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).

Make new friends but keep the old

This may be a bronze of the ancient Greek bard Hesiod. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

It is the immemorial custom at this blog (for the last couple years anyway) to reserve the last week or so of the year to discussing items from the Goat Rope book shelf. This involves giving a shout out to some of this year's best reading material, although little if any of it was written in 2008.

(Note: While El Cabrero is pleased to discuss selected books, I cannot divulge the total number of books consumed this year lest my employer realize what a slacker I am.)

This first installment consists of classics, many of which have been revisited after years since the previous perusal.

So here goes, starting with the ancients. The ancient Greek bard Hesiod was no Homer, but he had his moments. I started 2008 with another run through the Theogony, his account of the origin of gods, the universe and everything. As he put it,

In the beginning there was chaos.

Come to think of it, there still is.

Then came another look at Plato's Symposium, a dialogue on the nature of love. For some reason, I liked it better the last time I read it. Followers of this blog will not be surprised that the Odyssey of Homer got another look, since I spent a couple of months taking the long way home with its hero.

I also took another look at Rome's answer to the Homeric epics, the Aeneid of Virgil. Virgil was a more elegant writer than Homer although I prefer the latter. One difference between the work of Homer (whoever he was/they were) and Virgil is that the Homeric epics grew while Virgil's was self-consciously written. Good though.

I love these lines from Aeneas' visit to the underworld (which make a great mission statement):

...your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.

That works for me...

On the borderline between ancient and medieval literature lies Boethius' Consolations of Philosophy, a wonderful book by a man who was unjustly accused by the Powers that Were and which was composed while he prepared for a particularly nasty death. His musings on the nature of Fortune inspired this year's series on luck and randomness. It's definitely worth a look.

HEARTS OF DARKNESS, then and now, form the subject of this elegant rant by Chris Hedges. El Cabrero is a sucker for Joseph Conrad references.

LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO CUT SPENDING? There is quite a bit of indefensible "defense" spending which is really just corporate welfare.

EVERYBODY HURTS, but we hurt more if we think people are deliberately inflicting it.

PARLEZ USTED PAJARO? Here's an item on deciphering the songs of birds.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

SHUTTING OFF THE MORALITY SWITCH

Beelzebub, "Lord of the Flies," from Beelzebub as depicted in Collin de Plancy's Dictionnaire Infernal. Image courtesy of wikipedia.

The theme at Goat Rope lately is what the social sciences can tell us about human cruelty and violence. If this is your first visit, please click on earlier posts.

As mentioned yesterday, social psychologist Albert Bandura's research indicates that most people have a sense of morality that includes not doing bad things to others and helping them out when they need it. To repeat, that's the good news. The bad news is that we're pretty good at shutting morality down under certain conditions. He called this "moral disengagement."

Two ways of doing this that were discussed yesterday were redefining the situation and using euphemisms. But there are other ways as well. They include:

*advantageous comparison. "We didn't do bad stuff and if we did, it wasn't as bad as what the other guys do."

*displacement of responsibility. "...and besides, we were just carrying out the orders of our superiors."

*diffusion of responsibility. "I didn't kill anybody directly--I just put them on the train/pushed a button/etc." Modern atrocities, it should be noted, often have a complicated division of labor. If everyone just does one small part of the operation, it's easy for people to think they really weren't responsible.

*disregard or distortion of consequences. "It wasn't that bad."

*dehumanization. "And besides, they were just a bunch of [fill in the blank]."

*attribution of blame. "They had it coming anyway."

Here's a final thought. According to Bandura, moral disengagement usually doesn't happen all at once. It usually starts small and escalates over time as people get used to it. El Cabrero is reminded of a quote from Dostoevsky that I've used here more than once:

Man gets used to anything, the scoundrel.

ECONOMY AND AGING. Here's more on the longevity gap between rich and poor and the nation's retirement woes.

RIDING OUT THE RECESSION. Economist Paul Krugman predicts a slow recovery.

MORALITY AND WAR. A new study suggests that war effects the moral development of children, especially on how they think about revenge.

THREE WORDS THAT DON'T USUALLY GO TOGETHER are mountaintop removal and tourism.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

ON AGGRESSION, WITH INTERESTING ITEMS ON SCIENCE, MORALITY AND CRUELTY

Caption: The constant struggle within human nature is here symbolized by a cat playing with a peacock feather and a dog searching a squeaky toy. It's like really deep or something.

This is the fourth post in a series on obedience to authority and all the carnage that has caused over the years. It was initially inspired by reflections on psychologist Stanley Milgram's classic experiment.

If this is your first visit, please scroll down to earlier entries.

So why is it so easy to get people to hurt other people who have done them no harm when told to do so by an authority figure?

It would be nice to think that people who do so are abnormally cruel or sadistic, but that's not the case. They (we?) are pretty normal people.

Could it be that a dark and aggressive side of human nature accounts for it?

Milgram explored but dismissed that explanation in Obedience to Authority at least as it applied to the results of his "shocking" experiment and presumably in many related situations.

He describes the aggression argument thus:

By aggression we mean an impulse or action to harm another organism. In the Freudian view, destructive forces are present in all individuals, but they do not always find ready release, for their expression is inhibited by superego, or conscience. Furthermore, ego functions--the reality-oriented side of man--also keep destructive tendencies under control. (If we strike out every time we are angry, it will ultimately bring us harm, and thus we restrain ourselves.) Indeed, so unacceptable are these destructive instincts that they are not always available to conscious scrutiny. However, they continually press for expression and, in the end, find release in the violence of war, sadistic pleasures, individual acts of anti-social destruction, and under certain circumstances self-destruction.

But he ultimately rejects it:

Although aggressive tendencies are part and parcel of human nature, they have hardly anything to do with the behavior observed in the experiment. Nor do they have much to do with the destructive obedience of soldiers in war, of bombardiers killing thousands on a single mission, or enveloping a Vietnamese village in searing napalm. The typical soldier kills because he is told to kill and he regards it as his duty to obey orders. The act of shocking the victim does not stem from destructive urges but from the fact that subjects have become integrated into a social structure and are unable to get out of it.

In one of the permutations of the experiment, subjects were allowed to choose the level of shock they could administer. Overwhelmingly, they gave the lowest possible shocks. Only when they were in a structured environment directly supervised by an apparently "legitimate" authority did most subjects administer the highest shocks.

Another variation on the experiment deliberately frustrated subjects to see if anger and similar emotions would increase the probability that they would choose to inflict severe shocks given the choice. It had very little effect.

Milgram concludes that

The key to the behavior of subjects lies not in pent-up anger or aggression but in the nature of their relationship to authority. They have given themselves to the authority; they see themselves as instruments for the execution of his wishes; once so defined, they are unable to break free.

In other words, our problem is not that we are "killer apes," rather that we are all too human.

He called this relationship to authority "the agentic state," which will keep until tomorrow...

VERY COOL NY TIMES ITEM ON THE EVOLUTION OF MORALITY. In the history of philosophy, there have often been conflicting schools of thought on ethics between those who based it on rationality (like Kant) and those who based it on empathy and emotions (like Adam Smith, Hume, and the Scottish Enlightenment). El Cabrero, as a Scotch-Irish hillbilly with an admiration for German philosophy, has mixed emotions on that one. But it looks like my Celtic cousins are winning as the scientific evidence comes in.

VERY INTERESTING ITEM ON THE FACT THAT WE MAY NOT BE AS NASTY AS WE USED TO BE. Harvard professor Steven Pinker has a fascinating article in the March 19 New Republic titled "A History of Violence: We're getting nicer every day."

Citing studies that show a long term decline in violence, he argues that this trend may be "the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga..." As bad as things seem now, he argues that they were worse in the past. Of course, there are more people now and we have more nasty toys. Probably we have shifted from more overt forms of cruelty to more impersonal, systemic, and structural violence.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED