The Sociopath Next Door Read online

  But what if the burning human figure had been Osama bin Laden? How would this crowd of American nationals in 2002 have reacted if suddenly confronted with the public execution of the person identified by them as the world's most despicable villain? Would these normally conscience-bound, churchgoing, nonviolent people have stood by and allowed it? Might there have been enthusiasm, or at least acquiescence, rather than nausea and horror at the spectacle of a human being dying in agony?

  Standing there among all those good people, I suddenly realized that the reaction might have been something less than horror, simply because Osama bin Laden is not a human being in our view. He is Osama, and as such, to borrow an expression from Ervin Staub in The Roots of Evil, he has been completely “excluded from our moral universe.” The interventions of conscience no longer apply to him. He is not human. He is an it. And unfortunately, this transformation of a man into an it makes him scarier as well.

  Sometimes people appear to deserve our moral exclusion of them, as terrorists appear to do. Other examples of its are war criminals, child abductors, and serial killers, and in each of these cases, a considered argument can be (and has been) made, rightly or wrongly, that certain rights to compassionate treatment have been forfeited. But in most cases, our tendency to reduce people to nonbeings is neither considered nor conscious, and throughout history our proclivity to dehumanize has too often been turned against the essentially innocent. The list of out groups that some portion of humankind has at one time or another demoted to the status of hardly even human is extremely long and, ironically, includes categories for nearly every one of us: blacks, Communists, capitalists, gays, Native Americans, Jews, foreigners, “witches,” women, Muslims, Christians, the Palestinians, the Israelis, the poor, the rich, the Irish, the English, the Americans, the Sinhalese, Tamils, Albanians, Croats, Serbs, Hutus, Tutsis, and Iraqis, to name but a few.

  And once the other group has become populated by its, anything goes, especially if someone in authority gives the order. Conscience is no longer necessary, because conscience binds us to other beings and not to its. Conscience still exists, may even be very exacting, but it applies only to my countrymen, my friends, and my children, not yours. You are excluded from my moral universe, and with impunity—and maybe even praise from the others in my group—I can now drive you from your home, or shoot your family, or burn you alive.

  I should record that nothing bad actually happened at the bonfire in 2002. As far as I know, these macabre thoughts occurred only to me. The flames consumed only wood. The fire was a sight to behold, and then burned itself out, just as planned. Laughing children, safe in their hometown, romped on the beach and got doused by the firemen. One wishes that human gatherings could always be as peaceful.

  The Emperor's New Clothes

  When conscience falls into a profound trance, when it sleeps through acts of torture, war, and genocide, political leaders and other prominent individuals can make the difference between a gradual reawakening of our seventh sense and a continued amoral nightmare. History teaches that attitudes and plans coming from the top dealing pragmatically with problems of hardship and insecurity in the group, rather than scapegoating an out group, can help us return to a more realistic view of the “others.” In time, moral leadership can make a difference. But history shows us also that a leader with no seventh sense can hypnotize the group conscience still further, redoubling catastrophe. Using fear-based propaganda to amplify a destructive ideology, such a leader can bring the members of a frightened society to see the its as the sole impediment to the good life, for themselves and maybe even for humanity as a whole, and the conflict as an epic battle between good and evil. Once these beliefs have been disseminated, crushing the its without pity or conscience can, with chilling ease, become an incontrovertible mandate.

  The recurrence throughout history of this second type of leader raises a long list of dumbfounding questions. Why does the human race tolerate this sorrowful story over and over, like a mindless broken record? Why do we continue to allow leaders who are motivated by self-interest, or by their own psychological issues from the past, to fan bitterness and political crisis into armed confrontation and war? In the worst instances, why do we let people who think like frog-killing, arm-breaking Skip run the show and play games of dominance with other people's lives? What becomes of our individual consciences? Why do we not stand up for what we feel?

  One explanation is our trancelike state, which lets us believe that the ones who are dying are only its anyway. And there is fear, of course—always—and often a sense of helplessness. We look around at the crowd and we think to ourselves, Too many are against me, or I don't hear any other people protesting this, or, even more resignedly, That's just the way the world is, or That's politics. All of these feelings and beliefs can significantly mute our moral sense, but where the disabling of conscience by authority is concerned, there is something even more effective, something more elemental than objectifying the “others,” more cloying and miserable than a sense of helplessness, and evidently more difficult to conquer than fear itself. Very simply, we are programmed to obey authority even against our own consciences.

  In 1961 and 1962, in New Haven, Connecticut, Yale University professor Stanley Milgram designed and filmed one of the most astonishing psychological experiments ever conducted. Milgram set out to pit the human tendency to obey authority as squarely as possible against individual conscience. Concerning his method of inquiry, he wrote, “Of all moral principles, the one that comes closest to being universally accepted is this: one should not inflict suffering on a helpless person who is neither harmful nor threatening to oneself. This principle is the counterforce we shall set in opposition to obedience.”

  Milgram's experimental procedure was relentlessly straightforward, and the filmed version of his study has outraged humanists, and unsuspecting college students, for forty years. In the study, two men, strangers to each other, arrive at a psychology laboratory to participate in an experiment that has been advertised as having to do with memory and learning. Participation is rewarded with four dollars, plus fifty cents for carfare. At the lab, the experimenter (Stanley Milgram himself, in the filmed version) explains to both men that the study concerns “the effects of punishment on learning.” One of the two is designated as the “learner” and is escorted into another room and seated in a chair. All watch as the learner's arms are matter-of-factly strapped to the chair, “to prevent excessive movement,” and an electrode is attached to his wrist. He is told that he must learn a list of word pairs (blue box, nice day, wild duck, etc.), and that whenever he makes a mistake, he will receive an electric shock. With each mistake, the shock will increase in intensity.

  The other person is told that he is to be the “teacher” in this learning experiment. After the teacher has watched the learner get strapped to a chair and wired for electric shock, the teacher is taken into a different room and asked to take a seat in front of a large, ominous machine called a “shock generator.” The shock generator has thirty switches, arranged horizontally and labeled by “volts,” from 15 volts all the way to 450 volts, in 15-volt increments. In addition to the numbers, the switches are branded with descriptors that range from SLIGHT SHOCK to the sinister appellation of DANGER—SEVERE SHOCK. The teacher is handed the list of word pairs and told that his job is to administer a test to the learner in the other room. When the learner gets an answer right—for example, teacher calls out “blue,” and learner answers “box”—the teacher can move on to the next test item. But when the learner gives an incorrect answer, the teacher must push a switch and give him an electric shock. The experimenter instructs the teacher to begin at the lowest level of shock on the shock generator, and with each wrong answer, to increase the shock level by one increment.

  The learner in the other room is actually the experimenter's trained confederate, an actor, and will receive no shocks at all. But of course the teacher does not know this, and it is the teacher who is the r
eal subject of the experiment.

  The teacher calls out the first few items of the “learning test,” and then trouble begins, because the learner—Milgram's accomplice, unseen in the other room—starts to sound very uncomfortable. At 75 volts, the learner makes a mistake on the word pair, the teacher administers the shock, and the learner grunts. At 120 volts, the learner shouts to the experimenter that the shocks are becoming painful, and at 150 volts, the unseen learner demands to be released from the experiment. As the shocks get stronger, the learner's protests sound more and more desperate, and at 285 volts, he emits an agonized scream. The experimenter—the Yale professor in the white lab coat—stands behind the teacher, who is seated at the shock generator, and calmly gives a sequence of scripted prods, such as “Please continue,” or “The experiment requires that you continue,” or “Whether the learner likes it or not, you must go on until he has learned all the word pairs correctly. So please go on.”

  Milgram repeated this procedure forty times using forty different subjects—people who were “in everyday life responsible and decent”—including high school teachers, postal clerks, salesmen, manual laborers, and engineers. The forty represented various educational levels, from one man who had not finished high school to others who had doctoral or other professional degrees. The aim of the experiment was to discover how long the subjects (the teachers in this experiment) would take to disobey Milgram's authority when presented with a clear moral imperative. How much electric shock would they administer to a pleading, screaming stranger merely because an authority figure told them to do so?

  When I show Milgram's film to a lecture hall full of psychology students, I ask them to predict the answers to these questions. The students are always certain that conscience will prevail. Many of them predict that a large number of the subjects will walk out of the experiment as soon as they find out about the use of electric shock. Most of the students are sure that, of the subjects who remain, all but a few will defy the experimenter, perhaps telling him to go to hell, at least by the time the man in the other room demands to be freed (at 150 volts). And of course, the students predict, only a tiny number of very sick, sadistic subjects will continue pushing switches all the way to 450 volts, where the machine itself says DANGER—SEVERE SHOCK.

  Here is what actually happens: Thirty-four of Milgram's original forty subjects continue to shock the learner, whom they believe to be strapped to a chair, even after he asks to be released from the experiment. In fact, of these thirty-four subjects, twenty-five—that is to say, 62.5 percent of the total group—never disobey the experimenter at any point, continuing to press the switches all the way to the end of the sequence (450 volts) despite entreaties and shrieks from the man in the other room. The teachers sweat, they complain, they hold their heads, but they continue. When the film is over, I watch the clock. In a lecture hall full of students who have just seen this experiment for the first time, there is always stunned silence for at least one full minute.

  After the original experiment, Milgram varied his design in a number of ways. In one variation, for example, subjects were not commanded to operate the switches that shocked the learner, only to call out the words for the word-pair test before another person pushed the switches. In this version of the experiment, thirty-seven of forty people (92.5 percent) continued to participate to the highest shock level on the “generator.” Thus far, the teachers in the study had been only men. Milgram now tried his experiment using forty women, speculating that women might be more empathic. Their performance was virtually identical, except that obedient women reported more stress than obedient men. Studies using the Milgram model were repeated at several other universities, and soon involved more than a thousand subjects of both genders and from many walks of life. The results remained essentially the same.

  The many-times-replicated outcome of his obedience study led Milgram to make the famous pronouncement that has haunted, and also motivated, so many students of human nature: “A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.” Milgram believed that authority could put conscience to sleep mainly because the obedient person makes an “adjustment of thought,” which is to see himself as not responsible for his own actions. In his mind, he is no longer a person who must act in a morally accountable way, but the agent of an external authority to whom he attributes all responsibility and all initiative. This “adjustment of thought” makes it much easier for benign leadership to establish order and control, but by the same psychological mechanism, it has countless times rolled out the red carpet for self-serving, malevolent, and sociopathic “authorities.”

  Where Conscience Draws the Line

  The extent to which authority dulls conscience is affected by the perceived legitimacy of that authority. If the person giving the orders is seen as a subordinate, or even as an equal, the same “adjustment of thought” may never occur. In Milgram's initial study, one of the minority of people who eventually refused to continue with the experiment was a thirty-two-year-old engineer who apparently regarded the scientist in the lab coat as, at most, his intellectual peer. This subject pushed his chair away from the shock generator and in an indignant tone said to Milgram, “I'm an electrical engineer, and I have had shocks . . . I think I've gone too far already, probably.” In an interview later, when Milgram asked him who was accountable for shocking the man in the other room, he did not assign any responsibility to the experimenter. Instead, he replied, “I would put it on myself entirely.” He was a professional person with an advanced education, and education must be acknowledged as one of the factors that determine whether or not conscience stays alert. It would be a grave and arrogant mistake to imagine that an academic degree directly increases the strength of conscience in the human psyche. On the other hand, education can sometimes level the perceived legitimacy of an authority figure, and thereby limit unquestioning obedience. With education and knowledge, the individual may be able to hold on to the perception of him- or herself as a legitimate authority.

  Relatedly, in another permutation of his experiment, Milgram posed an “ordinary man,” rather than a scientist, as the person who ordered the subjects to administer shocks. When an “ordinary man” was in charge, instead of a man in a white lab coat, obedience on the part of the subjects dropped from 62.5 percent to 20 percent. Packaging and perceptions are not everything, but evidently they get pretty close. Some of us may resist a person who looks like we do, but most of us will obey someone who looks like an authority. This finding is of particular concern in an age when our leaders and experts come to us via the magic of television, where nearly anyone can be made to appear patrician and commandingly larger than life.

  In addition to being larger than life, images on television are up close and personal—they are in our living rooms—and another factor that affects authority's power to overwhelm individual conscience is the proximity of the person giving the commands. When Milgram varied his experiment such that he was not in the room, obedience dropped by two-thirds, to about the same level as when an “ordinary man” was in charge. And when authority was not close by, subjects tended to “cheat” by using only the lower shock levels on the machine.

  The nearness of authority is especially relevant to the real-life obedience requirements of combat and war. As it turns out, individual conscience draws a surprisingly firm line at killing—surprising for those who think of human beings as natural war makers. This aspect of conscience is so resilient in normal people that military psychologists have needed to devise ways around it. For example, military experts now know that to make men kill with any kind of reliability, commands must be given by authorities who are present with the troops. Otherwise, the men in the field will tend to “cheat” on their orders to kill, will intentionally misaim or simply fail to fire, to keep from violating this mightiest proscription of conscience
.

  Brig. Gen. S. L. A Marshall was a United States combat historian in the Pacific theater during World War II and later became the official historian of the European theater of operations. He wrote of many World War II incidents in which almost all soldiers obeyed and fired their weapons while their leaders were present to command them, but when the leaders left, the firing rate dropped immediately to between 15 and 20 percent. Marshall believed that the great relief displayed by soldiers in a sector where they were not being directly ordered to fire “was due not so much to the realization that things were safer there as to the blessed knowledge that for a time they were not under the compulsion to take life.”

  In his book On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, former U.S. Army Ranger and paratrooper Lt. Col. Dave Grossman reviews Marshall's observations, along with the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates among law-enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and observations of nonfiring from a long list of wars, including the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War, and the Falklands War. He concludes that “the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be ‘conscientious objectors.'” After weighing the considerable historical evidence that ground soldiers often resist and quietly sabotage opportunities to kill, Grossman comes to a “novel and reassuring conclusion about the nature of man: despite an unbroken tradition of violence and war, man is not by nature a killer.” To subvert the bottom line of conscience, to be able to thrust a bayonet or pull a trigger to kill a stranger, normal human beings must be carefully taught, psychologically conditioned, and commanded by authorities on the battlefield.