A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil: Understanding How Good People are Transformed Into Perpetrators
by Philip G. Zimbardo
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Table of Contents
• Abstract
• Locating Evil Within Particular People: The Rush to the Dispositional
• On the Transformation of Good People Into Agents of Destruction
• The Milgram Obedience Experiments
• Ten Ingredients in the Situationist’s Recipe for Behavioral Transformations
• Lord of the Flies and the Psychology of Deindividuation
• Halloween Disguises and Aggression in Children
• Cultural Wisdom of Changing Warriors’ Appearances
• The Theoretical Model of Deindividuation and Bandura's Model of Moral Disengagement
• Dehumanization In Action: ‘Animals” By Any Other Name Are College Students
• Environmental Anonymity Breeds Vandalism
• The Faces of the "Enemy:" Propaganda images condition men to kill abstractions
• Ordinary Men Murder Ordinary Men, Women, and Children – Jewish Enemies
• The Spurious Creation of Evil Terrorists and Spread of National Fears Leading to the War on Iraq
• The Socialization into Evil: How the "Nazi Hate Primers" Prepared and Conditioned the Minds of German Youth to Hate Jews
• The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Crucible of Human Nature Where Good Boys Encountered an Evil Place
• The Failure of the Social Experiment of U. S. Corrections
• The Evil of Inaction
• The Worst of the Apples in the Evil Barrel: Torturers and Executioners?
• Suicide Bombers: Senseless Fanatics or Martyrs for a Cause?
• Conclusions
A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil: Understanding How Good People Are Transformed into Perpetrators.
Philip G. Zimbardo, Ph. D. (Psychology Department, Stanford University) [1]
Chapter in Arthur Miller (Ed.). The social psychology of good and evil: Understanding our capacity for kindness and cruelty. New York: Guilford. (Publication date: 2004).
{Revised July 25, 2003}
Abstract
I endorse a situationist perspective on the ways in which anti-social behavior by individuals, and of violence sanctioned by nations, is best understood, treated and prevented. This view has both influenced and been informed by a body of social psychological research and theory. It contrasts with the traditional dispositional perspective to explaining the whys of evil behavior. The search for internal determinants of anti-social behavior locates evil within individual predispositions – genetic “bad seeds,” personality traits, pathological risk factors, and other organismic variables. The situationist approach is to the dispositional as public health models of disease are to medical models. It follows basic principles of Lewinian theory that propel situational determinants of behavior to a foreground well beyond being merely extenuating background circumstances. Unique to this situationist approach is using experimental laboratory and field research as demonstrations of vital phenomena that other approaches only analyze verbally or rely on archival or correlational data for answers. The basic paradigm to be presented illustrates the relative ease with which "ordinary," good men and women are induced into behaving in evil ways by turning on or off one or another social situational variable.
I will start with a series of “oldies, but goodies” -- my laboratory and field studies on deindividuation, aggression, vandalism, and the Stanford Prison Experiment, along with a process analysis of Milgram's obedience studies, and Bandura's analysis of “moral disengagement.” My analysis is extended to the evil of inaction by considering bystander failures of helping those in distress. This body of research demonstrates the under-recognized power of social situations to alter the mental representations and behavior of individuals, groups and nations. Finally, I explore extreme instances of “evil” behavior for their dispositional or situational foundations – torturers, death squad violence workers and terrorist suicide-bombers.
Evil is intentionally behaving -- or causing others to act – in ways that demean, dehumanize, harm, destroy, or kill innocent people. This behaviorally-focused definition makes an agent of agency responsible for purposeful, motivated actions that have a range of negative consequences to other people. It excludes accidental or unintended harmful outcomes, as well as the broader, generic forms of institutional evil, such as poverty, prejudice or destruction of the environment by agents of corporate greed. But it does include corporate responsibility for marketing and selling products with known disease-causing, death-dealing properties, such as cigarette manufacturers, or other drug dealers. It also extends beyond the proximal agent of aggression, as studied in research on interpersonal violence, to encompass those in distal positions of authority whose orders or plans are carried out by functionaries. This is true of military commanders and national leaders, such as Hilter, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and others who history has identified as tyrants for their complicity in the deaths of untold millions of innocent people.
History will also have to decide on the evil status of President Bush’s role in declaring a pre-emptive, aggressive war against Iraq in March, 2002, with dubious justification, that resulted in widespread death, injury, destruction and enduring chaos. We might also consider a simpler definition of evil, proposed by my colleague, Irving Sarnoff, that “Evil is knowing better, but doing worse.”
We live in a world cloaked in the evils of civil and international wars, of terrorism -- home-grown and exported -- of homicides, of rapes, of domestic and child abuse, and more forms of devastation. The same human mind that creates the most beautiful works of art and extraordinary marvels of technology is equally responsible for the perversion of its own perfection. This most dynamic organ in the universe has been a seemingly endless source for creating ever more vile torture chambers and instruments of horror in earlier centuries, the “bestial machinery” unleashed on Chinese citizens by Japanese soldiers in their rape of Nanking (see Iris Chang, 1997), and the recent demonstration of “creative evil” of the destruction of the World Trade Center by weaponizing commercial airlines. We continue to ask why? Why and how is it possible for such deeds to continue to occur? How can the unimaginable become so readily imagined? And these are the same questions that have been asked by generations before ours.
I wish I had answers to these profound questions about human existence and human nature, but can deal here only with their more modest versions. My concern centers around how good, ordinary people can be recruited, induced, seduced into behaving in ways that could be classified as evil. In contrast to the traditional approach of trying to identify "evil people" to account for the evil in our midst, I will focus on trying to outline some of the central conditions that are involved in the transformation of good people into perpetrators of evil.
Locating Evil Within Particular People: The Rush to the Dispositional
"Who is responsible for evil in the world, given that there is an all-powerful, omniscient God who is also all-Good?" That conundrum began the intellectual scaffolding of the Inquisition in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. As revealed in Malleus Maleficarum, the handbook of the German Inquisitors from the Roman Catholic Church, the inquiry concluded that the Devil was the source of all evil. However, these theologians argued the Devil works his evil through intermediaries, lesser demons and of course, human witches. So the hunt for evil focused on those marginalized people who looked or acted differently from ordinary people, who might qualify under rigorous examination of conscience, and torture, to expose them as witches, and then put to death. They were mostly women who could readily be exploited without sources of defense, especially when they had resources that could be confiscated. An analysis of this legacy of institutionalized violence against women is detailed by historian Anne Barstow (1994) in Witchcraze. Paradoxically, this early effort of the Inquisition to understand the origins of evil and develop interventions to cope with evil instead created new forms of evil that fulfilled all facets of my definition. But it exemplifies the notion of simplifying the complex problem of widespread evil by identifying individuals who might be the guilty parties, and then making them pay for their evil deeds.
Psychodynamic theory, as well as most traditional psychiatry, also locates the source of individual violence and anti-social behavior within the psyches of disturbed people, often tracing it back to early roots in unresolved infantile conflicts. Like genetic views of pathology, such psychological approaches seek to link behaviors society judges as pathological to pathological origins -- defective genes, “bad seeds,” or pre-morbid personality structures. But the same violent outcomes can be generated by very different types of people, who give no hint of evil impulses. My colleagues and I (Lee, Zimbardo, & Berthoff, 1973) interviewed and tested 19 inmates in California prisons who had all recently been convicted of homicide. Half of these killers had a long history of violence, showing lack of impulse control (on the MMPI), were decidedly masculine in sexual identity, and generally extroverted. The other ten murderers were totally different. They had never committed any criminal offense prior to the current homicide -- their murders were totally unexpected given their mild manner and gentle disposition. Their problem was excessive impulse control that inhibited their expression of any feelings. Their sexual identity was feminine or androgynous, and the majority was shy. These "Shy Sudden Murderers" killed just as violently as did the habitual criminals, and their victims died just as surely, but it would have been impossible to predict this outcome from any prior knowledge of their personalities that were so different from the more obvious habitual criminals.
The authoritarian personality syndrome was developed by a team of psychologists (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswick, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950) after WWII, trying to make sense of the Holocaust and the broad appeal of national Fascism and Hitler. Their dispositional bias led them to focus on a set of personality factors underlying the fascist mentality. However, what they overlooked were the host of processes operating at political, economic, societal, and historical levels of analysis to influence and direct so many millions of individuals into a constrained behavioral channel of hating Jews and admiring the apparent strength of their dictator.
This tendency to explain observed behavior by reference to dispositions, while ignoring or minimizing the impact of situational variables has been termed the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE) by my colleague, Lee Ross (1977). We are all subject to this dual bias of over-utilizing dispositional analyses and under-utilizing situational explanations when faced with ambiguous causal scenarios we want to understand. We succumb to this effect because so much of our education, social and professional training, and societal agencies are geared toward a focus on individual, dispositional orientations. Dispositional analyses are a central operating feature of cultures that are based on individualistic rather than collectivist values (see Triandis, 1994). Thus, it is individuals who get praise and fame and wealth for achievement and are honored for their uniqueness, but it is also individuals who are blamed for the ills of society. Our legal systems, medical, educational and religious systems all are founded on principles of individualism.
Dispositional analyses of anti-social, or non-normative, behaviors always include strategies for behavior modification to make the deviant individuals fit better by education or therapy, or to exclude them from society by imprisonment, exile or execution. However, locating evil within selected individuals or groups always has the 'social virtue' of taking society "off the hook" as blameworthy, as exonerating societal structures and political decision-making for contributing to the more fundamental circumstances that create poverty, marginal existence for some citizens, racism, sexism and elitism. What are other characteristics of this dispositional orientation to understanding evil? I think it implies a two-category world -- of good people, like US, and of bad people, like THEM. That clear cut dichotomy is divided by a line that separates good and evil. We then take comfort in the illusion that such a line is impermeable, constraining cross-overs in either direction. We could never imagine being like them, of doing their unthinkable dirty deeds, and do not admit them into our company because they are so essentially different as to be unchangeable. That also means we forfeit the motivation to understand how they came to engage in evil behavior. I find it good to remind myself of the geo-political analysis of the Russian novelist, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a victim of persecution by the Soviet KGB, that the line between good and evil lies in the center of every human heart.
On the Transformation of Good People Into Agents of Destruction
My bias is admittedly more toward situational analyses of behavior, which comes both from my training as an experimental social psychologist, and also from having grown up in poverty in a New York City ghetto of the South Bronx. I believe that dispositional orientations are more likely to correlate with affluence, since the rich want to take full credit for their success, while situationists arise more from the lower classes who want to explain away -- onto external circumstances -- the obvious dysfunctional life styles of those around them. But I am primarily concerned with understanding the psychological and social dynamics involved when an ordinary, "good" person begins to act in anti-social ways, and in the extreme, behaves destructively toward the property or person of other people. I have seen first hand my childhood friends go through such transformations, and always wondered how and why they did, and whether I could also change like that. I was similarly fascinated with the behavioral transformation tale of Robert Louis Stevenson’s good Dr. Jekyll into the murderous Mr. Hyde. What was in his chemical formula that could have such an immediate and profound impact? But then even as a child, I wondered, were there other ways to induce such changes, since my friends did not have access to his elixir of evil before they did such bad things to other people. I would later discover that social psychology had recipes for such transformations.
Our mission is to understand better how virtually anyone could be recruited to engage in evil deeds that deprive other human beings of their dignity, humanity and life. The dispositional analysis has the comforting side effect of enabling those who have not yet done wrong to righteously assert, "Not me, I am different from those kinds of people who did that evil deed!" By positing a "Me-Us-Them" distinction, we live with the illusion of moral superiority firmly entrenched in the pluralistic ignorance that comes from not recognizing the set of situational and structural circumstances that empowered others -- exactly like us -- to engage in deeds that they too once thought were alien to their nature. We take false pride in believing that “I am not that kind of person.”
I argue that the human mind is so marvelous that it can adapt to virtually any known environmental circumstance in order to survive, to create, and to destroy as necessary. We are not born with tendencies toward good or evil, but with mental templates to do either, more gloriously than ever before or more devastatingly than ever seen. It is only through the recognition that no one of us is an island unto itself, that we are all part of the human condition, that humility takes precedence over unfounded pride in acknowledging our vulnerability to situational forces. If we want to develop mechanisms for combating such transformations, it seems essential to learn to appreciate the extent to which ordinary people can be seduced or initiated into engaging in evil deeds. We need to focus on discovering the mechanisms among the causal factors that influence so many to do so much bad, to commit so much evil throughout the globe. Please see the breadth of ideas that have been presented by social psychological colleagues, Baumeister, 1997; Darley, 1992; Staub, 1989; Waller, 2002.
The Milgram Obedience Experiments
The most obvious power of the experimental demonstration by Stanley Milgram (1974) of blind obedience to authority lies in the unexpectedly high rates of such compliance with the majority, two-thirds, of the subjects "going all the way" in shocking a victim with apparently lethal consequences. His finding was indeed shocking to most of those who read about it or saw his movie version of the study because it revealed that a variety of ordinary American citizens could so readily be led to engage in “electrocuting a nice stranger.” But the more significant importance of his research comes from what he did after that initial classic study with Yale College undergraduates. What most people do not realize is that Milgram's conducted 18 experimental variations on more than a thousand subjects from a variety of backgrounds, ages, both genders and all educational levels. In each of these studies he varied one social psychological variable and observed its impact on the extent of obedience to the unjust authority’s pressure to continue to shock the “learner-victim.” He was able to demonstrate that compliance rates could soar to 90 percent who delivered the maximum 450 volts to the hapless victim, or could be reduced to less than 10 percent of total obedience – by introducing one variable into the compliance recipe.
Obedience was maximized by first observing peers behaving obediently; it was dramatically reduced when peers rebelled, or when the victim acted like a masochist asking to be shocked. What is especially interesting to me about this last result were the data Milgram provides on the predictions of his outcome by forty psychiatrists who were given the basic description of the classic experiment. Their average estimate of the percent of U.S. Citizens who would give the full 450 volts was fewer than one percent. Only sadists would engage in such sadistic behavior, they believed. In a sense this is the comparison level for appreciating the enormity of Milgram’s finding. These experts on human behavior were totally wrong because they ignored the situational determinants of behavior in the procedural description of the experiment and over relied on the dispositional perspective that comes from their professional training. Their error is a classic instance of the FAE at work. In fact, in this research, the average person does not behave like a sadist when a masochistic victim encourages him or her to do so.
Milgram's intention was to provide a paradigm in which it was possible to quantify "evil" by the extremity of buttons pushed on a shock generator that allegedly delivered shocks to a mild-mannered confederate who played the role of the pupil or learner while the subject enacted the teacher role. Let's outline some of the procedures in this research paradigm that seduced many ordinary citizens to engage in evil. In doing so, I want to draw parallels to compliance strategies used by "influence professionals" in real-world settings, such as salespeople, cult recruiters, and our national leaders (see Cialdini, 2001).
Ten Ingredients in the Situationist’s Recipe for Behavioral Transformations.
Among the influence principles to be extracted from Milgram’s paradigm for getting ordinary people to do things they originally believe they would not are the following ten:
a) Presenting an acceptable justification, or rationale, for engaging in the undesirable action, such as wanting to help people improve their memory by judicious use of punishment strategies. In experiments it is known as the “cover story” because it is a cover-up for the procedures that follow which might not make sense on their own. The real world equivalent is known as an “ideology,” such as “national security,” that often provides the nice big lie for instituting a host of bad, illegal, immoral policies.
b) Arranging some form of contractual obligation, verbal or written, to enact the behavior.
c) Giving participants meaningful roles to play (teacher, student) that carry with them previously learned positive values and response scripts.
d) Presenting basic rules to be followed, that seem to make sense prior to their actual use, but then can be arbitrarily used to justify mindless compliance. “Failure to respond must be treated as an error,” was a Milgram rule for shocking omissions the same as false commissions. But then what happens when the learner complains of a heart condition, wants to quit and later screams out followed by a thud and silence? The learner’s inability to respond to the teacher’s testing because of death or being unconscious must be continually shocked since omission equals commission. It does not make sense at all since how could the teacher be helping improve the memory of the learner who is incapacitated or dead? But all too many participants stopped engaging in such primitive, obvious critical thinking exercises as their stress mounted.
e) Altering the semantics of the act and action, from hurting victims to helping learners by punishing them.
f) Creating opportunities for diffusion of responsibility for negative outcomes; others will be responsible, or it won’t be evident that the actor will be held liable.
g) Starting the path toward the ultimate evil act with a small, insignificant first step (only 15 volts).
h) Increasing each level of aggression in gradual steps, that do not seem like noticeable differences (only 30 volts).
i) Gradually changing the nature of the Influence Authority from “Just” to “Unjust,” from reasonable and rational to unreasonable and irrational.
j) Making the "exit costs" high, and the process of exiting difficult by not permitting usual forms of verbal dissent to qualify as behavioral disobedience.
Such procedures are utilized across varied influence situations where those in authority want others to do their bidding, but know that few would engage in the "end game" final solution without first being properly prepared psychologically to do the "unthinkable." I would encourage readers to do the thought exercise of applying these compliance principles to the tactics used by the Bush administration to get Americans to endorse going to war against Iraq.
Lord of the Flies and the Psychology of Deindividuation
William Golding's (1962) Noble prize-winning novel of the transformation of good British choir boys into murderous beasts centers on the point of change in one's external physical appearance leading to a change in one’s mental state and behavior. Painting one’s self, changing one's outward appearance, made it possible for some boys to disinhibit previously restrained impulses to kill a pig for food. Once that alien deed of killing another creature was accomplished, then they could continue on to kill with pleasure, both animals and people alike. Is it psychologically valid that external appearance could impact internal and behavioral processes? That is the question I answered with a set of experiments and field studies on the psychology of deindividuation (Zimbardo, 1970).
The basic procedure involved having young women deliver a series of painful electric shocks to each of two other young women whom they could see and hear in a one-way mirror before them. Half were randomly assigned to a condition of anonymity, or deindividuation, half to one of uniqueness, or individuation. The four college student subjects in each deindividuation group had their appearance concealed, given identifying numbers in place of their names. The comparison individuation subjects were called by their names and made to feel unique, although also in a four-woman group and asked to make the same responses of shocking each of two woman "victims" – all with a suitable cover story, the big lie that they never questioned.
The results were clear: Women in the deindividuation condition delivered twice as much shock to both victims as did the women in the individuated comparison condition. Moreover, they shocked both victims, the one previously rated as pleasant and the other unpleasant victim, more over the course of the 20 trials, while the individuated subjects shocked the pleasant woman less over time than they did the unpleasant one. One important conclusion flows from this research and its various replications and extensions, some using military personnel.
Anything that makes someone feel anonymous, as if no one knows who they are, creates the potential for that person to act in evil ways if the situation gives permission for violence.
Halloween Disguises and Aggression in Children.
We know that people also mask themselves for hedonistic pleasures, as at Carnival rituals in many Catholic countries. Children in America put on masks and costumes for Halloween parties. Scott Fraser (1974) arranged for elementary school children to go to a special, experimental Halloween party given by their teacher. There were many games to play and for each game won, tokens were earned that could be exchanged for gifts at the end of the party. Half the games were non-aggressive in nature, and half were matched in content but involved being aggressive to win the contest, with physical confrontations between two children in order to reach the goal. The experimental design was an ABA format; no costumes initially while the games were played, then the costumes arrived and were worn as the games continued, and finally, the costumes were removed and the games went on for the third phase; each phase for about an hour. The data are striking testimony to the power of anonymity. Aggression increased significantly as soon as the costumes were worn, more than doubling from the initial base level average. But when the costumes were removed, aggression dropped back well below initial level base rate. Equally interesting was the second result, that aggression had negative instrumental consequences on winning tokens, it cost money to be aggressive, but that did not matter when the children were costumed and anonymous. The least number of tokens won was during the second, anonymity phase, where aggression was highest.
Cultural Wisdom of Changing Warriors’ Appearances.
Let's leave the laboratory and fun and games at children's parties to the real world where these issues of anonymity and violence may take on life and death significance. Some societies go to war without having the young male warriors change their appearance, while others always include ritual transformations of appearance by painting or masking the warriors (as in Lord of the Flies). Does that change in external appearance make a difference in how warring enemies are treated? Harvard anthropologist, John Watson (1974) posed that question after reading my Nebraska Symposium chapter. The Human Area Files were his data source to collect two pieces of data on societies that did or did not change appearance of warriors prior to going to war and the extent to which they killed, tortured or mutilated their victims. The results are striking confirmation of the prediction that anonymity promotes destructive behavior—when permission is also given to behave in aggressive ways that are ordinarily prohibited. Of the 23 societies for which these two data sets were present, the majority (12 of 15, 80%) of societies in which warriors changed their appearance were those noted as most destructive, while that was true of only one of the eight where the warriors did not change appearance before going to battle. So cultural wisdom dictates that when old men want usually peaceful young men to harm and kill other young men like themselves in a war, it is easier to do so if they first change their appearance, to alter their usual external facade, put on uniforms or masks or paint their faces. With that anonymity in, out goes their usual internal focus of compassion and concern for others.
The Theoretical Model of Deindividuation and Bandura's Model of Moral Disengagement
The psychological mechanisms involved in getting good people to do evil are embodied in two theoretical models, the first elaborated by me (1970) and modified by input from subsequent variants on my deindividuation conceptions, notably by Diener (1980). The second is Bandura's model of moral disengagement (1988) that specifies the conditions under which anyone can be led to act immorally, even those who usually ascribe to high levels of morality.
Bandura's model outlines how it is possible to morally disengage from destructive conduct by using a set of cognitive mechanisms that alter: a) one's perception of the reprehensible conduct (engaging in moral justifications, making palliative comparisons, using euphemistic labeling for one's conduct): b) one's sense of the detrimental effects of that conduct (minimizing, ignoring, or misconstruing the consequences); c) one's sense of responsibility for the link between reprehensible conduct and their detrimental effects (displacing or diffusing responsibility), and d) one’s view of the victim (dehumanizing him or her, and attributing the blame for the outcome to the victim).
Dehumanization In Action: ‘Animals” By Any Other Name Are College Students.
A remarkable experiment by Bandura, Underwood, and Fromson (1975) reveals how easy it is to induce intelligent college students to accept a dehumanizing label of other people and then to act aggressively based on that stereotyped term. A group of four participants were led to believe they were overhearing the research assistant tell the experimenter that the students from another college were present to start the study in which they were to deliver electric shocks of varying intensity to them (according to the dictates of a reasonable cover story). In one of the three randomly assigned conditions the subjects overheard the assistant say to the experimenter that the other students seemed "nice.” In a second condition, they heard that the other students seemed like "animals,” while for a third group the assistant did not label the students in the alleged other group.
The dependent variable of shock intensity clearly reflected this situational manipulation. The subjects gave most shock to those labeled in the dehumanizing way as "animals," and their shock level increased linearly over the ten trials. Those labeled "nice" were given the least shock, while the unlabelled group was in the middle of these two extremes. Thus, a single word – “animals” -- was sufficient to incite intelligent college students to treat others so labeled as if they knew them enough that that they deserved to be harmed. On the plus side, that arbitrary labeling resulted in others being treated with greater respect if someone in authority labeled them positively. What is also of interest is a close examination of the graphed data shows that on the first trial there is no difference across the three experimental treatments in the level of shock administered, but with each successive opportunity, the shock levels diverge. Those shocking the so-called “animals” shock them more and more over time, a result comparable to the escalating shock level of the deindividuated female students in my earlier study. That rise in aggressive responding over time, with practice, or with experience, belies a self-reinforcing effect of aggressive or violent responding – it is increasingly pleasurable.
What my model adds to the mix of what is needed to get good people to engage in evil deeds is a focus on the role of cognitive controls that usually guide behavior in socially desirable and personally acceptable ways. It can be accomplished by knocking out these control processes, blocking them, minimizing them, or reorienting them. Doing so, suspends conscience, self-awareness, sense of personal responsibility, obligation, commitment, liability, morality and analyses in terms of costs/ benefits of given actions. The two general strategies for accomplishing this objective are: to reduce cues of social accountability of the actor (no one knows who I am, nor cares to), and reducing concerns for self evaluation by the actor. The first cuts out concerns for social evaluation, for social approval, and does so by making the actor feel anonymous. It works when one is functioning in an environment that conveys anonymity and diffuses personal responsibility across others in the situation. The second strategy stops self-monitoring and consistency monitoring by relying on tactics that alter one's state of consciousness (through drugs, arousing strong emotions, hyper-intense actions, getting into an expanded present-time orientation where there is no concern for past or future), and by projecting responsibility outward onto others.
My research on deindividuation and that of other social psychologists (see Prentice-Dunn & Rogers, 1983) differs from the paradigm in Milgram's studies in that there is no authority figure present urging the subject to obey. Rather, the situation is created in such a way that subjects act in accordance to paths made available to them, without thinking through the meaning or consequences of those actions. Their actions are not cognitively guided as they are typically, but directed by the actions of others in proximity to them, or by their strongly aroused emotional states, and by situationally available cues, such as the presence of weapons.
Environmental Anonymity Breeds Vandalism.
It is possible for certain environments to convey a sense of anonymity on those who live or behave in their midst. Where that happens, the people living there do not have a sense of community. Vandalism and graffiti may be interpreted as an individual's attempt for public notoriety in a society that deindividuates them.
I did a simple field study to demonstrate the ecological differences between a places where anonymity ruled versus a sense of community dominated the scene. I abandoned used, but good condition cars in the Bronx, New York City and in Palo Alto, California, one block away from New York University and Stanford University, respectively. License plates were removed and hoods raised slightly -- to serve as ethological "releaser cues" for the potential vandals' attack behavior. It worked swiftly in the Bronx, as we watched and filmed from a vantage point across the street. Within 10 minutes of officially beginning this study, the first vandals surfaced. This parade of vandals continued for two days, when there was nothing left of value to strip, then the vandals began destroying the remains. In 48 hours we recorded 23 separate destructive contacts by individual or groups, who either took something from the abandoned vehicle or did something to wreck it. Curiously, only one of these episodes involved adolescents, the rest were by adults, many well dressed and many driving cars, so that they might qualify as at least lower middle-class. Anonymity can make brazen vandals of us all. But what about the fate of the abandoned car in Palo Alto? Our time-lapse film revealed that no one vandalized any part of the car over a 5-day period. When we removed the car, three local residents called the police to say that an abandoned car was being stolen (the local police had been notified of our field study). That is one definition of “community,” where people care about what happens on their turf even to the person or property of strangers, with the reciprocal assumption that they would also care about them.
I now feel that any environmental, societal conditions that contribute to making some members of society feel that they are anonymous, that no one knows who they are, that no one recognizes their individuality and thus their humanity, makes them potential assassins and vandals, a danger to my person and my property -- and yours (Zimbardo, 1976).
The Faces of the "Enemy:" Propaganda images condition men to kill abstractions
We need to add a few more operational principles to our arsenal of weapons that trigger evil acts among men and women who are ordinarily good people. We can learn about some of these principles by considering how nations prepare their young men to engage in deadly wars and prepare citizens to support the risks of going to war, especially a war of aggression. This difficult transformation is accomplished by a special form of cognitive conditioning. Images of the "Enemy" are created by national propaganda to prepare the minds of soldiers and citizens to hate those who fit the new category of your enemy. This mental conditioning is a soldier's most potent weapon, without it, he could probably never fire his weapon to kill another young man in the cross-hairs of his gun sight. A fascinating account of how this "hostile imagination" is created in the minds of soldiers and their families is presented in Faces of the Enemy by Sam Keen (1991), and his companion video. Archetypes of the enemy are created by propaganda fashioned by the governments of most nations against those judged to be the dangerous "them," "outsiders," "enemies." These visual images create a consensual societal paranoia that is focused on the enemy who would do harm to the women, children, homes, and god of the soldier's nation, way of life, and so forth. Keen's analysis of this propaganda on a world-wide scale reveals that there are a select number of categories utilized by "homo hostilis" to invent an evil enemy in the minds of good members of righteous tribes. The enemy is: aggressor; faceless; rapist; godless; barbarian; greedy; criminal; torturer; death; a dehumanized animal, or just an abstraction. Finally, there is the enemy as worthy, heroic opponent to be crushed in mortal combat -- as in the video game of the same name.
Ordinary Men Murder Ordinary Men, Women, and Children – Jewish Enemies.
One of the clearest illustrations of my fundamental theme of how ordinary people can be transformed into engaging in evil deeds that are alien to their past history and to their moral development comes from the analysis of British historian, Christopher Browning. He recounts in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1993) that in March, 1942 about 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, but a mere 11 months later about 80 percent were dead. In this short period of time, the Endlösung (Hitler's 'Final Solution') was energized by means of an intense wave of mass mobile murder squads in Poland. This genocide required mobilization of a large-scale killing machine at the same time as able-bodied soldiers were needed on the Russian front. Since most Polish Jews lived in small towns and not the large cities, the question that Browning raised about the German high command was "where had they found the manpower during this pivotal year of the war for such an astounding logistical achievement in mass murder?" (p. xvi).
His answer came from archives of Nazi war crimes, in the form of the activities of Reserve Battalion 101, a unit of about 500 men from Hamburg, Germany. They were elderly, family men too old to be drafted into the army, from working-class and lower middle-class backgrounds, with no military police experience, just raw recruits sent to Poland without warning of, or any training in, their secret mission -- the total extermination of all Jews living in the remote villages of Poland. In just 4 months they had shot to death at point blank range at least 38,000 Jews and had another 45,000 deported to the concentration camp at Treblinka. Initially, their commander told them that this was a difficult mission which must be obeyed by the battalion but any individual could refuse to execute these men, women and children. Records indicate that at first about half the men refused and let the others do the mass murder. But over time, social modeling processes took their toll, as did any guilt-induced persuasion by buddies who did the killing, until at the end up to 90 percent of the men in Battalion 101 were involved in the shootings, even proudly taking photographs of their up-close and personal killing of Jews.
Browning makes clear that there was no special selection of these men, only that they were as "ordinary" as can be imagined -- until they were put into a situation in which they had “official” permission and encouragement to act sadistically and brutishly against those arbitrarily labeled as the “enemy.” Let’s go from the abstract to the personal: Imagine it was your father shooting to death a helpless mother and her infant child, and then imagine his answer to your question, “Why did you do it, daddy?”
The Spurious Creation of Evil Terrorists and Spread of National Fears Leading to the War on Iraq
Fast forward to our time, our nation, and the fears of terrorism instilled by the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers since that unforgettable day of September 11, 2001. The initial press and official reaction was to label the perpetrators of this horrific deed, as “hijackers,” “murderers,” “criminals.” Soon the label changed to “terrorists” and their deeds described as “evil.” “Evil” became the coin of the realm of the media and the administration, being used with ever more frequency and with an ever widening net of inclusiveness. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9-11, was the first culprit designated as evil. But when he proved elusive and escaped from the war zone in Afghanistan, it became necessary for the administration’s war on terrorism campaign to put a new face and a new place on terrorism. Of course, terrorism which works its generation of fear and anxiety by being faceless and placeless. Several countries were labeled by our president as the “axis of evil,” with the leader of one of those countries, Iraq, designated as so evil that he, Saddam Hussein, had to be removed from power by all means necessary.
A propaganda campaign was created to justify a pre-emptive war against his regime by identifying the clear and imminent threat to the national security of the United States posed by the alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) this evil leader had at his disposal. Then a link was erected between him and terrorist networks to whom he would sell or gift these WMD. Over time, many Americans began to believe the falsehoods that Saddam Hussein: was involved in the 9-11 terrorist attacks; was in complicity with Osama bin Laden, and had operationally ready an arsenal of deadly weapons that threatened U. S. security and well being. Magazine images, newspaper accounts, and vivid TV stories contributed to the Evilization of Saddam Hussein over the course of one year.
The vulnerability to terrorism that Americans continued to experience personally and deeply -- in part sustained and magnified by the administration’s issuing of repeated (false) alarms of imminent terrorist attacks on the homeland – was relieved by going to war. The public and Congress strongly supported a symmetrical war to rid Iraq of the feared WMD, and destroy Hussein’s evil menace. Thus, the United States for the first time in its history believed it was justified in waging an aggressive war that cost billions of dollars, untold thousands of deaths of soldiers and civilians, totally destroyed a nation, weakened the UN, and may enmesh the U. S. in a long, Vietnam-like “no exit” scenario.
When no WMD were uncovered despite the alleged best intelligence reports and aerial photos of them presented by the Secretary of State to the UN, collective cognitive dissonance has maintained the belief that it was still a necessary and good war against evil (Festinger, 1957). Who cares what the truth really is about the deceptive reasons for going to war if the United States is now safer, and their president is a commander-in-chief of decisive action -- as his image crafters have craftily depicted in the media. This national mind control experiment deserves careful documenting by unbiased social historians for the current and future generations to appreciate the power of images, words and framing that can lead a democratic nation to support and even relish in the unthinkable evil of an aggressive WAR.