A Point of View: Why people give into temptation when no-one's watching.
^Continuation,.........
We distance ourselves from each other and take important decisions about people we don't know, can't identify with, or treat fairly. We defer to all manner of authorities, no matter how unhinged, and we do not prosper as a result.
Stanford prison experiment
*.Study of psychological effects of being prisoner or guard, carried out at California's Stanford University in 1971, funded by US Office of Naval Research
*.Philip Zimbardo selected 24 random students to assume role of prisoner or guard; participants adapted too well to roles, and "guards" began to abuse their power
*.Experiment abruptly stopped after six days (it was originally planned for two weeks)
*.Zimbardo's findings still subject of debate; experiment inspired several films, plays, works of fiction
*.BBC documentary The Experiment (2002) attempted to replicate conditions of study (pictured)
Why do ordinary people commit evil deeds?
The Stanford Prison Experiment
Philip Zimbardo, who designed the Stanford Prison Experiment, is also often misunderstood. His experiment arbitrarily gave volunteers positions either as guards, or prisoners in a clearly fake prison and then watched how they behaved. Very quickly, the guards behaved like guards and the prisoners like prisoners, the fake set became a real and dangerous world of escalating cruelties. Experimenters watched their prison come to increasingly ugly life, but their assigned task was not to intervene. In the prison, stress was high and guidelines unclear.
Any sense of a moral world outside slipped away. Abuse of power, humiliation and small tortures began to blossom - not within months, but within days. Both scientists and volunteers became locked in a dark spiral, descending. Only an outsider intervening - a sensible lady whom Zimbardo later married - prevented perhaps serious wrongdoing by reminding the researchers they could abort the experiment. But Zimbardo and the others were doing what many of us tend to - fitting in, behaving like cleverly social animals, repeating and reinforcing the behaviour we see around us. We tend to assume that what's being done must be what should be done. We'll embrace fashions, or fashionably deny them, put grills on our teeth, we'll even ignore a real live fire if we're in a crowd, just because everyone else is, so that must be okay.
In short, we know the recipe for harmful behaviour - stress, poor or absent guidelines, a strict hierarchy with dissociation from others and from the consequences of our actions, established group culture and lack of oversight. These factors create sick workplaces, rogue military units, feral banks, abusive care homes, abusive marriages, countries apparently consumed by madness. Surveys now show bankers and doctors amongst the least trusted professions. They used to be touchstones of reliability - what happened? Highly influential bad situations happened.
The Magazine on evil
*.John Gray discusses Patricia Highsmith, her fictional creation Tom Ripley, and the meaning of evil(May 2013)
*.Philosopher David Bain asks how religious people can reconcile belief in God with the fact of natural disasters(January 2010)
*.
And when we consider the UK's politicians - stressed by intense competition and workloads in an environment that makes Gormenghast look like Butlins, led to believe they're a class apart, working in a gilded palace where they operate, in some senses, literally above the law… It's a testament to their moral fibre that they don't eat constituents in the lobbies.
But, naturally, if there's a recipe for wrongdoing, there's a recipe to encourage its opposite. Reverse all the above. Really. Remove stress and moral uncertainty, promote leadership ahead of dictatorship, introduce collaboration, guidelines, support, keep humanity's humanity and action's consequences in view. And introduce appropriate oversight. Ever wondered why sending a postcard to someone unjustly imprisoned can improve their conditions? Partly because it lets their guards know someone's watching. Why do you think our idea of God has that omnipotent reputation? Partly because God watches everything.
Are we likely to actually learn from what we know about ourselves, the scared, over-dressed monkeys we can be? Probably not. But if you have a go at it, I promise I'll try, too. No more pilfered Bourbon creams for me. And I'll tell my godchildren about Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo and all the rest, because they deserve a kind future where good people like them can do good things.
We distance ourselves from each other and take important decisions about people we don't know, can't identify with, or treat fairly. We defer to all manner of authorities, no matter how unhinged, and we do not prosper as a result.
Stanford prison experiment
*.Study of psychological effects of being prisoner or guard, carried out at California's Stanford University in 1971, funded by US Office of Naval Research
*.Philip Zimbardo selected 24 random students to assume role of prisoner or guard; participants adapted too well to roles, and "guards" began to abuse their power
*.Experiment abruptly stopped after six days (it was originally planned for two weeks)
*.Zimbardo's findings still subject of debate; experiment inspired several films, plays, works of fiction
*.BBC documentary The Experiment (2002) attempted to replicate conditions of study (pictured)
Why do ordinary people commit evil deeds?
The Stanford Prison Experiment
Philip Zimbardo, who designed the Stanford Prison Experiment, is also often misunderstood. His experiment arbitrarily gave volunteers positions either as guards, or prisoners in a clearly fake prison and then watched how they behaved. Very quickly, the guards behaved like guards and the prisoners like prisoners, the fake set became a real and dangerous world of escalating cruelties. Experimenters watched their prison come to increasingly ugly life, but their assigned task was not to intervene. In the prison, stress was high and guidelines unclear.
Any sense of a moral world outside slipped away. Abuse of power, humiliation and small tortures began to blossom - not within months, but within days. Both scientists and volunteers became locked in a dark spiral, descending. Only an outsider intervening - a sensible lady whom Zimbardo later married - prevented perhaps serious wrongdoing by reminding the researchers they could abort the experiment. But Zimbardo and the others were doing what many of us tend to - fitting in, behaving like cleverly social animals, repeating and reinforcing the behaviour we see around us. We tend to assume that what's being done must be what should be done. We'll embrace fashions, or fashionably deny them, put grills on our teeth, we'll even ignore a real live fire if we're in a crowd, just because everyone else is, so that must be okay.
In short, we know the recipe for harmful behaviour - stress, poor or absent guidelines, a strict hierarchy with dissociation from others and from the consequences of our actions, established group culture and lack of oversight. These factors create sick workplaces, rogue military units, feral banks, abusive care homes, abusive marriages, countries apparently consumed by madness. Surveys now show bankers and doctors amongst the least trusted professions. They used to be touchstones of reliability - what happened? Highly influential bad situations happened.
The Magazine on evil
*.John Gray discusses Patricia Highsmith, her fictional creation Tom Ripley, and the meaning of evil(May 2013)
*.Philosopher David Bain asks how religious people can reconcile belief in God with the fact of natural disasters(January 2010)
*.
And when we consider the UK's politicians - stressed by intense competition and workloads in an environment that makes Gormenghast look like Butlins, led to believe they're a class apart, working in a gilded palace where they operate, in some senses, literally above the law… It's a testament to their moral fibre that they don't eat constituents in the lobbies.
But, naturally, if there's a recipe for wrongdoing, there's a recipe to encourage its opposite. Reverse all the above. Really. Remove stress and moral uncertainty, promote leadership ahead of dictatorship, introduce collaboration, guidelines, support, keep humanity's humanity and action's consequences in view. And introduce appropriate oversight. Ever wondered why sending a postcard to someone unjustly imprisoned can improve their conditions? Partly because it lets their guards know someone's watching. Why do you think our idea of God has that omnipotent reputation? Partly because God watches everything.
Are we likely to actually learn from what we know about ourselves, the scared, over-dressed monkeys we can be? Probably not. But if you have a go at it, I promise I'll try, too. No more pilfered Bourbon creams for me. And I'll tell my godchildren about Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo and all the rest, because they deserve a kind future where good people like them can do good things.
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