FREEDOM OF MIND | Original PDF file
40
yale alumni magazi ne | january/fe bruary
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Philip Zimbardo ’59PhD
when
good
45 years ago, Stanley Milgram’s classic experiments showed that,
under orders, decent human beings will do anything.
do
e
v
il
people
pg_0002
to press the next switch. The control panel shows
both the voltage of each switch and a description.
The tenth level (150 volts) is “Strong Shock”; the
17th level (255 volts) is “Intense Shock ”; the 25th
level (375 volts) is “Danger, S evere Shock.” At the
29th and 30th levels (435 and 450 volts) the control
panel is m arked simply with an ominous X XX: the
pornography of ultim ate pain and power.
You and another volunteer draw straws to see
who will play e ach role; you are to be the teacher,
and the other volunteer will be the learner. He is a
mild-mannered, middle-age d man whom you help
escort to the nex t chamber. “Okay, now we are going
to set up the le arner so he can get some punishment,”
the experimenter tells you both. The le arner’s arms
are strapped down and an electrode is attached to
his right wrist. The generator in the nex t room will
deliver the shocks. The two of you communicate
over an intercom, with the experimenter standing
next to you. You get a sample shock of 45 volts—the
third level, a slight tingly pain—so you have a sense
of what the shock levels mean. The researcher then
signals you to start.
Initially, your pupil does well, but soon he begins
im a gin e th a t you h av e
responde d to an adver-
tisement in the New Haven newspaper seeking sub-
jects for a study of memory. A researcher whose seri-
ous demeanor and laboratory coat convey scientific
importance greets you and another applicant at your
arrival at a Yale laboratory in Linsly-Chittenden
Hall. You are here to help science find ways to
improve people’s learning and memory through the
use of punishment. The researcher tells you why this
work may have important conse quences. The task
is straightforward: one of you will be the “teacher”
who gives the “learner” a set of word pairings to
memorize. During the test, the teacher will give
each key word, and the learner must respond with
the correct association. When the learner is right,
the teacher gives a verbal reward, such as “Good”
or “That’s right.” When the learner is wrong, the
teacher is to press a lever on an impressive-looking
apparatus that delivers an im mediate shock to pun-
ish the error.
The shock generator has 30 switches, starting
from a low level of 15 volts and increasing by 15 volts
to each higher level. The experimenter tells you that
every time the learner makes a m istake, you have
yale a lumni magaz ine | ja nuary/fe bruary
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41
In
scenes from Milgram’s
documentary film,
Obedience
, three men press
levers on the apparatus
they believed would deliver
increasingly powerful elec-
tric shocks.
pg_0003
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yale alumni magaz ine | j anuary/february
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making errors, and you start pre ssing the shock
switches. He complains that the shocks are starting
to hurt. You look at the ex perimenter, who nods to
continue. As the shock le vels increase in intensity,
so do the learner’s scream s, say ing he does not think
he wants to continue. You hesitate and question
whether you should go on. But the experimenter
insists that you have no choice.
in
1949
, seated ne xt to me in senior cla ss
at
James Monroe High School in the Bronx, New York,
was my classmate, S tanley Milgram. We were both
skinny kids, full of ambition and a desire to make
something of ourselves, so that we might e scape life
in the confines of our ghetto ex perience. Stanley was
the little smart one who we went to for authoritative
answers. I was the tall popular one, the smiling guy
other kids would go to for social adv ice.
I had just returned to Monroe High from a hor-
rible year at North Holly wood High School, where
I had b een shunned and friendless (because, as I
later learne d, there was a rumor circulating that I
was from a New York Sicilian Mafia family). Back at
Monroe, I would b e chosen “Jimmy Monroe”—most
popular boy in Monroe High School’s senior class.
Stanley and I once discussed how that transfor-
mation could happen. We agreed that I had not
changed; the situation was what mattered.
Situational psychology is the study of the human
response to feature s of our social environment, the
external b ehavioral context, above all to the other
people around us. Stanley Milgram and I, budding
situationists in 1949, both went on to become aca-
demic social psychologists. We met again at Yale in
1960 as b eginning assistant profe ssors—him start-
ing out at Yale, me at N YU. Some of Milgram’s new
research was conducted in a modified laboratory
that I had fabricated a few years earlier as a graduate
student—in the basement of Linsly-Chittenden, the
building where we taught Introductory Psychology
courses. That is where Milgram was to conduct his
classic and controversial experiments on blind obe-
dience to authority.
Milgram’s intere st in the problem of obedience
came from deep personal concerns about how read-
ily the Nazis had obediently k illed Jews during the
Holocaust. His laboratory paradigm, he wrote years
later, “gave scientific ex pression to a more gen-
eral concern about authority, a concern forced upon
members of my generation, in particular upon Jews
such as myself, by the atrocities of World War II.”
As Milgram described it, he hit upon the concept
for his experiment while musing about a study in
which one of his professors, S olomon Asch, had test-
ed how far subjects would conform to the judgment
of a group. Asch had put each subje ct in a group of
coache d confederates and asked every member, one
by one, to compare a set of lines in order of length.
When the confederates all started giving the same
obviously false answers, 70 percent of the subjects
agreed with them at least some of the time.
Milgram wondered whether there was a way
to craft a conform ity experiment that would be
“more humanly significant” than judgments about
line length. He wrote later: “I wondered whether
groups could pressure a person into performing an
act whose human import was more readily appar-
ent; perhaps behaving aggressively toward another
person, say by administering incre asingly severe
shocks to him. But to study the group effect . . . you’d
have to know how the subject performed without
any group pressure. At that instant, my thought
shifted, zeroing in on this ex perimental control. Just
how far would a person go under the ex perimenter’s
orders?”
how fa r up the scale do you predict
that you
would go under those orders? P ut yourself back in
the basement with the fake shock apparatus and
the other “volunte er”—actually the ex perimenter’s
confe derate, who always plays the learner because
the “drawing” is rigged—strapped down in the nex t
room. As the shocks procee d, the learner begins
complaining about his he art condition. You dissent,
but the ex perimenter still insists that you continue.
ph i li p z im ba r do
’59PhD, professor emeritus of
psychology at Stanford, created the well-known “Stanford
Prison Experiments” on the psychology of incarceration.
This essay is adapted from his forthcoming book, The
Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
(Random House, March 2007).
The vast majority of people shocked the victim over and over again,
despite his increasingly desperate pleas to stop.
pg_0004
yale alumni magazi ne | janua ry/february
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43
The le arner make s errors galore. You plead with
your pupil to concentrate; you don’t want to hurt
him. But your concerns and motivational messages
are to no avail. He gets the answers wrong again
and again. As the shocks intensify, he shouts out,
“I can’t stand the pain, let me out of here!” Then he
says to the experimenter, “You have no right to keep
me here!” Another level up, he scream s, “I absolutely
refuse to answer any more! You can’t hold me here!
My heart’s bothering me!”
Obv iously you want nothing more to do with
this ex periment. You tell the experimenter that you
refuse to continue. You are not the kind of person
who harms other people in this way. You want
out. But the ex perimenter continues to insist that
you go on. He reminds you of the contract, of your
agreement to participate fully. Moreover, he claims
responsibility for the consequence s of your shock-
ing actions. After you pre ss the 300-volt switch,
you read the nex t ke yword, but the learner doesn’t
answer. “He’s not responding,” you tell the experi-
menter. You want him to go into the other room
and check on the learner to see if he is all right. The
experimenter is impassive; he is not going to che ck
on the learner. Instead he tells you, “If the learner
doesn’t answer in a reasonable time, about five se c-
onds, consider it wrong,” since errors of omission
must be punished in the same way as errors of com-
mission—that is a rule.
As you continue up to even more dangerous
shock levels, there is no sound coming from your
pupil’s shock chamber. He may be unconscious or
worse. You are truly disturbe d and want to quit,
but nothing you say works to get your exit from this
unex pectedly distressing situation. You are told to
follow the rules and keep posing the test items and
shocking the errors.
Now try to imagine fully what your participation
as the teacher would b e. If you actually go all the
way to the last of the shock levels, the experimenter
will insist that you repeat that XXX switch two
more times. I am sure you are say ing, “No way would
I ever go all the way!” Obv iously, you would have
dissented, then disobeyed and just walked out. You
would never sell out your morality. Right?
milgr am once described
his shock experiment
to a group of 40 psychiatrists and asked them to
estimate the percentage of American citizens who
would go to each of the 30 levels in the ex periment.
On average, they predicted that less than 1 percent
would go all the way to the end, that only sadists
would engage in such sadistic behav ior, and that
most people would drop out at the tenth level of 150
volts. They could not have been more wrong.
In Milgram’s ex periment, two of every three (65
percent) of the volunte ers went all the way up to the
max imum shock level of 450 volts. The vast major-
ity of people shocked the victim over and over again
despite his incre asingly desperate pleas to stop.
Most participants dissented from time to time and
said they did not want to go on, but the researcher
would prod them to continue.
Over the course of a year, Milgram carried out 19
different experiments, each one a different varia-
tion of the basic paradigm. In each of these stud-
ies he varied one social psychological variable and
observed its impact. In one study, he added women;
in others he varied the physical proximity or remote-
ness of either the experimenter-teacher link or the
teacher-learner link; had peers rebel or obey before
the teacher had the chance to begin; and more.
In one set of ex periments, Milgram wanted to
show that his results were not due to the authority
power of Yale University. So he transplanted his lab-
oratory to a run-down office building in downtown
Bridgeport, Connecticut, and repe ated the experi-
ment as a project ostensibly of a private research
firm with no connection to Yale. It made hardly any
difference; the participants fell under the same spell
of this situational power.
The data cle arly revealed the extreme pliability of
human nature: depending on the situation, almost
everyone could be totally obedient or almost every-
one could resist authority pressures. Milgram was
able to demonstrate that compliance rates could
soar to over 90 percent of people continuing to the
450-volt maximum or be re duce d to less than 10
percent—by introducing just one crucial variable
into the compliance recipe.
Want m ax imum obedience? Make the subje ct a
Milgram coached a confed-
erate to play the role of
the
“learner” whose incorrect
answers had to be pun-
ished
. Here, the learner sits
strapped into a chair with
an “electrode” attached to
one wrist.
pg_0005
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y ale alumni magaz ine | january/februa ry
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1
Prearranging some form
of contractual obliga-
tion, verbal or written, to
control the individual’s
behavior in pseudo-legal
fashion. In Milgram’s
obedience study, subjects
publicly agreed to accept
the tasks and the proce-
dures.
2
Giving participants
meaningful roles to play—
“teacher,” “learner”—that
carry with them previous-
ly learned positive values
and automatically activate
response scripts.
3
Presenting basic rules to
be followed that s eem to
make sense before their
actual use but can then
be used arbitrarily and
impersonally to justify
mindless compliance. The
authorities will change the
rules as necessary but will
insist that rules are rules
and must be followed
(as the researcher in the
lab coat did in Milgram’s
experiment).
4
Altering the semantics
of the act, the actor, and
the action—replacing
unpleas ant reality with
desirable rhetoric, gilding
the frame so that the real
picture is disguised: from
“hurting victims” to “help-
ing the experimenter.” We
can see the same semantic
framing at work in adver-
tising, where, for example,
bad-tasting mouthwash
is framed as good for you
because it kills germs and
tastes like medicine.
5
Creating opportunities for
the diffusion of respon-
sibility or abdication of
responsibility for negative
outcomes, such that the
one who acts won’t be
held liable. In Milgram’s
experiment, the authority
figure, when questioned
by a teacher, said he would
take responsibility for
anything that happened to
the learner.
6
Starting the path toward
the ultimate evil act with
a small, seemingly insig-
nificant first step, the easy
“foot in the door” that
swings open subsequent
greater compliance pres-
sures . In the obedience
study, the initial shock
was only a mild 15 volts.
This is also the operative
principle in turning good
kids into drug addicts with
that first little hit or sniff.
7
Having successively
increasing steps on the
pathway that are gradual,
so that they are hardly
noticeably different from
one’s most recent prior
action. “Just a little bit
more.”
8
Gradually changing the
nature of the authority
figure from initially “just”
and reasonable to “unjust”
and demanding, even irra-
tional. This tactic elicits
initial compliance and
later confusion, since we
expect consistency from
authorities and friends.
Not acknowledging that
this transformation has
occurred leads to mindless
obedience. And it is part
of many date rape sce-
narios and a reason why
abused women s tay with
their abusing spouses.
9
Making the exit costs high
and making the process
of exiting difficult; allow-
ing verbal dissent, which
makes people feel better
about themselves , while
insisting on behavioral
compliance.
10
Offering a “big lie” to jus-
tify the use of any means
to achieve the seemingly
desirable, essential goal.
(In Milgram’s research
the jus tification was that
science will help people
improve their memory by
judicious use of reward
and punishment.) In social
psychology experiments,
this is known as the “cover
story”; it is a cover-up for
the procedures that fol-
low, which do not make
sense on their own. The
real-world equivalent is
an ideology. Mos t nations
rely on an ideology, typi-
cally “threats to national
security,” before going
to war or suppressing
political opposition. When
citizens fear that their
national security is being
threatened, they become
willing to surrender
their basic freedoms in
exchange. Erich Fromm’s
classic analysis in Escape
from Freedom made us
aware of this trade-off,
which Hitler and other dic-
tators have long used to
gain and maintain power.
Ten lessons from the Milgram studies
Milgram crafted his research paradigm to find out what
strategies can seduce ordinary citizens to engage in
apparently harmful behavior. Many of these methods
have parallels to compliance s trategies used by “influ-
Procedures like these are used when thos e in authority know that few
would engage in the endgame without being prepared ps ychologically to
do the unthinkable. But people who unders tand their own impulses to join
with a group and to obey an authority may be able also to withstand those
impulses at times when the mandate from outside comes into conflict with
their own v alues and conscience. In the future, when you are in a compro-
mising position where your compliance is at iss ue, thinking back to thes e
ten s tepping-stones to mindless obedience may enable you to step back and
not go all the way down the path—their path. A good way to avoid crimes
of obedience is to assert one’s personal authority and to always take full
responsibility for one’s actions. Resist going on automatic pilot, be mind-
ful of situational demands on you, engage your critical thinking skills, and
be ready to admit an error in your initial compliance and to say, “Hell, no, I
won’t go your way.”
ence professionals” in real-world settings , such as sales-
people, cult and military recruiters , media advertisers,
and others. Below are ten of the most effective.
pg_0006
yale alumni magazine | january/february
20 07
45
member of a “teaching team,” in which the job of
pulling the shock lever to punish the victim is given
to another person (a confederate), while the subject
assists with other parts of the procedure. Want
resistance to authority pressures? Provide social
models—peers who rebel. Participants also refused
to deliver the shocks if the learner said he wanted
to be shocked; that’s masochistic, and the y are not
sadists. They were also reluctant to give high le v-
els of shock when the experimenter filled in as the
learner. They were more likely to shock when the
learner was remote than in proximity.
In each of the other variations on this diverse
range of ordinary American citizens, of widely vary-
ing ages and occupations and of both genders, it
was possible to elicit low, me dium, or high levels of
compliant obedience with a flick of the situational
switch. Milgram’s large sample—a thousand ordi-
nary citizens from varied backgrounds—makes the
results of his obedience studie s among the most
generalizable in all the social sciences. His classic
study has b een replicated and extended by many
other researchers in m any countries.
Recently, Thomas Blass of the University of
Maryland–Baltimore County analyzed the rates of
obedience in eight studies conducted in the United
States and nine replications in European, African,
and A sian countries. He found comparably high
levels of compliance in all. The 61 percent mean
obedience rate found in the U.S. was matched by the
66 percent rate found across all the other national
samples. The degree of obedience was not affected
by the timing of the studies, which range d from
1963 to 1985.
Other studies based on Milgram’s have shown
how powerful the obedience effect can b e when
legitimate authorities exercise their power within
their power domains. In one study, most college stu-
dents adm inistered shocks to whimpering puppies
when required to do so by a professor. In another,
all but one of 22 nurses flouted their hospital’s pro-
cedure by obeying a phone order from an unknown
doctor to administer an excessive amount of a drug
(actually a placebo); that solitary disobedient nurse
should have been given a raise and a hero’s medal.
In still another, a group of 20 high school students
joined a history teacher’s supposed authoritarian
political movement, and within a week had expelled
their fellows from class and recruite d nearly 200
others from around the school to the cause.
now w e ask the question
that must be posed of
all such research: what is its ex ternal validity, what
are real-world parallels to the laboratory demon-
stration of authority power?
In 1963, the social philosopher Hannah Arendt
published what was to become a classic of our time s,
Eichm ann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality
of Evil
. She provides a detailed analysis of the war
crime s trial of Adolf Eichm ann, the Nazi figure who
personally arranged for the murder of millions of
Jews. Eichmann’s defense of his actions was similar
to the testimony of other Nazi le aders: “I was only
following orders.” What is most striking in Arendt’s
account of Eichmann is all the ways in which he
seemed absolutely ordinary: half a dozen psychia-
trists had certified him as “norm al.” Arendt’s famous
conclusion: “The trouble with Eichmann was pre-
cisely that so many were like him, and that the many
were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were,
and still are, terribly and terrify ingly normal.”
Arendt’s phrase “the banality of ev il” continues
to resonate be cause genocide has been unleashed
around the world and torture and terrorism con-
tinue to be common features of our global land-
scape. A few years ago, the sociologist and Brazil
expert Martha Huggins, the Greek psychologist and
torture e xpert Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and I inter-
viewed several dozen torturers. These men did their
daily dirty deeds for ye ars in Brazil as policemen,
sanctioned by the government to get confessions by
torturing “subversive” enemie s of the state.
The systematic torture by men of their fellow
men and women represents one of the darkest
sides of human nature. Surely, my colleagues and I
reasoned, here was a place where dispositional ev il
would be m anifest. The torturers shared a common
enemy: men, women, and children who, though citi-
zens of their state, even neighbors, were declared by
“the System” to be threats to the country’s national
security—as socialists and Communists. Some had
Milgram’s diagram for the
control panel
of the sup-
posed shock apparatus.
pg_0007
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yale alumni maga zine | january/february
20 07
to be elim inated efficiently, while others, who might
hold secret inform ation, had to be made to y ield it
up by torture, confess and then be kille d.
Torture always involves a personal relationship; it
is e ssential for the torturer to understand what kind
of torture to employ, what intensity of torture to use
on a certain person at a certain time. Wrong kind or
too little—no confession. Too much—the v ictim dies
before confessing. In either case, the torturer fails to
deliver the goods and incurs the wrath of the senior
officers. Learning to determine the right kind and
degree of torture that y ields up the desired informa-
tion elicits abounding rewards and flowing praise
from one’s superiors. It took time and emerging
insights into human weak nesses for these torturers
to become adept at their craft.
What kind of men could do such deeds? Did
they need to rely on sadistic impulses and a history
of sociopathic life experiences to rip and tear the
flesh of fellow beings day in and day out for years
on end?
We found that sadists are selecte d out of the
training process by trainers because the y are not
controllable. They get off on the ple asure of inflict-
ing pain, and thus do not sustain the focus on the
goal of extracting confessions. From all the ev i-
dence we could muster, torturers were not unusual
or dev iant in any way prior to practicing their new
roles, nor were there any persisting dev iant tenden-
cies or pathologies among any of them in the years
following their work as torturers and executioners.
Their transform ation was entirely explainable as
being the consequence of a number of situational
and systemic factors, such as the training they were
given to play this new role; their group camaraderie;
acceptance of the national security ideology; and
their learned belief in socialists and Communists as
enemie s of their state.
Amazingly, the transformation of these men into
violence workers is comparable to the transformation
of young Palestinians into suicide b ombers intent on
killing innocent Israeli civilians. In a re cent study,
the forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman found ev i-
dence of the normalcy of 400 al-Qaeda members.
Three -quarters came from the upper or middle
class. Ninety percent came from caring, intact fami-
lies. Two-thirds had gone to college; two-thirds were
married; and most had children and jobs in science
and engineering. In many ways, Sageman conclude s,
“these are the b est and brightest of their society.”
Israeli psychologist A riel Merari, who has studied
this phenomenon ex tensively for m any years, out-
lines the common steps on the path to these explo-
sive deaths. First, senior memb ers of an ex trem ist
group identify young people who, based on their
declarations at a public rally against Israel or their
support of some Islam ic cause or Palestinian action,
appear to have an intense patriotic fervor. Nex t, they
are invited to discuss how seriously they love their
country and hate Israel. They are asked to commit
to being trained. Those who do then become part
of a small secret cell of three to five youths. From
their elders, they learn bomb making, disguise, and
selecting and timing targets. Finally, they make
public their private commitment by mak ing a v ideo-
tape, declaring themselves to be “the liv ing martyr”
for Islam. The recruits are also told the Big Lie: their
relatives will be entitled to a high place in Heaven,
and they themselves will earn a place be side A llah.
Of course , the rhetoric of dehumanization serves to
deny the humanity and innocence of their victims.
The die is cast; their minds have been carefully
prepare d to do what is ordinarily unthinkable. In
these systematic way s a host of normal, angry young
Eichmann’s defense of his actions was similar to the testimony of
other Nazi leaders: “I was only following orders.”
pg_0008
ya le alumni magaz ine | january/februa ry
20 07
4 7
men and women be come transformed into true
believers. The suicide, the murder, of any young per-
son is a gash in the fabric of the human family that
we elders from every nation must unite to prevent.
To encourage the sacrifice of youth for the sake of
advancing the ideologies of the old must be consid-
ered a form of ev il that transcends local politics and
expedient strategies.
our fina l e xten sion
of the social psychology of
evil from artificial laboratory ex periments to real-
world contex ts comes to us from the jungles of
Guyana. There, on November 28, 1978 , an American
religious leader persuaded more than 900 of his fol-
lowers to comm it mass suicide. In the ultimate test
of blind obedience to authority, many of them k illed
their children on his com mand.
Jim Jones, the pastor of Peoples Temple congre-
gations in San Francisco and Los Angeles, had set
out to create a socialist utopia in Guyana. But over
time Jone s was transformed from the caring, spiri-
tual “father” of a large Protestant congregation into
an Angel of Death. He instituted ex tended forced
lab or, armed guards, sem istarv ation diets, and daily
punishments amounting to torture for the slightest
breach of any of his many rules. Concerne d rela-
tives conv inced a congre ssman and media crew to
inspect the compound. But Jone s arranged for them
to be murdered as they left. He then gathered almost
all the members at the compound and gave a long
speech in which he ex horted them to take their lives
by drinking cyanide-lace d Kool-Aid.
Jones was surely an egomaniac; he had all of
his speeches and proclamations, even his torture
sessions, tape-recorded—including his final suicide
harangue. In it Jones distorts, lies, pleads, makes
false analogies, appeals to ideology and to transcen-
dent future life, and outright insists that his orders
be followed, all while his staff is efficiently distribut-
ing deadly poison to the hundreds gathered around
him. Some excerpts from that last hour convey a
sense of the de ath-dealing tactics he use d to induce
total obe dience to an authority gone mad:
Please get us some medication. It’s simple. It’s
simple. There’s no convulsions with it. [Of course
there are, especially for the children.] . . . Don’t be
afraid to die. You’ll see, there’ll be a few people
land[ing] out here. They’ll torture some of our
children here. They’ll torture our people. They’ll
torture our seniors. We cannot have this. . . . Please,
can we hasten? Can we hasten with that medica-
tion? . . . We’ve lived—we’ve lived as no other
people lived and loved. We’ve had as much of this
world as you’re gonna get. Let’s just be done with
it. (Applause.). . . . Who wants to go with their
child has a right to go with their child. I think it’s
humane. . . . Lay down your life with dignity. Don’t
lay down with tears and agony. There’s nothing to
death. . . . It’s just stepping over to another plane.
Don’t be this way. Stop this hysterics. . . . Look,
children, it’s just something to put you to rest.
Oh, God. (Children crying.). . . . Mother, Mother,
Mother, Mother, Mother, please. Mother, please,
please, please. Don’t—don’t do this. Don’t do this.
Lay down your life with your child.
And they did, and they died for “Dad.”
A fitting conclusion comes from psychologist
Mahrzarin Banaji: “What social psychology has
given to an understanding of human nature is the
discovery that forces larger than ourselves deter-
mine our mental life and our actions—chief among
these forces [is] the power of the social situation.”
The most dramatic instances of directed behav ior
change and “m ind control ” are not the consequence
of exotic forms of influence such as hy pnosis, psy-
chotropic drugs, or “brainwashing.” They are, rather,
the systematic manipulation of the most mundane
aspects of human nature over time in confining
settings. Motives and needs that ordinarily serve
us well can lead us astray when they are arouse d,
amplified, or manipulated by situational forces that
we fail to recognize as potent. This is why evil is so
pervasive. Its temptation is just a small turn away,
a slight detour on the path of life , a blur in our
sidev iew mirror, leading to disaster.
Most participants in
Milgram’s experiments
dis sented
from time to
time and said they did not
want to go on. But the
researcher would prod
them to
continue
.