Growth of Overt Homosexuality In City Provokes Wide Concern’, New York Times (17 December 1963).
25. Quoted in Pelonero, Kitty Genovese, p. 18.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Saul M. Kassin, ‘The Killing of Kitty Genovese: What Else Does This Case Tell Us?’ Perspectives on Psychological Science, Vol. 12, Issue 3 (2017).
Part 3 Why Good People Turn Bad
1. For a lucid discussion, see Jesse Bering, ‘The Fattest Ape: An Evolutionary Tale of Human Obesity’, Scientific American (2 November 2010).
10 How Empathy Blinds
1. James Burk, ‘Introduction’, in James Burk (ed.), Morris Janowitz. On Social Organization and Social Control (Chicago, 1991).
2. See, for example, Martin Van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939–1945, ABC-CLIO (1982).
3. Max Hastings, ‘Their Wehrmacht Was Better Than Our Army’, Washington Post (5 May 1985).
4. Quoted in Edward A. Shils and Morris Janowitz, ‘Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II’, Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 12, Issue 2 (1948).
5. Ibid., p. 281.
6. Ibid., p. 303.
7. Ibid., p. 284.
8. Felix Römer, Comrades. The Wehrmacht from Within (Oxford, 2019).
9. Janowitz and Shils’ first article would become one of the mo
st widely cited studies in post-war sociology. There is broad consensus among sociologists for the validity of their ‘primary group theory’, i.e. the notion that soldiers fight primarily for their immediate comrades, though with a few caveats. Some scientists point out that there was real hatred towards the enemy among ordinary recruits as well, particularly on the Eastern Front. Also that, where twenty-first-century professional soldiers are concerned, only three factors really determine success: training, training and more training. Sociologists these days accordingly distinguish between group cohesion and task cohesion, meaning effective collaboration does not require soldiers to feel deep affection for each other. Nevertheless, ties of brotherhood among enlistees have historically been crucial in the vast majority of wars.
10. Quoted in Michael Bond, The Power of Others. Peer Pressure, Group Think, and How the People Around Us Shape Everything We Do (London, 2015), pp. 128–9.
11. Amy Chua, Political Tribes. Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (New York, 2018), p. 100.
12. Bond, The Power of Others, pp. 94–5.
13. Quoted in ibid., pp. 88–9.
14. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, ‘Terrorists in the Family’, New Yorker (24 March 2016).
15. Quoted in Donato Paolo Mancini and Jon Sindreu, ‘Sibling Ties Among Suspected Barcelona Plotters Underline Trend’, Wall Street Journal (25 August 2017).
16. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, ‘Profiling Terrorist Leaders. Common Characteristics of Terror Leaders’, Psychology Today (31 October 2013).
17. Aya Batrawy, Paisley Dodds and Lori Hinnant, ‘Leaked Isis Documents Reveal Recruits Have Poor Grasp of Islamic Faith’, Independent (16 August 2016).
18. Quoted in ibid.
19. J. Kiley Hamlin, Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom, ‘Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants’, Nature (22 November 2007).
20. Paul Bloom, Just Babies. The Origins of Good and Evil (New York, 2013), p. 28.
21. J. Kiley Hamlin et al., ‘Not Like Me = Bad: Infants Prefer Those Who Harm Dissimilar Others’, Psychological Science, Vol. 24, Issue 4 (2013).
22. Karen Wynn said this on the CNN show Anderson Cooper 360 on 15 February 2014.
23. Bloom, Just Babies, pp. 104–5.
24. The first meta-analysis, which included twenty-six studies, concluded that babies’ preference for good guys is ‘a well-established empirical finding’. But not everyone is convinced. Some scientists who repeated Hamlin’s experiment saw the same effect, but others found no significant correlation. See Francesco Margoni and Luca Surian, ‘Infants’ Evaluation of Prosocial and Antisocial Agents: A Meta-Analysis’, Developmental Psychology, Vol. 54, Issue 8 (2018).
25. Susan Seligson, ‘Felix Warneken Is Overturning Assumptions about the Nature of Altruism’, Radcliffe Magazine (Winter 2015).
26. In Warneken’s TEDx Talk (titled: ‘Need Help? Ask a 2-Year-Old’), available on YouTube, you can see a touching video of a child climbing out of a ball pit to help someone in need.
27. Not only that, if you do reward a toddler with candy or a toy, Warneken found they subsequently help less, since that was not their motive (see Chapter 13 on intrinsic motivation). Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, ‘Extrinsic Rewards Undermine Altruistic Tendencies in 20-Month-Olds’, Development Psychology, Vol. 44, Issue 6 (2008).
28. Stephen G. Bloom, ‘Lesson of a Lifetime’, Smithsonian Magazine (September 2005).
29. Quoted in ibid.
30. Quoted in ibid.
31. Rebecca S. Bigler and Meagan M. Patterson, ‘Social Stereotyping and Prejudice in Children. Insights for Novel Group Studies’, in Adam Rutland, Drew Nesdale and Christia Spears Brown (eds), The Wiley Handbook of Group Processes in Children and Adolescents (Oxford, 2017), pp. 184–202.
32. Yarrow Dunham, Andrew Scott Barron and Susan Carey, ‘Consequences of “Minimal” Group Affiliations in Children’, Child Development, Vol. 82, Issue 3 (2011), p. 808.
33. See also Hejing Zhang et al., ‘Oxytocin Promotes Coordinated Out-group Attack During Intergroup Conflict in Humans’, eLife (25 January 2019).
34. Apparently, I’m not alone. See Elijah Wolfson, ‘Why We Cry on Planes’, The Atlantic (1 October 2013).
35. Paul Bloom, Against Empathy. The Case for Rational Compassion (New York, 2016), p. 15.
36. Daniel Batson, ‘Immorality from Empathy-induced Altruism: When Compassion and Justice Conflict,’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 68, Issue 6 (1995).
37. Michael N. Stagnaro and Paul Bloom, ‘The Paradoxical Effect of Empathy on the Willingness to Punish’, Yale University, unpublished manuscript (2016). See also Bloom, Against Empathy, p. 195.
38. Psychologists refer to this as the ‘moralisation gap’–the tendency to perceive harm inflicted on us (or on those we care about) as somehow being much worse than any harm we inflict on others. An attack on a loved one so upsets us that we seek retribution, which we deem to be proportionate and justified when we do it, but completely excessive when the other does it, prompting us to strike back again. (You may have experienced this kind of escalating quarrel in relationships. The moralisation gap can also help us to understand the decades of bloodshed in Israel and Palestine. Many people blame a lack of empathy, but I’ve come to believe there is rather too much empathy at work in the Middle East.)
39. George Orwell, ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ (August 1942).
40. Grossman, On Killing, p. 122.
41. Quoted in ibid., p. 126.
42. John Ellis, The World War II Databook. The Essential Facts and Figures for All the Combatants (London, 1993), Table 57, p. 257.
43. What, then, about the Rwandan genocide in 1994, when an estimated eight hundred thousand Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered? In the West, this example is often used to paint humans as bloodthirsty ‘monsters’, but that is largely because we know so little of the history. More recently, a historian has written, ‘There is now ample evidence that the mass extermination of Rwandan citizens was the culmination of a carefully prepared, well-organized, bureaucratic campaign, using modern means of mass communication, propaganda, civil administration, and military logistics’. The actual murders were carried out by a small minority, in which an estimated 97 per cent of Hutus did not take part. See Abram de Swaan, The Killing Compartments. The Mentality of Mass Murder (New Haven and London, 2015), p. 90.
44. Łukasz Kamieński, Shooting Up. A Short History of Drugs and War (Oxford, 2016).
45. Lee, Up Close and Personal, p. 27.
46. Snipers much more often belong to the 1 to 2 per cent of soldiers who are psychopaths and have no natural aversion to killing. See Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity. A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists (Princeton, 2008), p. 372.
47. Dave Grossman, ‘Hope on the Battlefield’, in Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh and Jeremy Adam Smith (eds), The Compassionate Instinct. The Science of Human Goodness (New York, 2010), p. 41.
48. Grossman, On Killing, p. 178.
49. Many soldiers who fought in the First and Second World Wars were also traumatised; however, Vietnam was comparatively much more traumatic. Of course, other factors were also to blame (such as the chilly reception Vietnam vets received on their return), but all the evidence suggests that the biggest was how the soldiers were conditioned to kill. Three recent studies among 1,200 veterans of Vietnam, 2,797 of Iraq and 317 of the Gulf War have shown that soldiers who killed (enabled by their conditioning) are at a substantially higher risk of PTSD. See Shira Maguen et al., ‘The Impact of Reported Direct and Indirect Killing on Mental Health Symptoms in Iraq War Veterans’, Journal of Traumatic Stress, Vol. 23, Issue 1 (2010); Shira Maguen et al., ‘The impact of killing on mental health symptoms in Gulf War veterans’, Psychological Trauma. Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy, Vol. 3, Issue 1 (2011); and Shira Maguen et al., ‘The Impact of Killing in War on Mental Health Symptoms and Related Functioning’, Journal of Traumatic Stress, Vol. 45, Issue 10 (2009).
50. Frederick L. Coolidge, Felicia L. Davis and Daniel L. Seg
al, ‘Understanding Madmen: A DSM-IV Assessment of Adolf Hitler’, Individual Differences Research, Vol. 5, Issue 1 (2007).
51. Bond, The Power of Others, pp. 94–5.
11 How Power Corrupts
1. Quoted in Miles J. Unger, Machiavelli. A Biography (London, 2011), p. 8.
2. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, translated by James B. Atkinson (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), p. 271. Originally published in 1532.
3. Machiavelli, The Discourses. Quoted in ibid., p. 280.
4. Dacher Keltner, The Power Paradox. How We Gain and Lose Influence (New York, 2017), pp. 41–9.
5. Melissa Dahl, ‘Powerful People Are Messier Eaters, Maybe’, The Cut (13 January 2015).
6. See for an overview: Aleksandra Cislak et al., ‘Power Corrupts, but Control Does Not: What Stands Behind the Effects of Holding High Positions’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 44, Issue 6 (2018), p. 945.
7. Paul K. Piff et al., ‘Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behaviour’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 109, Issue 11 (2012), pp. 4086–91.
8. Benjamin Preston, ‘The Rich Drive Differently, a Study Suggests’, New York Times (12 August 2013).
9. See Jeremy K. Boyd, Katherine Huynh and Bonnie Tong, ‘Do wealthier drivers cut more at all-way stop intersections? Mechanisms underlying the relationship between social class and unethical behavior’ (University of California, San Diego, 2013). And Beth Morling et al., ‘Car Status and Stopping for Pedestrians (#192)’, Psych File Drawer (2 June 2014).
10. Keltner, The Power Paradox, pp. 99–136.
11. Jeremy Hogeveen, Michael Inzlicht and Suhkvinder S. Obhi, ‘Power Changes How the Brain Responds to Others’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Vol. 143, Issue 2 (2014).
12. Jerry Useem, ‘Power Causes Brain Damage’, The Atlantic (July/August 2017).
13. See, for example, M. Ena Inesi et al., ‘How Power Corrupts Relationships: Cynical Attributions for Others’ Generous Acts’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 48, Issue 4 (2012), pp. 795–803.
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