The Lucifer Effect: Creating Difference to Justify Atrocity
01 Apr 2012 Leave a Comment
in Psychiatry/psychology Tags: dehumanization, deanimation, Philip Zimbardo, Stanford Prison Experiment, Abu Ghraib, ego defence, ego defense, self-deception, Holocaust
A U.S. government poster from World War II depicting a Japanese soldier as a rat.
The ego defence of dehumanization involves seeing other people as less or other than human so as not to have to think about them so much and/or feel guilty for neglecting or abusing them.
One simple example of dehumanization is that of a person who thinks of her partner or child as a pet or even a great teddy bear so as to better forgive his many failings.
Dehumanization is easier if the target people are marked out as being different, perhaps by age, gender, race, religion, social class, disability, sexual orientation, or even so little as a different style of dress. Thus, in everyday life, it is all too common to see people in uniform such as waiters, cleaners, bus drivers, and police officers being treated as mere automatons devoid of any such human attributes as feelings or families.
In April 2011, riots broke out in Bristol, England over the opening of a new supermarket. During the riots, one Benjamin Cyster dropped a five stone concrete block from the top of a building onto an advancing line of police officers. The block caught PC Nicholas Fry square on the shoulder, knocking him flat to the ground. Instead of expressing anguish or remorse, Cyster continued rioting, and even exclaimed, ‘I want to find that copper I hit on the head. I want to do it again.’ During Cyster’s trial (he received a total sentence of 11-and-a-half years), the court heard that Fry was recovering, but could not bring himself to tell his wife and three children about what Cyster had done to him for fear of upsetting them.
Diane Davies, a 62-year-old grandmother of nine from Anglesey in Wales, was holidaying in one of the most exclusive areas of Barbados. Then one day, in broad daylight, she was brutally raped by a complete stranger. One year on, in November 2011, she decided to talk about her ordeal in a national newspaper so as to expose the shabby treatment that she received from the island’s authorities. Of particular note is that she felt certain that she would have been killed had she not remembered reading that a victim of attempted rape should talk to the rapist so that he might see her as a person rather than as an object of gratification. ‘So I told him I was a 61-year-old grandmother with four children and nine grandchildren and felt he slightly softened. I think talking to him saved my life.’
Unfortunately, dehumanization is not limited to thugs and rapists, and may also be employed by supposedly decent, middle class people. For example, it is commonly employed by healthcare professionals to cope with distress at loss, grief, disease, and death – with patients being referred to by their diagnosis rather than by their name (‘the stroke in bed number 6’, ‘the fractured hip in the ER’…), or just being thought of in terms of a long line of faceless ‘patients’.
In the early 1970s, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo and his colleagues set up a mock prison with hidden cameras and microphones in the basement of Stanford University’s psychology building. The researchers selected 24 healthy, well adjusted undergraduate students, mostly white and middle class men, and randomly assigned them to the roles of either prisoner or guard. The ‘prisoners’ were to remain in the mock prison 24-hours a day, while the ‘guards’ were to ‘work’ in three-man teams over eight-hour shifts. The experiment – which, not surprisingly, has been heavily criticized for its ethics – had been due to run for 14 days, but had to be stopped after just six days due to the aggressive and abusive behaviour of the ‘guards’ and the extreme adverse psychological reactions of the ‘prisoners’, five of whom had had to be released early.
Even Zimbardo, who had been acting as the prison warden, had overlooked the dehumanizing behaviour of the guards until graduate student Christina Maslach voiced objections to him. In his subsequent book, The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo candidly looks back over the experiment and says, ‘Only a few people were able to resist the situational temptations to yield to power and dominance while maintaining some semblance of morality and decency; obviously I was not among that noble class.’ The Stanford Prison Experiment attracted a lot of interest after the horrific abuses that took place in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and is often upheld to demonstrate the important effect that situation can have on human behaviour.
Dehumanization is particularly common during times of war, when it may be incited by governments in a bid to prosecute, or quell opposition to, the war. If people can be seen as less than human, then they become dispensable, and any atrocity can be justified. Thus, Josef Goebbels, the Minister of ‘Public Enlightenment and Propaganda’ (Volksaufklärung und Propaganda)in Hitler’s Nazi regime, ruthlessly employed all contemporary methods of propaganda to inflame already existing anti-Semitic feelings. By pinning the blame for all the economic and social ills of the time on the Jewish people and then lampooning them as an ‘inferior race’, Goebbels prepared the ground for the progressive elimination of their rights and freedoms and, one thing leading to the next, for the mass genocide of the Holocaust.
Adapted from my new book, Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception
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Original Sin: The Psychology of Dishonesty
31 Mar 2012 1 Comment
in Psychiatry/psychology Tags: cheating, contemplation, dishonesty, experiment, free will, honesty, Kierkegaard, lying, Shalvi, time, truth
Are lying and cheating instinctive or calculating?
To answer this question, Shaul Shalvi and his colleagues set up an experiment in which volunteers were told that they could earn ten shekels (about $2.50) for each pip of the numeral that they rolled on a die. The volunteers were asked to check the outcome of the roll, to roll the die twice more to satisfy themselves that it was not loaded, and then to report the outcome of the original roll on a computer terminal. Half the volunteers were given no time limit in which to do this, whereas the other half were given a time limit of just 20 seconds.
If the volunteers had been completely honest, the average reported roll would have been 3.5 or thereabouts. The volunteers with just 20 seconds in which to complete the task reported an average roll of 4.6, whereas the volunteers with an unlimited amount of time reported an average roll of just 3.9, an important and statistically significant difference.
Although both groups lied, the group with more time for reflection lied considerably less. This finding was confirmed by a second, similar experiment in which volunteers were asked to roll the die just once and then to report the outcome. Half the volunteers were given no time limit, whereas the other half were given a time limit of just 8 seconds. The volunteers with the 8 second time limit reported an average roll of 4.4, compared to 3.4 for the volunteers with an unlimited amount of time. Note that, in this case, the volunteers with an unlimited amount of time actually told the truth.
These findings strongly suggest that lying and cheating are more instinctive than calculating: if people are given plenty of time to think over a problem, they are far more likely to come up with an honest answer. Or as the philosopher Kierkegaard put it,
Far from idleness being the root of all evil, it is rather the only true good.
Notes:
Shalvi S, Eldar O, & Bereby-Meyer Y (March 2012): Honesty requires time (and lack of justifications), Psychological Science.
Does True Altruism Exist?
28 Mar 2012 Leave a Comment
in Philosophy, Psychiatry/psychology
Altruism has been thought of as an ego defense, a form of sublimation in which a person copes with his anxiety by stepping outside himself and helping others. By focusing on the needs of others, people in altruistic vocations such as medicine or teaching may be able to permanently push their needs into the background, and so never have to address or even to acknowledge them. Conversely, people who care for a disabled or elderly person may experience profound anxiety and distress when this role is suddenly removed from them.
Altruism as an ego defence should be distinguished from true altruism—one being primarily a means to cover up uncomfortable feelings and the other being primarily a means to some external end such as alleviating hunger or poverty. However, many psychologists and philosophers have argued that there is, in fact, no such thing as true altruism. In The Dawn, the 19th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche maintains that that which is erroneously called ‘pity’ is not selfless but variously self-motivated.
Nietzsche is in effect agreeing with Aristotle who in the Rhetoric defines pity as a feeling of pain caused by a painful or destructive evil that befalls one who does not deserve it, and that might well befall us or one of our friends, and, moreover to befall us soon. Aristotle surmises that pity cannot be felt by those with absolutely nothing to lose, nor by those who feel that they are beyond all misfortune.
In an interesting and insightful aside, Aristotle adds that a person feels pity for those who are like him and for those with whom he is acquainted, but not for those who are very closely related to him and for whom he feels as he does for himself. Indeed, says Aristotle, the pitiful should not be confounded with the terrible: a man may weep at the sight of his friend begging, but not at that of his son being led to death.
Altruistic acts are self-interested, if not because they relieve anxiety, then perhaps because they lead to pleasant feelings of pride and satisfaction; the expectation of honor or reciprocation; or the greater likelihood of a place in heaven; and even if neither of the above, then at least because they relieve unpleasant feelings such as the guilt or shame of not having acted at all.
This argument has been attacked on various grounds, but most gravely on the grounds of circularity— altruistic acts are performed for selfish reasons, therefore they must be performed for selfish reasons. The bottom line, I think, is this. There can be no such thing as an ‘altruistic’ act that does not involve some element of self-interest, no such thing, for example, as an altruistic act that does not lead to some degree, no matter how small, of pride or satisfaction. Therefore, an act should not be written off as selfish or self-motivated simply because it includes some inevitable element of self-interest. The act can still be counted as altruistic if the ‘selfish’ element is accidental; or, if not accidental, then secondary; or, if neither accidental nor secondary, then undetermining.
Need this imply that Aristotle is incorrect in holding that pity cannot be felt by those with absolutely nothing to lose, or who feel that they are beyond all misfortune? Not necessarily—although an altruistic act is often driven by pity, this need not be the case, and altruism and pity should not be amalgamated and then confounded with each another. Thus, it is perfectly possible for someone lying on his deathbed and at the very brink of death, who is compos mentis and whose reputation is already greatly assured, to gift all or most of his fortune to some deserving cause, not out of pity, which he may or may not be beyond feeling, but simply because he thinks that, all things considered, it is the right thing to do. In fact, this goes to the very heart of ancient virtue, which can be defined as the perfection of our nature through the triumph of reason over passion. The truly altruistic act is the virtuous act and the virtuous act is, always, the rational act.
Adapted from my new book, Hide and Seek: The Psychology of Self-Deception
