Outside of the workplace, the power of authority is most evident in law enforcement. Whenever we have been pulled over by men in uniforms, most of us become obedient. I know I do. In an incredible account of blind obedience, Zimbardo describes how he served as an expert witness in one case of a spate of sixty sexual assaults that had taken place in fast-food chains across the United States during the late 1990s and early 2000s. In a typical scam, the caller asked to speak to the assistant manager and then informed him that he was a police officer and that one of the recent employees had been stealing money and concealing drugs. The assistant manager was asked to cooperate by restraining the suspect employee and performing a strip search while the police made their way to the restaurant. Of course, this was not a real police request but a pervert who wanted the manager to describe the intimate search in detail into the phone. In the case with which Zimbardo was involved, a terrified eighteen-year-old female employee was stripped naked and then commanded to perform oral sex with another male co-worker, simply because they were told to so by an anonymous phone caller who they believed was ‘the law’.38
The Banality of Evil
Much of the research on compliance and obedience was conducted in a period of history still recovering from the atrocities of the Nazi concentration camps. Asch, Milgram and Zimbardo were Americans of Jewish descent who wanted to know how the Holocaust could ever have taken place. It was a question to which the world wanted the answer as well. Even today, we still ask the same questions. How can ordinary people perform such extraordinarily cruel acts on other people?
Perhaps the Milgram experiments were products of the era – when authoritarianism ruled the day. We are much more liberated today and wary of the corrupting power of authority in the post-Watergate years. However, in 2007, the ABC News Primetime TV show in the US decided to recreate the Milgram study to see whether a sample of forty men and women would go as far as to administer the highest level of shock.39 Again two-thirds of them obeyed a man in the white coat and went all the way to the end of the dial. We are fooling our selves if we believe we can resist the influence of others. We can all become the instruments of torture.
We still question how people can be so evil whenever we hear of another example of human atrocity inflicted on fellow human beings around the globe. One example that was so surprising was the treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib by US professional soldiers. In 2004, images of naked male Iraqi detainees piled high on top of each other in a human pyramid were circulated around the world’s press. Alongside their victims, grinning American guards posed, with smiling faces and thumbs up gestures, for trophy photographs. The images also showed the psychological torture of hooded detainees balanced on boxes with outstretched arms, who were told that, if they fell, they would be electrocuted with the dummy wires attached to their fingers. The pictures bore a shocking resemblance to those of hooded prisoners in Zimbardo’s prison experiment. Others detainees were forced to wear women’s clothing or simulate fellatio with other male prisoners. All of these images showed that Abu Ghraib prison, originally used by Saddam Hussein to torture his opponents, continued with the tradition of sadistic human behaviour under the occupation of the coalition’s liberating Army.
At first, US Army generals dismissed the scandal as the work of a few ‘bad apples’ – disturbed sadists who had managed to infiltrate the honourable corp. In particular, the most upsetting images were of a young female guard, Private Lynndie England, who was photographed grinning as she led a naked male prisoner around in a dog-collar. There was nothing out of the ordinary about Lynndie England’s upbringing to suggest that she was a sadist. One of her ex-teachers described her as ‘invisible’. If anything, it appears that Lynndie England was just a simple woman who followed others and was under the influence of her lover, Charles Garner, who instigated the abuse and took many of the photographs. But it is the cherub-like smiling face of twenty-one-year-old England, and not Garner’s, that will forever be associated with the atrocities.40
This is probably the most disturbing thing about evil. When the philosopher Hannah Arendt was commissioned by the New Yorker to cover the war crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann in the early 1960s, she reported that the trouble with Eichmann and his ilk was that they were neither perverted nor sadistic, but simply ‘terribly and terrifyingly normal’. Seemingly ordinary people had committed extraordinary crimes. It was as if, as she called it, the ‘banality of evil’ was proof that the self had capitulated to the cruelty that war and conflicts engender and that people were generally incapable of resisting the will of others.41
The Human Chameleon
When you consider the power of groups in these studies, it seems unlikely that anyone was totally unaware of their behaviour in the conformity and obedience experiments of the 1960s and 1970s. People were also probably aware of their actions in the real-life examples of blind obedience described by Zimbardo. They simply don’t feel responsible for their actions. They may still believe in their self illusion, that they could do otherwise should they wish, but rather they prefer to suspend their decision-making in order to fit in with others or obey authority figures. It’s not a pleasant realization, but then we can always justify it later by weighing up what is in our best interests in the long term. It is our old friend cognitive dissonance, again.
Sometimes our behaviour can also be hijacked unknowingly by the influence of those around us. This is when the self is covertly manipulated. In these situations we are not even aware that we are being shaped by social influences. For example, Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis recalls the time when he and a few members of the Nijmegen Psychology Department went to watch a soccer match.42 On their walk to the stadium, the academics behaving calmly and orderly were soon surrounded by hundreds of yelling and shouting soccer fans and hooligans. At that point something odd happened. One of academics saw an empty beer can and, in what seemed to be an impulsive act, he kicked it violently as far away as possible. For a moment, he stood there, transfixed and aghast at what he had just done. He was no longer an individual – he had become like the crowd around him.
This change in behaviour to match others around us is known as the ‘chameleon effect’43 after the exotic lizard that can change its skin colour to blend in with its surroundings. It is not a deliberate effort to change but rather reflects the automatic way that we mimic others around us. This can be anything from simple postures, expressions and gestures to more complicated patterns of behaviour such as speech or moods. Simply the way we move about can be influenced by others without us even being really aware. The brain’s mirroring system that is activated during our own movements that can also be triggered by the goal-directed actions of another when we observe them performing the same goal. These mirror neurons provide a convenient way of mapping the behaviour of others directly into our own brains through a process much like resonance. It’s like when you are in a guitar salesroom and strike the ‘G’ string loudly enough on one guitar, all the other ‘G’ strings on all the other guitars will eventually vibrate in synchrony.
Human mirroring works the same way. Most of us have a repertoire of behaviours that can be triggered by others without us being aware that we are mirroring someone else’s movements. We may cross our legs, yawn, stroke our nose, play with our hair and change the way we speak or sit simply because we are unwittingly copying another person.44 This unconscious imitation, known as mimicry, is a powerful mechanism for binding the self to others.45 It is not entirely automatic as we only mimic those we like in a virtuous self-fulfilling circle – we copy others who we like, who in turn like us more, thereby increasing the likelihood that they will copy us in a synchronized sycophantic symphony of mutual appreciation.46