Archive for December, 2009
The most peaceful period in history
Tags: 2005, Al-Qaeda, America, Cold War, History, Hunter Gatherer, North Korea, Peace, Pre-history, Steve Pinker, Ted Robert Gurr, Ted Talks, Violence, WWI, WWII
The news brings us almost daily reports about bombs exploding, attacks in remote parts of the world or security breaches close to home.
In a world that seems so threatening, full of hatred and war, we might wonder what the most peaceful times were in human existence, and what we can learn from them to stem the violence.
You’d be surprised to learn that the most peaceful period ever recorded in human history is… right now.
Harvard’s Steve Pinker argues that if people had behaved in the 20th Century as they did in the Bible, several billion people would have died in war, not several hundred million. There are more people alive today, meaning that the raw numbers of deaths are higher, but people are fundamentally far less violent and in percentage terms violence has continually decreased significantly since the enlightenment.
The below graphics shows death caused by rival humans amongst the hunter gatherer tribes in pre-history (as per fossil evidence) and the lowest bar shows deaths as a percentage of human population in the 20th century including WWI and WWII:
Source: Steve Pinker, A brief history of violence lecture
Ted Robert Gurr and a team of scholars at the University of Maryland‘s Center for International Development and Conflict Management analyzed all data available on historical conflicts and game to the conclusion that:
the general magnitude of global warfare has decreased by over 60% [since the mid 1980s], falling by the end of 2004 to its lowest level since the late 1950s
The decline of violence from the 1950s to 2005:
Source: The Human Security Brief
After World War II, a war weary world experienced a growing peace that reached its peak in the late 1950s. Then the Cold War spurred on violence accross the globe. Although only two mighty forces were at odds with each other, the US and the Soviet Union, they ignited wars in various countries. These were called proxy wars. From the Greek civil war to Korea, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, wars were fought by extension, because the two forces could not face each other directly. A nuclear war would have been too devastating.
But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, a period of peace settled over the world that is unprecedented.
The decline of violence from 2002 – 2006:
Source: The Human Security Brief
As you can see, the trend keeps continuing.
Why do we believe there is so much violence now?
Better access to media
24 hour news has clouded the reality of ever rising peace, instead creating a constant hyperbole. The constant media hype also masks the fact that crime is at is lowest level in history.
Cognitive illusion
In psychology, it is said that the easier it is to remember incidents, the more probable we think its re-occurrence will be. This is why when I traveled the London tubes after the 7 /7 train bombings, I saw virtually no-one on the underground. As the memory faded, and memories of safe transport became more common place, the carriages gradually filled. I saw a documentary here in the US that claimed the British people were indomitable and started to use the Tube right away, but from personal experience I can tell you that this was simply not the case.
For the same reason, when there was a dodged attempt to bring an airplane down this Christmas, President Obama had to step in and promise to raise security. This was as much to counteract the effects of cognitive psychology than to assure people of long lasting improvements in safety standards (in my humble opinion).
Opinion and advocacy markets and political fear mongering
Political actors and fund raisers abuse the news cycle to inspire fear in the hearts of their constituents and recruit them to march under their banner.
It is pretty hard for advocacy group to continue to raise money under the banner: ‘things are getting better all the time’. Instead, marketers know that in order to arouse people from a laissez-faire mentality, a sense of urgency needs to be created: ‘we need to turn this awful tide’.
But none of it resembles a morsel of truth.
Guilt
We live with the heavy historical burden of guilt about parts of our history: war mongering, slavery and abuse or genocide of native people. As integration expands, we feel this tricky past more acutely, as it is used in part to rightly explain current socio-economic disparities and thus has become a political tool.
The incongruence between the rise of moral standards and human behavior
As our moral standards rise, we judge occurrences of injustice more harshly, as we should. As a result, our current justice system seems to be failing our moral standards daily, as it does, but we forget that in previous times, people expected nothing more of the ‘Kings justice’ than a 10 minute trial followed by a burning on the stake.
With rising moral standards we also emotionally mature. When Jesus Christs commands us to be more ‘like these children’ we find his statement confusing. Children can be cruel, tie firecrackers to cats’ tales or bully others, destroy reputations with gossip and can be petty. Early man however was more like an ‘innocent’ child in his moral awareness, and committed rather similar acts, from throwing cats of bell towers, lowering them in fire for public amusement or indulging in terrible gossip about people that were different from them. Christ more likely referred to the innocence of children in relation to their ability to keep a sense of wonder than that he meant to imply we should admire their moral values.
A sense of anti-Westernism amongst Westerners
The aformentioned incongruence between the rise of moral standards and human behavior in Western societies can cause us to become blasé about our culture. We forget that there is no more affluent or peaceful alternative society on Earth. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continuously strive for improvement.
The human need to excel
Humans are as lazy as they are ambitious. There are two great passions in the human soul: idleness (derived from our instinctual need to preserve energy for the next big hunting and gathering session) and the need to always want more, an eternal ‘the grass is greener on the other side’ attitude that has driven so much of human progress. We are continuously striving for an utopia. Some psychologists associate this with a deep embedded wish for a return to the womb: a place of absolute security and nurture.
As a result, we have a constant attitude that what we have is not enough. This attitude is exacerbated by modern marketing, that gives a constant sense that we don’t have everything we need. This attitude spurs growth and innovation, but can at times lead us to unfairly judge our current circumstances.
Why has peace gone viral?
Preemptive wars and the logic of anarchy
Thomas Schelling gives us a simple example: a burglar enters a house. The occupier catches him in the act. Being good Americans, both have guns. The average human being doesn’t want to kill, but both reason that they have to kill the other before the other kills them, the simple logic of self preservation.
Nations think much along the same lines, because their rulers and citizens are driven by the same instinctual reasoning. The best defense is offense, they argue, and preemptive wars result.
When Theodore Roosevelt argued that the path to peace is to ‘carry a big stick and talk softly’, he might have seemed to be self serving according to some observers, but he wasn’t entirely wrong. The policy of deterrence is an evolution of the idea of preemptive war, where a nation keeps an army large enough to avenge all infringements on its territory or citizens. The next evolution was measured response, which means avenging wrong-doings in a measured way (an eye for an eye as opposed to a life for an eye). This reduced the possibility of an endless cycle of retaliatory violence. This evolution was necessary because of the statistical likelihood of smaller armies winning over larger armies, a counter-intuitive concept, but one that is very real and therefore required calculating in. Perfect examples are the Vietnam war, the Guezen in Flanders and the American revolution.
Malcolm Gladwell illustrates this reality in his question: why do underdogs win so often:
Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
The reason behind this is, he argues, because the Goliaths of this world often play by a set of rules unknown to them. If an underdog can understand their rule book and find the loopholes, the underdog can use their logic against them. They often avoid direct confrontation, refuse to offer themselves as a target, instead act as a virus, attacking where least expected, draining the resources of the opponent while remaining illusive themselves. Weighing on the weakness of your opponent, can lead to spectacular results. Strength in numbers is vastly overrated, instead the trick appears to be to not overstretch, not to blindly use scarce resources and not to present an obvious target, causing the enemy to have to thin out their armies not knowing where the next attack will come from. This eventually leads to exhaustion and collapse of the enemy army.
During his Nobel prize acceptance speech, President Obama tried to make a case that the absence of war doesn’t always lead to peace and tried to articulate and justify a difficult balance between the capacity for war in its relationship with the potential for peace:
Seeing his speech in terms of what we’ve learned about Goliaths historic impotence at times, we can appreciate the difficult decisions he had to make: wage a war of soldiers vs a war of secret intelligence (the latter so far being the only thing that has kept us safe from the most devastating terrorist acts while the former only relocated terrorist bases to 6 other countries)? You can read a further opinion in the blog post ‘How the enemy needs war to stay alive’.
Wealth and moral awareness
In wealthy societies, peace is vital for economic growth. On an instinctual level all of us understand this: we are well fed and live relative comfortable lives, and the perceived way to insure this continues is by going on with our business, not fighting another war. This makes peace and justice a valuable commodity and through the psychological powers of projection, we start negatively evaluating every instance of violence and injustice. As a result, we become more sensitive about the use of any type of tribal warfare or racism, which could upset the balance of society and our comfortable lives. Equally, institutions such as the death penalty come under attack, as we empathise with innocent victims in the legal system, the unfair socio-demographic and racial imbalance in the prison system and its corresponding threat to social balance.
This was argued by the political scientist James Payne.
On the other hand, racism can be spurred by the desire to keep economic balance as well, as some seem to identify socio-economic imbalances with historical factors such as slavery, inequality and wars, and instead suspect there is a character flaw in certain races. Equally, fear can lead to intolerance, as the behavior of certain actors can be seen to undermine society and social cohesion.
Non zero sum gain
Robert Wright postulated in the framework of game theory and economic theory a situation in which a participant’s gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.
As a result, war makes no sense, because it decreases the gains to be had by trade, therefore trade is valued as a bigger win than war. This explains the current peaceful period as aided by economic and technological development.
As Wright put it:
Among the many reasons that we should not bomb the Japanese is that they built my mini-van.
Take it from the horse’s mouth:
A sense of community
Humans are endowed with a sense of community. That sense in early human stages did not exceed beyond one’s own immediate family, but grew over time to include the tribe, the village, the nation, one’s own sexes, other species (see the movement for animal rights) and so on. The embrace of empathy amongst humans is ever increasing, much as it does during the stages of individual human development, and empathy reduces the level to which we can dehumanize ‘he who is different from us’, instead we sympathize with their fortunes and pains to an extend that is unprecedented in human history.
This is likely to have happened due to increasing interaction with other humans and the realization of commonly shared conditions and values. Trade, cosmopolitanism, fiction, journalism and a whole heap of other forces have made us more acutely aware of our shared common humanity.
Benjamin Franklin never thought of the slaves as equal until he went to a school for minorities and realized that they could be absorb information as well as white kids. This caused a profound change in his opinion of black people. A similar experience caused a shift in the attitudes of John Quincy Adams and slowly rippled through society.
The decline of authority
In Biblical times authority was far more embedded in society. Speaking out against the King had the legal punishment of death attached to it. Speaking out against your parents did too. With such powers invested in authorities, people were more apt to follow. This was a natural state, as lack of science gave enormous powers to state and religion, the only tools to exercise some control over the random events of life. These two forces, religion and state, competed for power. With the rise of corporations, interest groups, institutions, individual economic independence and the rise of control over our environment through the advancement of science and the resulting technological revolutions, power is much more diluted, and authorities worldwide and in particular in the developed world find it harder to mobilize public opinion.
We aren’t there yet
None of this means that we should rest on our laurels, but it does indicate that we are moving in a gainful direction. Numbers and statistics are a poor quantifier of evil, as evil is in the deed, not the quantity. But numbers do reflect the effectiveness of the remedies we experiment with.
Nor does this article dare to claim that we are on a path to eradicating war. There have been periods in history of relative calm before, only to melt down in a spectacular explosion of violence.
Instead, as the pendulum inevitably swings, we should be critical of our society, but not throw away the child with the bath water and instead also learn to appreciate the lessons of what went right in our society.
Steve Pinker in his own words
I’ve added some theories to Steve Pinker’s expose, so in the spirit of fairness, here is Steve in his own words:
Tags: 2005, Al-Qaeda, America, Cold War, History, Hunter Gatherer, North Korea, Peace, Pre-history, Steve Pinker, Ted Robert Gurr, Ted Talks, Violence, WWI, WWII
Is man essentially good or evil?
Tags: 1963, 1971, 2004, Abu Ghraib, Cruelty, Derren Brown, Disobedience, Evil, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Good, Milgram experiment, Obedience, Philip Zimbardo, Prison, Psychology, Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanford University, Stanley Milgram, War
The eternal question
The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.
- Philip Zimbardo
Nothing is easier than to denounce the evil doer; nothing more difficult than understanding him.
- Dostoevsky
(Click image to enlarge) Some see angels, some see demons in this illustration by MC Escher, a modern day Ying Yang.
Privileged people tend to think of good and evil as separate worlds, but Zimbardo argues that the boundaries between the world of good and evil is far more gradual.
Zimbardo notes that the prerequisite to evil is power – without it, evil cannot exercise itself and as a result rarely manifests in human behavior.
Three things appear to need to happen before evil can truly present itself in the general healthy human: permission (from group or higher authority), ability (power and a lack of fear of retaliation), an ‘us against them’ philosophy (dehumanization). Given these three conditions, the actor might not even view his or her behavior as evil, and be completely unaware of acting outside of a higher moral standard that is more inclusive of all beings.
The human capacity for evil deeds
Zimbardo illustrates his hypothesis by pointing at various psychological experiments.
The Milgram Experiment
First, he shows us the research of Stanley Milgram in 1963. Milgram wanted to find out if the holocaust could occur again in America. The question he asked was: “would you electrocute a stranger if Hitler asked you to?”
Disguising his research as an experiment to test peoples abilities to memorize, he published an ad and accepted 1,000 ordinary people to take part.
Milgram’s original ad:
A experimenter is asked to administer a shock to a student for each question he gets wrong.
In each session, three people take part in the experiment: the “experimenter”; the “learner” (“victim”); and the “teacher” (participant). Only the “teacher” is an actual participant, i.e., unaware about the actual setup, while the “learner” is a confederate of the experimenter. The role of the experimenter was played by a stern, impassive biology teacher dressed in a grey technician’s coat, and the victim (learner) was played by a 47-year-old Irish-American accountant trained to act for the role. The participant and the learner were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment helping his study of memory and learning in different situations.
The subject was given the title teacher, and the confederate, learner. The participants drew lots to ‘determine’ their roles. Unknown to them, both slips said “teacher”, and the actor claimed to have the slip that read “learner”, thus guaranteeing that the participant would always be the “teacher”. At this point, the “teacher” and “learner” were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a heart condition.
The “teacher” was given an electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the “learner” would supposedly receive during the experiment. The “teacher” was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.
The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.
At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.
If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:
- Please continue.
- The experiment requires that you continue.
- It is absolutely essential that you continue.
- You have no other choice, you must go on.
If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession
The study is all about the power of institutions. What if all authority was handed to an authoritative few, how many would follow him?
Results of the Milgram Experiment
Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2%) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.
In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Only one participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks below the 300-volt level.
Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, “The Perils of Obedience”, writing:
The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.
Quoted from Milgram, Stanley. (1974), ”The Perils of Obedience.” Harper’s Magazine. Abridged and adapted from Obedience to Authority.
The BBC reprised the Milgram Experiment:
The Milgram Experiment in popular culture:
Derren Brown subconsciously influences middle management business men and women with no previous criminal record to pull an armed robbery without ever directly mentioning the idea to them.
The Stanford Prison Experiment
| The Stanford Prison Experiment |
The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard, conducted by Zimbardo himself in 1971. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Roles were assigned at random.
The “prison” itself was in the basement of Stanford’s Jordan Hall, which had been converted into a mock jail. An undergraduate research assistant was the “warden” and Zimbardo the “superintendent”. Zimbardo set up a number of specific conditions on the participants which he hoped would promote disorientation, depersonalisation and deindividualisation.
The researchers provided weapons—wooden batons — and clothing that simulated that of a prison guard—khaki shirt and pants from a local military surplus store. They were also given mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact.
Prisoners wore ill-fitting smocks and stocking caps, rendering them constantly uncomfortable. Guards called prisoners by their assigned numbers, sewn on their uniforms, instead of by name. A chain around their ankles reminded them of their roles as prisoners.
The researchers held an “orientation” session for guards the day before the experiment, during which they were told that they could not physically harm the prisoners. In The Stanford Prison Study video, quoted in Haslam & Reicher, 2003, Zimbardo is seen telling the guards, “You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy… We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”
The participants chosen to play the part of prisoners were “arrested” at their homes and “charged” with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots. At the prison, they were transported to the mock prison where they were strip-searched and given their new identities.
The experiment quickly grew out of hand. Prisoners suffered — and accepted — sadistic and humiliating treatment from the guards. The high level of stress progressively led them from rebellion to inhibition. By the experiment’s end, many showed severe emotional disturbances.
After a relatively uneventful first day, a riot broke out on the second day. The guards volunteered to work extra hours and worked together to break the prisoner revolt, attacking the prisoners with fire extinguishers without supervision from the research staff.
A false rumor spread that one of the prisoners, who asked to leave the experiment, would lead companions to free the rest of the prisoners. The guards dismantled the prison and moved the inmates to another secure location. When no breakout attempt occurred, the guards were angry about having to rebuild the prison, so they took it out on the prisoners.
Guards forced the prisoners to count off repeatedly as a way to learn their prison numbers, and to reinforce the idea that this was their new identity. Guards soon used these prisoner counts as another method to harass the prisoners, using physical punishment such as protracted exercise for errors in the prisoner count. Sanitary conditions declined rapidly, made worse by the guards refusing to allow some prisoners to urinate or defecate. As punishment, the guards would not let the prisoners empty the sanitation bucket. Mattresses were a valued item in the spartan prison, so the guards would punish prisoners by removing their mattresses, leaving them to sleep on concrete. Some prisoners were forced to go nude as a method of degradation, and some were subjected to sexual humiliation, including simulated sodomy.
Zimbardo cited his own absorption in the experiment he guided, and in which he actively participated as Prison Superintendent. On the fourth day, some prisoners were talking about trying to escape. Zimbardo and the guards attempted to move the prisoners to the more secure local police station, but officials there said they could no longer participate in Zimbardo’s experiment.
Several guards became increasingly cruel as the experiment continued. Experimenters said that approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early.
Zimbardo argued that the prisoner participants had internalized their roles, based on the fact that some had stated that they would accept parole even with the attached condition of forfeiting all of their experiment-participation pay. Yet, when their parole applications were all denied, none of the prisoner participants quit the experiment. Zimbardo argued they had no reason for continued participation in the experiment after having lost all monetary compensation, yet they did, because they had internalized the prisoner identity, they thought themselves prisoners, hence, they stayed.
Prisoner No. 416, a newly admitted stand-by prisoner, expressed concern over the treatment of the other prisoners. The guards responded with more abuse. When he refused to eat his sausages, saying he was on a hunger strike, guards confined him in a closet and called it solitary confinement. The guards used this incident to turn the other prisoners against No. 416, saying the only way he would be released from solitary confinement was if they gave up their blankets and slept on their bare mattresses, which all but one refused to do.
Zimbardo concluded the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student he was then dating (and later married), objected to the appalling conditions of the prison after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that of more than fifty outside persons who had seen the prison, Maslach was the only one who questioned its morality. After only six days of a planned two weeks’ duration, the Stanford Prison experiment was shut down.
The Stanford experiment ended on August 20, 1971, only six days after it began instead of the fourteen it was supposed to have lasted. The experiment’s result has been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. It is also used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority.
In psychology, the results of the experiment are said to support situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants’ behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities. In this way, it is compatible with the results of the also-famous Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be damaging electric shocks to a confederate of the experimenter.
The entire experiment was filmed, with excerpts soon made publicly available, leaving some disturbed by the resulting film.
Correlations with terror in Abu Ghraib
When the Abu Ghraib military prisoner torture and abuse scandal was published in March 2004, many observers immediately were struck by its similarities to the Stanford Prison experiment — among them, Philip Zimbardo, who paid close attention to the details of the story. He was dismayed by official military and government efforts shifting the blame for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison on to “a few bad apples” rather than acknowledging it as possibly systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration system.
I must say, when I saw those pictures on 20/20—on 60 minutes, I, excuse me, the pictures of the abuse. I was shocked the way most people are. Of course I saw the parallels immediately with the Stanford Prison Experiment, visual images. And immediately what happened was, what always happens when there is a scandal in police departments, or in the military, they blame the individual, it’s a few bad apples. The fact that the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or I guess General Myers said we know it’s not systemic. Well, so I said maybe it’s not bad apples, maybe these are really good American soldiers and they were put in a bad barrel, but how would I know?
When I was invited to be on Chip Frederick’s Defense council—team, it meant I had access to him, I could find out everything there was to know about this young man, everything there was to know about the place and the psychological dynamics of the prison. I had access to all the investigative reports. And so in The Lucifer Effect, I have two whole chapters on what Abu Ghraib really was like and what the situation was like. What was the system? What was the military and Bush administration system that created those horrendous conditions? And so, I testified, essentially talking about how the situation he was in and the other seven soldiers were in, in the basement of that dungeon, how that corrupted him and made him lose his moral compass.
He was dishonorable discharged, he got eight years in prison, they send him to Kuwait in solitaire confinement. They took away 22 years of his retirement pay. This is an all American, super patriotic soldier; he had nine medals and awards, which he really prized. And they stripped him publicly to humiliate him. He’s now in a prison in Leavenworth.
I still have personal contact with him and his family. The sad thing is, the day before he went down to that prison, from everything I know, he was normal, healthy, exactly like one of the good guards in our study. Within a few days, maybe a few weeks actually, he and the other military army reservists. Now, these are not real soldiers, these are military police, these are army reservists, who have no mission specific training, they are not trained to do this job.
He was a guard in a small prison in the states. He now is in charge of a thousand prisoners. Sixty Iraqi police men who are smuggling in weapons, the place is under constant bombardment. Soldiers are dying, prisoners are dying. He’s working a 12-hour shift, seven days a week, 40 days without a day off. Incredible. How could anybody, how could any system allow American soldiers to be under that kind of stress? He and the other soldiers just gave in to the horrors of that situation.
Philip Zimbardo
Environmental conditions and personal responsibility
My analysis is, individuals are always ultimately personally responsible. He and most of the other military police said, I’m guilty—well, they had to say it, because they’re in the pictures, what I call the trophy photos. He is willing to accept punishment. The situational analysis says, we should limit the extent of the punishment, because these are extreme mitigating circumstances. And what I do in The Lucifer Effect, and I have a wonderful website, we just put up called www. lucifereffect.com, we put the system on trial. To say, if you’re going to put these soldiers, these good American soldiers on trial for what they did, my argument has been, the people who create this corrupting situation, they have to be put on trial, too. So, I have a virtual voting booth in which I put George Tenant on trial, the former Head of the CIA, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and President Bush. Because, in various ways, they created that situation which corrupted these good American young men and women.
Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
Zimbardo outlines the 7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil:
- Mindlessly taking the first small step
- Dehumanization of Others
- De-individuation of the Self (anonymity)
- Diffusion of Personal Responsibility
- Blind obedience to authority
- Uncritical Conformity to group norms
- Passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference.
These 7 elements were applied in Abu Ghraib, and according to Zimbardo it can come as no surprise that the abuses occurred. They are applied in almost every major war.
He uses the Stanford Experiment to illustrate the point:
Well, there are two things about a prison. One is the physical aspects of it. So we took a basement, which were offices that students usually used. We took off the doors, put new doors on with bars. Took a closet and converted it to solitary confinement, meaning a small, tight, dark space, which had a label on “The Hole”. We had quarters where the guards came and changed. I was the superintendent of the prison. We had a warden, David Jaffe, a student in his office. We had a place where visitors could come. We had a place where we would have parole board hearings.
So we created a very—simulated physical environment. And at one end of the hall we had a little window that we could look through watching what was happening with a TV camera. It was covered with theatrical scrims, so they never knew when they were being observed and when they were being filmed. The psychology—psychological aspect of a prison is more subtle.
Before I began the experiment, I taught a summer course at Stanford called, The Psychology of Imprisonment with Carlo Prescott, he was both the consultant to my study and a young man who had just been released from prison after 17 years. So, he was our consultant, but also he was the head of the parole board. Ironically his parole had been denied for 17 previous years.
And what we wanted to do was create essential psychology of imprisonment, and that’s all about power. Every prison is about power. Guards have to assume more and more power and domination, and prisoners have to have their power stripped away. And so that is the ultimate evil of prison. It’s all about power, dominance, and mastery. And that was the same thing we found in Abu Ghraib prison.
But also—so the way that power evolves is, the prisoners have to be ultimately dehumanized. You have to think of them as not your kind, not your kin, as—ultimately you end up thinking of them as animals. And the guards have to be impersonal, distant. Whatever humanity they have when they are home, when they are with their families, that has to be suspended, put on a hook. Because, what they have to do is treat other people in ways that they don’t treat anyone else, those are the people being prisoners.
And so, we’re talking about playing a role, anonymity, dehumanization, and then of course there’s things like being a team member, the guards have to develop a sense of camaraderie. Most of the evil of the world comes about not out of evil motives, but somebody saying get with the program, be a team player, this is what we saw at Enron, this is what we saw in the Nixon administration with their scandal. And I think you are seeing it now, with the current administration.
So, it’s that set of social psychological variables. Oh, the key one is of course diffusion of responsibility. When a person feels, I am not personally responsible, I am not accountable, it’s the role I’m playing or these are the orders I’ve gotten, then you allow yourself to do things you would never do under ordinary circumstances.
So, it’s that mix of the physical environment, psychological environment, which came to be overwhelming. By overwhelming, I mean that, each day the guards would escalate their level of abuse, so that initially it was doing push ups, waking prisoners up in the middle of the night, long counts. Then it got to be personal humiliation. Cursing the guards, and having them curse each other, then finally it devolved into sexually degrading games.
Conclusion: Are humans good or evil?
The answer, as you might suspect, is neither. Apart from a tiny few with criminal or psychopathic tendencies, we all live within a social norm that deeply affects us. Some humans are better at withstanding social pressures to commit evil acts, such as the soldier who finally informed the media about the abuse in Abu Ghraib.
We cannot be good and moral beings if we don’t question who we are and question the values that society places upon us. Do these values truly deliver good results, or can they be oppressive onto others? This takes a lot of introspection, and the training of an eternal muscle that can withstand peer pressure.
Nor can we build a society of morally enlightened people if we don’t question the systems that creates attitudes and maintains them.
Moral good comes from two directions: from the top down and from the inside out. If the two forces aren’t somehow aligned, something will break along the line, and evil will manifest itself.
Compassion for ‘evil-doers’ becomes something entirely different in this light: it is the courage to hold people responsible for their acts, while taking them out or changing an environment that negatively affects them. Compassion then becomes giving them a chance, literally ‘changing their lives’ by changing their environment through our actions.
Zimbardo in his own words:
This dark talk might lead us to believe that humans are somehow twisted, but the truth is that we no longer amuse ourselves with gladiator games and instead have found less destructive entertainment.
Tomorrow, a blog post of hope, as we analyze what we can learn from the most peaceful period in human history.
Tags: 1963, 1971, 2004, Abu Ghraib, Cruelty, Derren Brown, Disobedience, Evil, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Good, Milgram experiment, Obedience, Philip Zimbardo, Prison, Psychology, Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanford University, Stanley Milgram, War
Katyn
Tags: 1940, History, Katyn, Poland, Soviet Union, War, WWII
Silly intro – how we pick films
I have a habit of looking up highly rated films on MetaCritic, and then just watching them from highest to lowest rating. It is a great system, because you do get to watch great films from all over the world on an eclectic set of topics. This habit does unnerve Anna (my wife) who likes to know what she will be watching, so she tends to ask me for 5 film titles, does her research and then picks one out. Anna likes to be in the right mood to watch the film that compliments that mood.
Yesterday, the film du jours was Katyn. Having an unruly mind that pre-judges everything it comes in contact with, the title conjured up images of the life of a woman detailing her passage of rites.
I could not have been more wrong…
Katyn – the WWII massacre
In 1939 Poland succumbed to the twin invasions of Germany and Soviet Union, carving up the country between the two behemoths. The film Katyn starts with a scene on a bridge. One side tries to cross it attempting to get away from the German military machine, while the other side crosses it in a hope to escape the Soviet invasion. Panic and confusion arises when both groups realize they are trapped in a steadily closing vise.
Cut to Polish military officers who surrender to the Soviet Union. One of the officers remarks they surrendered to the wrong side, as the Russians never signed the Geneva convention. They are taken to a POW camp.
The film then follows the lives of their relatives, who learn that these 12,000 men were killed in a terrible massacre near the forest of Katyn. In the German occupied lands, this massacre unnerves the occupiers, fearing that this might lead to a violent uprising of the Polish people. They issue documentaries rightly accusing the Russians of callous murder and argue that the Polish people are safer under German occupation. They also express their condolences to the family members, then pressure them viciously in recording and signing anti-soviet statements, manufacturing hatred for the Russian occupiers on the other side and strengthening their grip on their part of the country.
1945 – Germany surrenders, and the Soviet forces flood over Poland. Recognizing the dangerous situation that has been created by the German public briefing on the massacre of Katyn, they issue propaganda attempting to blame the Germans for a mass murder although it happened in a Russian zone. The propaganda films, of which we see clips in the movie Katyn, are utterly unconvincing. They act only to stir up further hatred for the regime, which the Russians counter by suppressing the population mercilessly and extracting all hope for a successful revolution among the Polish, who still bitterly remember how no-one came to their rescue in ’39. The Polish people feel more and more fatalistic and inclined to cooperate with the occupiers.
The film then explores the lives of the relatives and friends of the murdered soldiers. Those most vocal are rounded up and disappear. Those who remain behind, try to protect themselves against Soviet prosecution, try to blend in, but are slowly hollowed out. The Russians re-ignite their propaganda, create new films and radio documentaries calling the Katyn massacre a German evil, and it inflames those families left behind again. We see their lives unraveling before our lives in self-destructive acts: a sister of one of the murdered soldiers attempts to erect a tombstone for her brother detailing the true events and is rounded up and asked to sign a statement that she saw proof it was a German massacre. Her passions betray her, she cannot submit to this governmental lie, and defies her captors. This act proves to be ultimately self-destructive, and she is locked up in a cell, deep underground, never to be heard of again.
A pragmatic Polish soldier enlists in the Soviet army, recognizing that if you can’t beat them, you must join them. In his capacity as a Soviet major, he attempts to help where he can, in his own way protecting the Polish people by shielding them from Russian aggression and taking on the role of mediator. It is a difficult yet heroic role that leaves him despised by both sides. He desperately attempts to spare others of the fate that the women we mentioned in the last paragraph had to suffer, trying to give relatives a middle road, in which they can move on instead of unleasing the Soviet wrath. But instead he ends up alienated from the Polish people, who see him as a traitor, and in his despair, and the growing conflict in his soul created by serving the perpetrator of this crime, he ends up committing suicide.
The film details many more of these stories, including a General’s wife who seems to be able to accept the futility of rebellion while privately hanging on to her hatred and contempt.
It ends with the protagonist, a wife of a Polish lieutenant, receiving the diary of her husband, detailing his last moments.
Here, the film that had a previously confusing storyline, really becomes great. It shows us the sheer ruthlessness and viciousness of war in its uncensored horror.
We follow the lieutenant on his trip to Katyn, where the 12,000 soldiers disembark, wagon by wagon. For 10 long minutes, we are witness to all the soldiers that we have come to love and respect in the film being slaughtered, one by one. The scene is all the more harrowing because of the mechanical nature of the executions. The soldiers are lulled into a belief that they are going to a cell, stripped of all their valuables, bound, taken into a room where a one sentence trial is read out and then shot through the head. Then their bodies are shipped via a slide to a truck that takes them to a mass grave. The scene shows the Russians getting more and more ‘efficient’ in their slaughter, slowly changing the process in order to deal with the mammoth numbers required in the execution. The trial is skipped, eventually the doomed are simply driven to the grave and shot inside of it.
As you watch this protracted scene, you cannot help but crawl up in your chair in sheer horror. I wondered how these soldiers could execute so many as if they were animals?
It dawned on me that the very armies that we create to protect ourselves are the very danger that we put upon ourselves. These men were selected, trained, desensitized and educated to become sheer killing machines. An environment and reasoning was created for them to no longer see the enemy as human, but even less then animals.
But how can humans be so cruel and inhumane towards each other? That topic we explore in our next blog topic: Are humans good or evil?
It’s only 2 days after X-mas and already it’s weird to sit on a stranger’s lap and ask for gifts!
David Bowie the Comedian
Tags: David Bowie, Humor, Video, YouTube
Two very funny David Bowie interviews. Discovered quite by accident, but worth it.
Tags: David Bowie, Humor, Video, YouTube
A President Caught Skinny Dipping
Tags: 1826, American Presidents, Anecdotes, Anne Royall, Humor, John Quincy Adams
John Quincy Adams
Skinny dipping became something of a tradition among American Presidents. Harry Truman was a fan, and so was Lyndon Johnson. In that list belongs John Quincy Adams, an enthusiastic swimmer, who used to go skinny dipping in the Potomac before starting work.
Anne Royall, considered by many the first female journalist in the U.S., felt ignored by Adams. When she heard about his habit to go skinny dipping, she tracked the President down, hid herself out of view, and waited patiently for the President to enter the water. Once Adams was submerged, she quickly positioned herself on his clothes.
When Adams returned, he looked puzzled at the very determined young lady. She announced her intention to have an interview with the President.
Adams suggested that if she let him get dressed first, he’d be happy to oblige. But Anne, sensing the opportunity, coolly replied she had no intention to move until the President answered all her questions to a satisfactory level. She also added that if the President dared getting out of the water she would scream out loud for all to hear. Adams, aware that there were some fishermen round the next bend, was nervous about the embarrassment this could cause.
Anne Royall got the interview of her life, while the President stayed decently submerged in the water throughout.
Tags: 1826, American Presidents, Anecdotes, Anne Royall, Humor, John Quincy Adams
Cat Fishing
Tags: Cat, Diary, Humor, Jezebelle, YouTube
Jezebelle, our cat, reaches under door for string. Watch the video:
Kindle
Tags: Status update
Got a Kindle for Christmas. It is a wonderful piece of technology, but don’t ever try swatting flies with it. You’ll still need a newspaper for that…
Tags: Status update
What is peace?
Tags: Lifestyle Experiment, Peace, Philosophy, Psychology, X-mas
Now that Christmas draws near, and everyone is talking about peace and good will, I wonder what peace really is?
Peace, it seems to me, is the calm in the storm, a moment of respite in an avalanche. It is a state that can last but a moment.
The same can be said for a peaceful soul: it isn’t that the life of a man at peace doesn’t experience the humdrum of daily life, but that the peaceful man resists being taken on a ride on the tiger’s back, and instead focuses with great clarity on the peace he wants in his life, eventually creating it, moment by moment, despite the humdrum. In as such, it is an inner state that can project itself upon the world around us.
Christmas reminds us that we all should be seeking peace and stability, seek to bring the chaos around us to its natural conclusion, whatever that may be. It reminds us that we are the masters of our lives and should not be set adrift by the constant changes around us, but instead work hard to understand the nature and stages of the things around us and bring it to a state that can endure: peace.
Tags: Lifestyle Experiment, Peace, Philosophy, Psychology, X-mas