Holocaust Studies CenterSonoma State University1999 Holocaust LecturesMarch 9, 1999
Transforming People into Perpetrators of Evil
(The Robert L. Harris Memorial Lecture)
Why Does Genocide Continue to Exist?
Philip G. Zimbardo, Ph.D.
Stanford University
Some Main Topics in the Lecture:
Overview of Lecture / Devils and Angles / TheLine between Good and EvilViolence Throughout History / Obedience to Authority/ Milgrim / Conditions of Obedience
Conditions for deindividuation / Dehumanization / Jim Jones and Mass Suicide
The Stanford Prison Experiment / Principles for Collective Violence / Nature of Aggression
Violence of War / David Duke / Conclusion
It is an honor to be included in this distinguished lecture series, which over a span of 16 years (at the original instigation of Professor John Steiner) has played a vital role in informing and focusing the conscience of a great many students, faculty, and citizens on issues most people would rather not think about. It is not pleasant to think about the nature of evil, of collective violence, of genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, brutal tortures, and bestial acts of man against man that challenge our basic conception of human nature.
As an aside, I use the politically incorrect phrase "man against man" in this case because most of the evil that the world has experienced has been perpetrated by men. In wars it is young men exploited by old political leaders to kill other young men under the banner of one ideology or another in their quest to conquer the resources or another nation. And in rape it is men who violate the integrity of women, and also under some conditions they violate other men. But we shall not move women totally off center stage in our analysis of evil, since they often participate insidiously by supporting their husbands, sons, and brothers with patriotic fervor as they are marched off to wars, by working in factories making weapons of destruction, and always by standing silent witnesses to atrocities of their men folk, or choosing to remain ignorant of them by not demanding to know more so that they could condemn the massacres and atrocities that have occurred in their lands and by their men on foreign shores.
It would be hubris on my part to believe that I could add significant insights to the themes of this lecture series beyond those that learned scholars from many disciplines have already advanced, as well as the perceptive analysis of survivors. However, what I will attempt to do is to more modestly outline some of the psychological processes that I believe are involved in the kind of evil we are concerned with here, consider some social psychological strategies and tactics that may facilitate the transformation of good people into evil monsters, and mention variables, constructs and processes at a more macro level, sociological and political, that must be included when we move from individual to collective violence, and to the unique phenomenon of genocide, the desire to destroy an entire nation or race of people by those who consider themselves a superior nation or race.
As in my previous lectures here, I will add visual materials to my presentation in order to vivify and clarify parts of my message, but many of them are newly integrated into this lecture.
The structure of my talk then is as follows:
* It begins with a brief reflection on the origins of the transformation of good into evil, and notes our collective fascination with that process whereby an ordinary person behaves in totally unpredictable ways, as in the Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde story, or cases of multiple personality disorders.
* I argue against the theory that Evil resides in the genes, biology, or temperament of particular people -- the sadists, deranged, psychopaths, and their ilk. Instead I will propose that most evil is the product of rather ordinary people caught up in unusual circumstances that they are not equipped to cope with in the normal ways that have worked in the past to escape, avoid or challenge them, while they are being recruited, seduced, initiated into evil by persuasive authorities or compelling peer pressure.
* Then I will present a few social psychological studies of my colleagues and mine that demonstrate it is possible to induce "Every man and Every woman" to do deeds that are alien to their personalities and to their previous history of morality.
* In doing so, I will use the metaphor of the imaginary Line between Good and Evil that separates the "GOOD US"' from the "EVIL THEM" -- my analytical goal is to determine what it would take for any one of you Good Folks to cross that line.
* Next we expand our analysis beyond psychology to incorporate concepts that must be part of our analysis in an understanding of collective violence as national levels, to prepare men to kill in wars of genocide.
* Unfortunately, I will not have the time here and now to add an analysis of some current research I am doing on understanding the transformations by which soldiers and policemen become Torturers -- torture being one of the most demeaning acts of human violence, and in some ways worse than murder since it involves personal contact, intimate knowledge of another person's vulnerabilities, and the intentional desire to violate that vulnerability with the aims of getting confessions, information, and/or of eliciting humiliation in the victim and generating terror in his or her family, friends, and compatriots. Perhaps we can touch on this area in our question period after the formal presentation.
Slide 1-- Escher illusion of Angels and Devils
As we look at this figure-ground illusion by the artist Escher, focusing on the white figures with black as ground, we see a world of Angels. But reverse the figure-ground relationship and the Angels become Devils, black demons rising above the good white background. This perceptual transformation reminds us of the similar transformation in the biblical story of God's favorite angel, Lucifer "the light of God's eyes" who led a revolt against his master. When put down by the forces of good, led by The Archangel Michael, Lucifer and his revolutionary band are cast out of Heaven into the newly created domain of Hell. This tale centers on the twin sins of Pride, the ambition to overextend one's sense of personal worth to feel superior to others, and disobedience to authority, which challenges the status quo. I will argue however, that obedience to authority must be limited to authority that is just, honest, and fair, when it is not, then disobedience should be the call to arms against tyrants and tyranny. This illusion also reminds me of the statement by psychologist Roy Baumeister, "Evil exists primarily in the eye of the beholder, especially in the eye of the victim" (1996, p. 1), since Perpetrators never see their acts as evil deeds.
So from early Christian history, we have an exemplar of the possibility of the Best becoming transformed into the Worst, of Angels to Devils. And of course, then Satan, the Devil, Beelzebub, or whatever we call it, become the embodiment of evil, the source of temptation for all humans to do bad deeds, forsake heaven, and be destined to end up in hell. The humanization of the Devil has been carried over to the characterization of evil as being an attribute of some people as inherently evil. The dispositional analysis of evil has focused analytical attention on identifying those individuals who are evil by nature, and indeed there are some people who have directed collective violence, such as Hitler and Stalin. This analysis then continues with remedial actions of changing these evil people by reeducating them, giving them therapy, isolating them, imprisoning them, or executing them. And we have been doing all those treatments for centuries, with null effects on the extent of evil in our world as can be seen in the next slide.
Slide 2: Listing of world wide misery of Holocausts and Massacres
The horrors spawned by the evil of Hitler against Jews and other "undesirables," have been matched or exceeded by Stalin's purges and by Mao in his Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and followed up in many countries, by Idi Amin, Pol Pot, and others who are nameless killers. The horrors statistically detailed in this table do not include the genocide of the American Indians by European settlers and the U.S. military, nor the horrors committed by the Japanese in China, and daily atrocities being committed as we speak in Kosovo, Rwanda, and other murderous venues. But those Evil men are dead, yet evil continues, those evil men probably did not kill a single individual personally, they gave directions, orders, to others who did. It is more profitable I believe for us to focus our analytical energies on understanding why those followers killed for their leaders, or why once they started he killing, their leaders became irrelevant, once the machinery of mass murder had been installed and lubricated, it required only persistent dedication to one's job and the knowledge that it is being executed effectively. We don't need Evil demons for those deeds, only compliant workers or willing soldiers.
This table recounts some of the collective violence in this century, but let us not think it is a modern invention, as we see in Homer's historical account of the Battle of Troy.
Overhead 1: Homer's recounting of Agamemnon's orders to his Trojan forces to destroy every bit of the enemy's existence.
Overhead 2: "Hannah Arendt" Banality of Evil in her analysis of Eichmann during the Nuremberg Trials, from Psychology and Life, [15 ed. by Zimbardo and Gerrig
But who are these Evil murderers? We get one perceptive glimpse of them from a profound analysis of Adolf Eichmann. Allow me to read some of the text of the classic statement by Hannah Arendt that some students might not know about. (The point of this statement is the utter normality of this man, the banality of his evil, who was responsible for the deaths of millions of Jews).
Her analysis had a powerful impact on my thinking, motivating my search for the conditions under which any of us "normal," "ordinary" men and women, might do as Eichmann did, to cross that line from Good to Evil, to go from being a good family man, a dutiful citizen to a mass murder with no conscience for his evil deeds and no remorse for destroying human lives.
Overhead 3- Cartoon of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and slight line between them.
What is that Line, that Cosmic Boundary, and how is it maintained? If you are like me, you are captivated by Robert Louis Stevenson's tale of the good Dr. Jekyll who drinks his chemical invention that instantly transforms him into a brutal monster who kills with pleasure. But are there other ways for people to cross that line? What would it take for You to slide across it? It is so comforting to be on the Good side, to side with the Angels as it were, that we are lulled into a false sense of security about our vulnerability to being seduced across that state of consciousness line. We want to believe it is impermeable, with US here forever and THEM over there permanently, when its membrane is rather permeable, as I shall try to show next.
The notion that there are Good and Bad people is part of a Dispositional analysis advanced by many theorists to explain the determinants of behavior in terms of traits and other inner personal characteristics. An alternative analysis explains human actions in terms of Situational determinants, aspects of the behavioral context that channel action in particular directions. Although most human action is an interaction of person and situational variables, it is common for us to make the Fundamental Attribution Error plain by overemphasizing the Dispositional while simultaneously underplaying the Situational.
Today, my emphasis will try to counteract that human tendency by playing up the Power of the Situation. However, I will agree with the novel thesis presented here last week by Professor Steiner that the roles individuals play have margins of discretion within which they can exercise freedom of choice in how they carry out the functions of those roles. Those margins are expanded when people have a high degree of moral and social intelligence, but I add, that those margins are compressed when situations become "total" and powerful.
Slide 3: Firing squad
(Describe situation where a traitor is sentenced to death by firing squad but government want to recruit his peers, civilians to shoot him. I try to encourage audience members to volunteer. Likely few will.)
Slide 4: Gun barrel
{I add a conditional, only one real bullet in the chamber of one of 6 guns, thus only 1 chance in 48 that when you press trigger, you gun will be the lethal weapon, only 2 % likelihood, now will you join the firing squad that is of course totally legal? Typically more agree. Why?
Adding the tactic of Diffusion of Responsibility greased that line and some good people were ready to become killers for the state. And how did they really know that not all the bullets were live ammunition, which just to be sure the traitor was blasted away, we agents of evil would have loaded into each gun?
So we have discovered one social psychological principle which changes the width of that Line, are there others that would narrow the boundary, grease the line, nudge some of you across to the other side?
Indeed there are many situational variables that subtly change key elements of the behavioral space and shift the behavioral dynamics away from standard operating procedures toward novel relationships and contingencies for which the Actor does not have a prepared script to guide behavior down familiar paths-- and so becomes more vulnerable to the demands of the immediately present behavioral context. Let's see what this means in three experiments, the first on blind obedience to authority, the second on anonymity and aggression in groups, and the third on induced dehumanization.