A look at the science of evil

In fall 2001, I taught a sociology class at WVU-Tech. The semester had barely started when the 9/11 terrorist attacks shook the world.

That prompted me to look at the social science of how and why people can be cruel to each other. A good resource was social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister’s 1997 study, “Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty.”

According to Baumeister, “Evil requires the deliberate actions of one person, the suffering of another, and the perception or judgment of either the second person or an observer. Very few people see their own actions as evil ...”

Since evil is largely in the eye of the beholder, victims and perpetrators have vastly different perspectives on it. For the latter, it’s usually “not that big a deal,” while to the victim it’s a huge deal. Baumeister calls this difference the “magnitude gap,” and it’s one reason why acts of revenge are often out of proportion to the original offense. Violence is often a spiral, not a cycle.

One thing that keeps us from understanding evil and dealing with it is what he calls “the myth of pure evil,” which we pick up from sources such as myths, comic books, action movies, etc.

According to this, evil involves the intentional infliction of harm for the pleasure of doing it. Victims are all innocent and good, and perpetrators are all evil. Evil is always “the other, the enemy, the outsider, the out-group.”

One problem with this is that, in any given war or conflict, both sides see each other in terms of the myth. Perpetrators usually see themselves as victims.

According to Baumeister, “the myth of pure evil conceals the reciprocal causality of violence. By doing so, it probably increases the violence. The myth of pure evil depicts innocent victims fighting against gratuitously wicked, sadistic enemies. The myth encourages people to believe that they are good and will remain good no matter what, even if they perpetrate severe harm on their opponents. Thus, the myth of pure evil confers a kind of moral immunity on people who believe in it ... belief in the myth is itself one recipe for evil, because it allows people to justify violent and oppressive actions. It allows evil to masquerade as good.”

Baumeister identified four types of evil: instrumental, egotism/revenge, idealism and sadism. Fortunately, sadism — cruelty for the fun of it — is the rarest form. Most people don’t enjoy inflicting harm on others, although it gets easier with repetition. It appears to be an acquired taste, with some of the same mechanisms of addiction.

Far more common is instrumental evil, i.e., doing harm to gain other ends, such as money or power. Examples could include killing or hurting someone for money, organized crime, a government that mistreats people to keep power, etc.

His view of egotism and revenge challenges common assumptions. It’s often asserted that harm is committed by people with low self-esteem. He suggests, rather, that many violent individuals, groups, political movements and countries have high but fragile self-esteem and lash out violently whenever this is challenged:

“The people (or groups or countries) most prone to violence are the ones who are most susceptible to ego threats, especially those who have inflated, exalted opinions of themselves or whose normally high self-esteem does occasionally take a nosedive.”

Wounded egotism usually seeks a revenge that is entirely out of proportion to the original offense.

Then there’s the violence of idealism and true believers. As Bob Dylan said, “you don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.” When people think they are on the side of good and their enemies are evil, they feel morally justified in using extreme violence and cruelty.

“Human nature inclines people to align themselves in groups that square off against each other, each group seeing itself as good and the other as bad. Group competition can evolve into brutal conflict in which each side sincerely sees itself as the good guys who need to take strong measures to defeat the forces of evil that oppose them.”

Evil doesn’t generally appear all at once in fully developed form. It starts with a loss of self- or social control. “Many instances of profound evil begin with a small, ambiguous act that crosses a fuzzy line and then escalates gradually into even greater levels of violence.”

For example, the Ku Klux Klan began with a group of bored young men seeking amusement by mischief and practical jokes. The Nazi holocaust came at the end of a long progression of gradually escalating abuses. Often, Nazi leaders would pause at each stage to gauge world reaction before escalating violence.

Groups can be especially dangerous, because, in them, “evil escalates as the members bring out one another’s worst impulses, lose track of individual responsibility and reinforce one another’s wavering faith in the broad justifications for what they are doing.”

There’s no magic bullet to make evil go away, but understanding it is a good first step, and Baumeister’s work is a good place to start. He argues that bystanders can have a huge effect and “a responsibility to protest evil, because it will grow unchecked if they do not ... the victims of evil and violence depend on bystanders to bear witness to what is happening and take a stand against it. It is the only way.”

(This ran as an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail).

Agendas and alternatives

Little Edith Ann has a dirty mouth some days.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is how public policy is made, which is usually a lot messier in practice than it is in theory. You will also find links and comments about current events.

As discussed in earlier posts, in Policyland, there is a big difference between agendas and alternatives. Political or public policy agendas are the big picture priorities often laid out by political leaders such as presidential administrations or leading legislators. Alternatives involve the specific ways of dealing with or implementing the items on the agenda.

As John Kingdon put it in Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policy,

Apart from the set of subjects or problems that are on the agenda, a set of alternatives for governmental action is seriously considered by governmental officials and those closely associated with them.

Usually for any problem that makes its way onto a policy agenda--health care reform being one example--there are any number of ways of approaching the subject. Sticking with health care, alternatives might include single payer, a Medicare for all option to compete with private insurance (which would probably have been the easiest way to deal with it), or a mix of private insurance reforms with public ones like what seems to be on the table now.

While those who set the agenda are high profile public figures, often the specific policy alternatives are developed and floated offstage by experts, congressional or administrative staff, advocacy and interest groups. Usually, out of a wide range of possible alternatives, a select few are given serious attention.

Again, using health care as an example, President Obama made it an early priority and laid out a series of elements that he wanted it to contain, a priority shared by many in Congress. However, it was mostly left to Congress to develop specific legislation. In Congress, the specifics of the House and Senate versions were mostly developed offstage to meet the priorities set by congressional leadership.

People working at the grassroots have two challenges. One is to work as skillfully as possible to get specific problems on the agenda to start with. The second is to try to influence the alternatives that make it to the agenda.

I CAN'T BELIEVE IT, but I'm with Friedman on this one.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, a new poll shows that most Americans would support climate change legislation--and paying for it--if it increased jobs.

ONE MORE THING. Here's Wired Science on the psychology of climate change denial.

THE (LATEST) DEAL on the Senate's health care compromise is discussed here. For what it's worth, El Cabrero thinks the Medicare buy-in provision is a very big deal and could mean more in the long run than a weak public option.

KEEPING IT REAL. Here's a call for relevant social science research.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED