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).

Thoughts on evil, Iran and the nuclear deal

This op-ed of mine ran in today's Charleston Gazette-Mail:

I’ve become fascinated with what might be called the science of evil, or what research tells us about violence, cruelty and conflict.

I’m not personally into all that myself (most days anyway), but I think the more we learn about such things, the better will be our chances for reducing them. After all, medicine wouldn’t have gotten very far if it didn’t study diseases and injuries.

It turns out that the science of evil has a lot to teach us. Psychologists like Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo have shown how normal people can be induced to do things they otherwise wouldn’t through pressures of conformity, obedience to authority, and social situations and systems.

I’ve been particularly struck by the research of Roy Baumeister, whose book “Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty” I discovered in the wake of 9/11.

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 ... ”

Victims and perpetrators generally have vastly different perspectives on the acts in question. For perpetrators, the actions in question usually aren’t a big deal, while to the victims they are a very big deal indeed. In fact, perpetrators, even very violent ones, often see themselves as victims and see their victims as perpetrators. Evil, Baumeister maintains, is in the eye of the beholder.

Baumeister calls this difference in perspective between victims and perpetrators the “magnitude gap,” and it is one reason why acts of revenge are often out of proportion to the original offence. This is why violence often doesn’t cycle — it spirals.

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

According to the myth, 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.” It has always been around and always will be; it is the enemy of order, peace and stability. We’re all good; the “enemy” is all bad.

One problem with seeing the world in this way is that in any serious conflict, both sides see each other in terms of the myth, which makes it harder to de-escalate a potentially violent situation.

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.”

As Bob Dylan sang, “You don’t count the dead when God’s on your side.”

To use a fairly recent real life example of the danger of the myth of pure evil in action, shortly after 9/11, then President George Bush promised to “rid the world of evil-doers.”

That didn’t happen, as you may have noticed.

Instead, he led the country to an unnecessary war in Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11) that cost nearly 4,500 American fatalities and over 30,000 non-fatal U.S. casualties in addition to an Iraqi death toll somewhere in the hundreds of thousands, depending on the estimate. Not to mention a trillion or so in wasted money that could better have been spent or invested elsewhere.

I hope we can avoid that kind of outcome in the case of Iran. True, the U.S. and that country have glared at each other since the Iranian revolution of 1979, each seeing evil in the other.

Many in the U.S. see in Iran a repressive regime which seized American hostages, supports terrorism, pursues nuclear weapons, and threatens our allies. Many Iranians see the U.S. as an imperial nuclear power that helped overthrow their democratically elected government in 1953, installed the Shah’s repressive regime, aided Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, and invades Muslim countries on flimsy pretexts.

That kind of mirror-imaging could be a recipe for international disaster. Fortunately, the United States, Britain, France, China, Russia and Germany have reached a deal with Iran that would prevent that country from developing nuclear weapons; shrink its nuclear program; allow for inspections; and reduce the likelihood of another disastrous war in the Middle East. Without a deal, the inspections and restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program go out the window.

No deal is perfect and this one doesn’t resolve all the issues or differences between the U.S. and Iran. It probably won’t bring about the Peaceable Kingdom right away. But it is a step in the right direction.

Congress has to vote on the measure in September. Bluster and tough talk are cheap and plentiful these days, but I hope some — or at least one — of West Virginia’s leaders will have the courage — and common sense — to support diplomacy and avert another avoidable disaster.

CHOOSING TO ACT

People in groups have a bad tendency not to take action to help others. In some cases, being in a group seems to keep people from acting in their own interest. That in a nutshell, Gentle Reader, has been the theme of this week's Goat Rope.

Previous posts this week have looked at real life incidents, such as the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, and at psychological experiments that also studied the issue in a less violent setting. Please check them out if this is your first visit.

So what are the conclusions of the research? Darley and Latane drew five conclusions from their experiments (both of which are discussed earlier this week) about helping behavior. As summarized in Lauren Slater's entertaining and informative book Opening Skinner's Box, they are:

1. You, the potential helper, must notice an event is occurring.
2. You must interpret the event as one in which help is needed.
3. You must assume personal responsibility.
4. You must decide what action to take.
5. You must take action.

Bystanders have great potential for good or evil. In his excellent study Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, Roy F. Baumeister notes that

bystanders do not have to provide active support to the perpetrators of evil and violence. If they merely do nothing, and in particular if they fail to protest or object, than evil and violence are likely to spread.

He also notes that in many cases

the perpetrator might be sensitive to the moral judgements of bystanders. If bystanders say nothing, the perpetrator may believe that they did not see anything to criticize.

In a more positive way, he argues that

Bystanders do have a responsibility to protest evil, because it will grow unchecked if they do not. Whatever the press of one's own concerns or the appeal of minding one's own business, it is nonetheless true that 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.

SPEAKING OF INSIGHTS FROM THE SOCIAL SCIENCES, here's a diverting mix from the Boston Globe.

MORE ON THE COST OF WAR. Here's former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz on the cost of the Iraq war. Short version: the big winners are oil companies and defense contractors. Who saw that coming?

SPEAKING OF THE WAR, a new poll shows that may Americans are confused about the human costs of that unnecessary war.

ECONOMY. The NY Times reports on a veritable witch's brew of bad economic news.

PRISON NATION/PRISON STATES. The latest snapshot from the Economic Policy Institute shows the drain caused by an exploding prison population on state budgets and investments in things like higher education.

COUNTING things is the theme of Jim Lewis' latest edition of Notes From Under the Fig Tree.

COMPARE YOUR LIST. From Campus Progress, here's a list of 99 problems with the Bush administration.

URGENT ANCIENT HOBBIT UPDATE here.

WV ROUNDUP. A confusing array of new state Medicaid rules has been challenged in court. The feds are investigating WV's supreme court Masseygate affair. Two sentences were handed down yesterday in the Megan Williams case.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED