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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
