Ordinary people do heroic things
do good, ordinary people sometimes become perpetrators of evil? The
most extreme transformation of this kind is the story of God’s
favourite angel, Lucifer – a story that has set the context for my
psychological investigations into lesser human transformations in
response to the corrosive influence of powerful situational forces.
forces exist in many common behavioural contexts, distorting our usual
good nature by pushing us to engage in deviant, destructive or evil
behaviour. When embedded in unfamiliar settings, our habitual ways of
thinking, feeling and acting no longer sustain our moral compass.
Over
the past three decades, my research and that of my colleagues has
demonstrated the relative ease with which ordinary people can be led to
behave in ways that qualify as evil. We put participants in experiments
where situational forces – anonymity, group pressures or diffusion of
personal responsibility – led them blindly to obey authority and to
aggress against innocent others after dehumanising them.
My
recent book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn
Evil, describes the radical transformations that took place among
college students playing randomly assigned roles of prisoners and
guards in a mock prison created at Stanford University. It goes on to
establish direct parallels with the abuses committed by American
soldiers at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, presenting much of the
social-science research illustrating the power of social situations to
dominate individual dispositions.
This body of work challenges
the traditional focus on the individual’s inner nature, dispositions
and personality traits as the primary – often the sole – factors in
understanding human failings. Instead, I argue that while most people
are good most of the time, they can readily be led to act antisocially,
because most people are rarely solitary figures.
On the
contrary, people are often in an ensemble of different players, on a
stage of life with various props, costumes, scripts and stage
directions from producers and directors. Together, they comprise
situational features that can dramatically influence behaviour. What
individuals bring into any setting is important, but so are the
situational forces that act on them, as well as the systemic forces
that create situations.
Most institutions invested in an
individualistic orientation hold up the person as sinner, culpable,
afflicted, insane or irrational. Programmes of change follow either a
medical model of rehabilitation, re-education and treatment, or a
punitive model of incarceration and execution. All such programmes are
doomed to fail if the causal agent is the situation or system, not the
person.
As a result, two kinds of paradigm shift are required.
First, we need to adopt a public health model for prevention of
violence, abuse, bullying, prejudice and more that identifies vectors
of social disease to be inoculated against. Second, legal theory must
reconsider the extent to which powerful situational and systemic
factors should be taken into account in punishment.
Although
much of The Lucifer Effect examines how easy it is for ordinary people
to be seduced into engaging in evil deeds, or to be passively
indifferent to the suffering of others, the deeper message is a
positive one. By understanding the how and why of such deeds, we are in
a better position to uncover, oppose, defy and triumph over them.
In this sense, The Lucifer Effect is a celebration of the human capacity to choose kindness over cruelty, cari
ng over indifference, creativity over destructiveness
and heroism over villainy. At its end, I invite readers to consider
fundamental strategies of resisting and challenging unwanted social
influences, and I introduce the notion of "the banality of heroism".
After all, most heroes are ordinary people who engage in extraordinary
moral actions.
With this in mind, I propose a situational
perspective for heroism, just as I do for evil: the same situation that
can inflame the hostile imagination and evil in some of us can inspire
the heroic imagination in others. We must teach people, especially
children, to think of themselves as "heroes-in-waiting", ready to take
heroic action in a situation that may occur once in their lifetime.
• Philip Zimbardo is emeritus professor of psychology at Stanford University. Details at www.lucifereffect.com
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Published Date:
02 February 2008 -
Source:
The Scotsman
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Location:
Scotland - Related Topics:
Scientist 