Understanding Evil

Understanding Evil
How Ordinary People Become Evildoers?

Rudolph Hoess was one of the greatest mass murderers in history. He was the architect and Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp ? the largest killing center ever created. He was responsible for exterminating 2.5 million people, yet he could go back home every night and enjoy normal family life; play the role of a good loving husband and father of his five children. In 1947 he was sentenced to death, and returned to Auschwitz to be hanged on the one-person gallows outside the entrance to the gas chamber.

Johann Kremer was one of the SS doctors. Through his diary and depositions, the court concluded that Kremer participated 14 times in mass murders; he was likely to have been involved in the deaths of several thousand prisoners. In his diary we can read not only descriptions of the gassing process and killing techniques, but also images of his everyday life: what he ate, what he drank, what movies he saw, or what diet he used for his diarrhea. Even after facing images, which he stated in his diary, were worst than Dante?s Inferno, Dr. Kremer was able to lead normal life and engage in everyday activities with no real difficulty. In 1947 Kremer was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment

On March 16, 1968 American Lt. William Calley led the Charlie Company to the village of Mai Lai in Vietnam. He ordered his men to enter the village firing, though there had been no report of opposing fire. During that "search and destroy" mission over 300 unarmed civilians, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were killed by soldiers of Charlie Company. For his part, on September 5, 1969, Calley was charged with six specifications of premeditated murder for the death of 109 Vietnamese civilians near the village of Mai Lai.

Above examples are given to us in a book Ordinary People and Extraordinary Evil: A Report on the Beguilings of Evil by Fred E. Katz. Katz?s work addresses to a very important issue: why do human beings participate in extraordinary acts of evil? If we want to talk about evil, we should first explain what ?evil? means. Webster?s Dictionary states that evil is something ?not good morally; causing or tending to cause harm; the antithesis of good; something that is injurious to moral or physical happiness or welfare? (Webster?s New Third International Dictionary, 1963). In our everyday understanding of evil behind evil actions must lay evil individuals. Therefore, without thinking much about it, most people would right away categorize the men mentioned above as evil people with cruel characters. Unfortunately the answer to Katz?s question is not that simple. Although it would be nice to just believe that such people are somehow different than us, we need to take a closer look at that issue. The common understanding of evil is often wrong and does not take under consideration specific circumstances, which individuals had to face at the time of ?evildoing?. Are Rudolph Hoess, Johann Kremer, and William Calley morally depraved, evil individuals? How about the U.S. soldiers found guilty of torturing the Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad? Are they just a ?few bad apples? in the U.S. military, like some politicians proclaim?

Katz, himself a concentration camp survivor, believes that none of these infamous characters were truly evil. They all had a lot of qualities, such as patriotism, or love of country, that in common understanding are good. They led a good family life and privately many people referred to them as nice. Thus, they could not be truly evil people.

There is a number of studies that support that thesis and show that in certain conditions ordinary people become capable of doing horrifying and evil things. John M. Darley of Princeton University in his book review essay ?Social Organization for the Production of Evil? introduces to us works of Robert Jay Lifton, Herbert Kelman and Lee Hamilton, and Ervin Staub. In his article he tries to explain how does an organization enlist individuals in harm doing, and how are they altered by their involvement. Reviewing above books he finds answers to these questions. The most well-known laboratory experiment studying obedience to authority was done by Stanley Milgram. Another very controversial and well-known experiment on human behavior was led by Philip G. Zimbardo. The experiment was conducted to find what it means psychologically to be prisoner or a prison guard. Both experiments gave very disturbing and interesting results. Stanley Milgram discovered that when in the role, the role incumbent accepts the authority?s judgments of the right and wrong things to do. Philip G. Zimbardo found that under some circumstances people are able to become evildoers, even if before they were as normal as one could think. Each author presented a full spectrum of events that have made ?good? people do ?bad? things. They all showed the courage to argue about people or events that we commonly label as evil, and debunked our everyday understanding of evildoing, and debunked our everyday understanding of evildoing.

Lifton in his book The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide gives us a full report of his interviews with physicians who participated in the Nazi death camps. He believed that human beings have the capacity to become able to kill other people as nothing extraordinary. He suggested that ?human beings have the capacity to adapt to moral wrongdoing taking place within organizational settings and, although at some psychic cost, to blank out the implications of those actions and functions as a cog within the terrible machine?(Darley, pp.205). Lifton suggested that the doctors doing their dreadful activities adapted by the act of ?doubling?. Doubling is ?the division of the self into two functioning wholes, so that a part-self acts as an entire self?(p.418).
Kelman and Hamilton in their book Crimes of Obedience: Towards a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility introduced to us their observations on the interpretations of their survey data on Mai Lai and the trial of Lt. Calley. They concluded that different organizations have a unique capacity to turn their members into evildoers. Individuals in hierarchal settings, often under high pressure, need to obey orders. Kelman and Hamilton explained that:
The most obvious sources of crimes of obedience are military, paramilitary and social-control hierarchies, in which soldiers, security agents, and police take on role obligations that explicitly include the use of forces. These hierarchies are the classic ones from which the term chain of command is borrowed; authority is bureaucratically stringent. The goals of these bureaucracies and the role definitions of actors within them in fact require harm to certain categories of others (such as an enemy or subversive). The sole question concerns the scope and definition of the target of harm rather than the existence of such a target. (p.314)

In Staub?s The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and other Group Violence we see his comparative study of number of genocidal events. According to Staub most evildoers are produced by a process of socialization into evildoing. He described the cultural conditions that lead to genocide. He argued that difficult life conditions, like threats to a sense of security, or well-being, bring about physical and psychological needs in people, that sometimes are fulfilled in positive ways, but other times, the circumstances give rise to hostility directed to whomever might be responsible for the problem. Staub explains it that way:
Blaming others, scapegoating, diminishes our own responsibility. By pointing to a cause of the problems, it offers understanding, which, although false, has great psychological usefulness. It promises a solution to problems by action against the scapegoat. And it allows people to feel connected as they join to scapegoat others. Devaluation of a subgroup helps to raise low self-esteem. Adopting an ideology provides a new worldview and vision of better society that gives hope. Joining a group enables people to give up a burdensome self, adopt a new social identity, and gain a connection to other people. This requires action, but it is frequently not constructive action. (p.17)

Lets talk now about two experimental approaches of the question. Stanley Milgram and Philip G. Zimbardo run two very important experiments that might explain why ?good? people come to do ?evil? things. Milgram in his book Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View revealed details of his experiment on obedience in laboratory settings and gave us his interpretation of the findings. Milgram states that people evolutionarily developed the potential for obedience. He wrote:
From an evolutionary standpoint each autonomously functioning element must be regulated against the unrestrained pursuit of appetites, of which the individual element is the chief beneficiary. The superego, conscience, or some similar mechanism that pits moral ideals against the uncontrolled expression of impulses fulfills the function. However, in the organizational mode, it is crucial for the operation of the system that these inhibitory mechanisms do not significantly conflict with the directions from higher-level components. Therefore when the individual is working on his own, conscience is brought into play. But when he functions in an organizational model, directions that come from the higher-level component are not assessed against the internal standards of moral judgment. Only impulses generated within the individual, in the autonomous mode, are so checked and regulated. (p.128-129)

Zimbardo in his work The Pathology of Imprisonment introduces us to the details of his experiment that is now called the Stanford Prison Experiment. His work revealed that people who are normal, psychologically healthy, mature, emotionally stable, and intelligent can take a role of cruel prison guards when the conditions allowed them to do so. They became corrupted by the power of their roles and constantly tried innovative techniques to break, belittle, and degrade the prisoners. He found that under certain circumstances, decent and normal men were willing to perform cruel acts. Zimbardo discovered that:
Individual Behavior is largely under the control of social forces and environmental contingencies rather than personality traits, character, will power, or other empirically invalidated constructs. Thus we create an illusion of freedom by attributing more internal control over ourselves, to the individual, than actually exists. We thus underestimate the power and pervasiveness of situational controls over behavior because: (a) they are often no obvious and subtle, (b) we can often avoid entering situations where we might be so controlled, (c) we label as ?weak? or ?deviant? people in those situations who do behave differently from how we believed we would. (pp.6)

Lets take a closer look at these two experiments now. In 1960 Milgram decided to prove that Germans have a basic character flaw?readiness to obey authority without question. That way he wanted to explain the systematic destruction of the Jews by the Third Reich. Milgram expected Americans to be different. He wanted to conduct the same experiment in America and in Germany. He constructed a ?learning experiment? where one volunteer, the ?teacher?, was given a electro-shock generator and a list of word pairs which he was supposed to teach the ?learner?. The ?learner? was supposedly another volunteer, but in reality he was a confederate of the experimenter. If the learner gave incorrect answer the teacher was supposed to administer a shock to the learner, and the voltage would increase after each wrong answer. In reality the learner was not receiving any shocks, but the subjects believed otherwise. The shock range was from 15 volts all the way up to 450 volts, increasing the number of volts by 15 with each wrong answer. The board has also verbal descriptions of the shock levels, ranging from ?Slight Shock?, through ?Intense Shock?, to ?Danger: Severe Shock.? When Stanley created the script of his experiment he asks 14 Yale psychology majors what they thought would be the results of that study. They believed that only a sadistic few (average 1.2%) would consider to employ the maximum voltage. His results in America were so disturbing and surprising that he never took the experiment to Germany. He found that when the ?learner? was kept relatively far from the subject 65% of the ?teachers?, 20- to 50-year-old American males, everyday, ordinary people, were willing to administer the highest?450 volt electric shocks when told to do so by the experimenter. Increasing proximity resulted in higher disobedience, but even in the ?touch-proximity? condition, as many as 30% were obedient. Stanley Milgrim concluded that a great proportion of people do what they are told to do, when guided by legitimate authority, irrespectively of the content of the act.

Milgram in his work speculated about his results and their relevance to the Vietnam War and such events as the Mai Lai massacre. A newer example of a real life event where Milgram?s work could be relevant is the incident in the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. In 2004 U.S. soldiers were convicted for dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault, and battery. The pictures taken in Abu Ghraib show naked men, stacked on top of one another, or hooded prisoner standing on a box with wires connected to his body. The U.S. soldiers responsible for these acts of cruelty defend themselves that they did what they were told to do.
? ?Certain people in the Army told her [Lynndie England--one of the soldiers charged in that case] to do what she did. She follows orders, said England?s sister. ?She?s a caring person??(Wade, Tavris, pp.262).

In 1971 Philip Zimbardo constructed a psychological experiment to study the responses and behavioral effects of imprisoned individuals and the authorities. Zimbardo with a team of researchers carefully screened 70 volunteers. From that pool of people they chose 24 men. They were the most mature, emotionally and physically stable, and the least involved in anti-social behavior. Half of them were randomly designed as prisoners and half as prison guards. The experiment was held in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.

Prisoners and guards had to play their roles in that simulated prison. ? The guards were made aware of the potential seriousness and danger of the situation and their own vulnerability. They made up their own formal rules for maintaining law, order, and respect, and were generally free to improvise new ones during their eight-hour, three-man shifts?(Zimbardo, 298). The volunteers who were chosen to play the role of prisoners were unexpectedly taken from their homes by a police officer. They were captured, handcuffed and taken blindfolded to the ?Stanford? jail. Once they arrived they were ?stripped, deloused, put into a uniform, given a number, and put into a cell with two other prisoners where they expected to live for the next two weeks. The pay was good ($15 a day), and their motivation was to make money?(pp.5).

The prison in the basement of Stanford University psychological building rapidly became the reality for the prisoners and the guards. They very quickly adapted to their roles, stepping afar from the predicted schemas and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. ?About a third of the guards became tyrannical in their arbitrary use of power, in enjoying their control over other people.? Many prisoners became emotionally traumatized and three of them had to be released before the end of the experiment because they suffered from severe depression. The whole experiment had to be called off after just six days. Zimbardo gives us his real motives for finishing the experiment after such a short time. He explains: ?I called off the experiment not because of the horror I saw out there in the prison yard, but because of the horror of realizing that I could have easily traded places with the most brutal guard or become the weakest prisoner full of hatred at being so powerless that I could not eat, sleep, or go to the toilet without permission of the authorities. I could have become Calley at Mai Lai??(pp.6).


In conclusion, we all like to think of ourselves as the ?good? ones. We hold that favorable self-image, where we are fair, just, and understanding. We could not imagine ourselves hurting anyone without a real reason. We assume that evil actions were committed by evildoers, who were simply born evil. We want to believe that ?these? people are genetically abnormal, or that they became evil because of a developmental trauma.
Above examples show something completely different. They corroborate that each of us has the capacity to do evil actions. If the circumstances press us to do so, we are capable of doing things that we would never imagine, we could do. ?Many people, perhaps the majority, can be made to do almost anything when put into psychologically compelling situations -- regardless of our morals, ethics, values, attitudes, beliefs, or personal convictions?(Zimbardo, pp.6). Milgram discovered that more than 60% of the population would deliver painful electric shocks, only because the legitimate authority told them to do so. Lifton believed that the social forces acting on us can make any individual, regardless of the strength of his or her personality and character, be a cog in a killing machine. Staub argued that difficult life conditions are able to make us do things that are morally wrong. Kelman and Hamilton stated that when in a ?role?, the ?role? incumbent accepts the authority?s judgments of the right and wrong things to do. Therefore we do not feel responsible for the things we do, so still we can think of ourselves as ?good.?
What is the next step then? Should we just accept what the research shows and stop being responsible for evildoing? Should we release the U.S. soldiers out of prison, because the circumstances made them do things they did? The answer is, no. No matter how the society or circumstances work on us, we still take the full responsibility for our actions. We should take advantage of the knowledge the researchers gave us and


References:

Milgram, S. 1965. Obedience to authority: An experimental view. New York: Harper & Row.
Webster?s New Third International Dictionary. 1963. Springfield, MA: Merriam.
Zimbardo, P.G. 1972. "The pathology of imprisonment." Society, vol. 9, no. 6, pp. 4-8, 1972, Transaction Publishers.