A Point of View: Why people give into temptation when no-one's watching.
Why are apparently good people tempted to commit evil acts, asks novelist AL Kennedy.
I spend a lot of time in hotels. They offer many temptations and although, like most people, I believe I'm more than averagely honest, nevertheless temptation does prove, on occasion, tempting. Well, it would.
These days, mini-bars are often left both warm and aggressively empty to circumvent thefts, but since I have no interest in any mini-bar's contents I feel this bespeaks a hurtful lack of trust. And I wouldn't - unlike some acquaintances - steal a towel, no matter how snowy, or unscrew a light fitting and take it home. But in a hotel corridor, if someone has happened to leave a room service trolley unattended and the biscuits in my room are horrible and there are all these packs of Bourbon creams just lying there and they are for guests and I am a guest and I would even bring the bloody fruit Shrewsburys that were in my room back (and I'd point out they're not fruit Shrewsbury, they've got some currants, they're mummified and sparse fruit corpse Shrewsburys) and I would possibly swap the Shrewsburys for the Bourbon creams which would be fair, but I know that, yes, my biscuit appropriation is still technically stealing… And I have helped myself to Bourbon creams, which is to say, stolen them. Once or twice.
I did wrong. Because I was unobserved. No one was watching me.
About the author
*.AL Kennedy is a writer and performer
*.A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays, 08:50 BST
Listen to A Point of View on the iPlayer
Four Thought podcast
http://www.bbc.co. uk/podcasts /series/pov
And I'm not alone in behaving badly when I know I'm unobserved. When psychologists test how people behave with and without oversight, it becomes depressingly clear that if we think nobody's looking, we don't even remotely always let our conscience be our guide. And this means we do bad things, sometimes extremely bad things. And our doing of bad things and how preventable this is has fascinated me all my life.
We inhabit an age when the complaint, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" is often voiced. It's a question I find slightly pointless, because perceived goodness is no defence against physics. How could it be? And because sometimes other apparently good people are making the bad things happen.
After World War II showed our species just how many hells on earth it could create, a whole generation of researchers devoted themselves to what I find a much more vital question. "Why do apparently good and normal people do abnormal and appalling things ?" Interestingly, those post-war researchers - psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists - found answers to that question. They found reliable, repeatable results which offer a map we could follow to better places, a guide we could offer to children everywhere, as necessary as instructions on how to cross roads safely - how to be human safely, how not to behave like a sociopath.
The trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann spotlighted how "normal people" might carry out horrendous acts
But in fact, much of the research has been forgotten or misunderstood and we continue to put human beings into desperately toxic situations which can make them go astray. If, for example, we remember Stanley Milgram's name at all, we associate it with an experiment that apparently proved one person can be persuaded to electrocute another with horrifying ease, sometimes even beyond the level at which shocks would be fatal. Of course, the allegedly instructional shocks Milgram had volunteers administer were fake and their recipients only pretended to be in pain. He was testing how obedient volunteer "teachers" would be to an authority figure's instructions, even when being told to carry out apparently immoral acts.
Controversially, he and his team found that even very normal, pleasant people can delegate their morality to other people who appear to be in charge, even of bizarre and disturbing scenarios, in fact especially then. When we're in unfamiliar and stressful circumstances, we very often turn to authority figures. This human tendency wouldn't set us up for all manner of dark falls if all of our authority figures were saints. But they're not. And unfortunately no one is putting Milgram on the national curriculum any time soon.
Milgram also experimented to see how affected we were by other people's pain and found - comfortingly - that someone screaming through an intercom would upset us less than someone writhing in agony next to us. So, in a way, he proved we're moral, but easily misled - compassionate, but easily dissociated. And you might think governments and institutions in every sane country would take these two factors into account in order to help us treat each other well. But they don't.
I spend a lot of time in hotels. They offer many temptations and although, like most people, I believe I'm more than averagely honest, nevertheless temptation does prove, on occasion, tempting. Well, it would.
These days, mini-bars are often left both warm and aggressively empty to circumvent thefts, but since I have no interest in any mini-bar's contents I feel this bespeaks a hurtful lack of trust. And I wouldn't - unlike some acquaintances - steal a towel, no matter how snowy, or unscrew a light fitting and take it home. But in a hotel corridor, if someone has happened to leave a room service trolley unattended and the biscuits in my room are horrible and there are all these packs of Bourbon creams just lying there and they are for guests and I am a guest and I would even bring the bloody fruit Shrewsburys that were in my room back (and I'd point out they're not fruit Shrewsbury, they've got some currants, they're mummified and sparse fruit corpse Shrewsburys) and I would possibly swap the Shrewsburys for the Bourbon creams which would be fair, but I know that, yes, my biscuit appropriation is still technically stealing… And I have helped myself to Bourbon creams, which is to say, stolen them. Once or twice.
I did wrong. Because I was unobserved. No one was watching me.
About the author
*.AL Kennedy is a writer and performer
*.A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays, 08:50 BST
Listen to A Point of View on the iPlayer
Four Thought podcast
http://www.bbc.co. uk/podcasts /series/pov
And I'm not alone in behaving badly when I know I'm unobserved. When psychologists test how people behave with and without oversight, it becomes depressingly clear that if we think nobody's looking, we don't even remotely always let our conscience be our guide. And this means we do bad things, sometimes extremely bad things. And our doing of bad things and how preventable this is has fascinated me all my life.
We inhabit an age when the complaint, "Why do bad things happen to good people?" is often voiced. It's a question I find slightly pointless, because perceived goodness is no defence against physics. How could it be? And because sometimes other apparently good people are making the bad things happen.
After World War II showed our species just how many hells on earth it could create, a whole generation of researchers devoted themselves to what I find a much more vital question. "Why do apparently good and normal people do abnormal and appalling things ?" Interestingly, those post-war researchers - psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists - found answers to that question. They found reliable, repeatable results which offer a map we could follow to better places, a guide we could offer to children everywhere, as necessary as instructions on how to cross roads safely - how to be human safely, how not to behave like a sociopath.
The trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann spotlighted how "normal people" might carry out horrendous acts
But in fact, much of the research has been forgotten or misunderstood and we continue to put human beings into desperately toxic situations which can make them go astray. If, for example, we remember Stanley Milgram's name at all, we associate it with an experiment that apparently proved one person can be persuaded to electrocute another with horrifying ease, sometimes even beyond the level at which shocks would be fatal. Of course, the allegedly instructional shocks Milgram had volunteers administer were fake and their recipients only pretended to be in pain. He was testing how obedient volunteer "teachers" would be to an authority figure's instructions, even when being told to carry out apparently immoral acts.
Controversially, he and his team found that even very normal, pleasant people can delegate their morality to other people who appear to be in charge, even of bizarre and disturbing scenarios, in fact especially then. When we're in unfamiliar and stressful circumstances, we very often turn to authority figures. This human tendency wouldn't set us up for all manner of dark falls if all of our authority figures were saints. But they're not. And unfortunately no one is putting Milgram on the national curriculum any time soon.
Milgram also experimented to see how affected we were by other people's pain and found - comfortingly - that someone screaming through an intercom would upset us less than someone writhing in agony next to us. So, in a way, he proved we're moral, but easily misled - compassionate, but easily dissociated. And you might think governments and institutions in every sane country would take these two factors into account in order to help us treat each other well. But they don't.
Comments
家庭科の場合は、女子達も自分の方が出来るというのは分かっているからこそ、一生懸命やっても上手くいかない謙也くんを可愛いと思えるし、助けてあげようようと思うのです。助けてあげれば、臆面なく「ありがとう」ときちんと礼を述べる姿も、好感度大かと思いますこれは女子から見る謙也くんの魅力として非常に大きいものがあるかと考えます。女の子は自分が女の子であるということを自覚するんです。
J POPの新人アーティストと肩を並べるには日本語は不可欠な要素。母国デビューの翌年に当たる2005年に日本語の歌詞でCDデビューを果たしたが、その発音は見事なまでに正確だった。同じエイベックス・エンタテインメントの先輩であるBoAがそうだったように、デビュー当時から日本語でインタビューに答えられるほどの語学力を身につけていた。
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