Bruce Hood - The Self Illusion

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 psychology, 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. 36This 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, 37the 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. 39Again 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