Situational psychologist Philip Zimbardo was interviewed about a book he wrote that I’ve read and blogged, The Lucifer Effect.
Powerful power of story stuff.
We can’t stop it until we can understand the mechanisms that corrupt not just individuals, but whole systems and institutions like politics or finance.
The Lucifer Effect is about bad barrels, not just bad apples.
It helps my own understanding to sharply distinguish school as institutional place, from education as personal goal/ attribute. What we compel is showing up at the place, not becoming an educated person.
. . .“place” can win over “person” through concepts like institutionalization, escalating dehumanization, stress and stereotyping, the seduction of boredom, the evil of inaction and much more. Sounds too much like what’s gone wrong between school and education — we’ve institutionalized thinking and learning and productive work, and lost the individuals we meant to inspire and empower in the process.
It all starts with “semantic distortion.”
Which leads to “moral disengagement” to detach from the human connection without really being aware of it and then finally, outright “demonization” of Other people.
Maybe words and ideas are repeatedly distorted to call the Other a cockroach, until you come to see that Other as sub-human, not your kind, literally insects to be squashed. It worked in Rwanda, telling Hutus that their neighbors the Tutsi were “cockroaches” and then giving them weapons to kill the bugs.
About 30 years ago, Zimbardo and his colleagues began to do research on dehumanization.
“What are the ways in which, instead of changing yourself and becoming the aggressor, it becomes easier to be hostile against other people by changing your psychological conception of them?” he asked.
“You think of them as worthless animals. That’s the killing power of stereotypes.”
It’s working on C Street, Doug Coe telling some well-connected elected white men that they’ve been chosen by divine will to be better than ordinary people, even their own wives and children much less their constituents. That they answer to a higher morality and aren’t bound by ordinary accountability . . .but it works even better if you keep really secret! I’m wondering if the cockroach trick will work for Rush Limbaugh, to turn enough of us against our president that someone will treat him like a bug?
So what’s the “bad barrel” that would cause a 60something year old married professor to hit on undergraduate students of his?
Zimabardo’s a jerk…
Huh?
Say he was a jerk, personally. Like Einstein reputedly was. Does that make you reject the science?
Hmmm, and would you similarly reject Christianity and conservatism, because of Doug Coe and C Street’s sex coverups?
I blame Viagra. Really. Why do these old white men think anyone is interested?
But isn’t this the sort of training — think of the other side as worthless animals so you can kill them without going too crazy — that the military receives?
Nance
EXACTLY!! Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment was based on the Milgram shock experiments to test how the Nazi psychology was able to get good people to do horrific things to other people, and he studied the horrors of Abu Ghraib too, remember?
It takes Authority that sort of supplants individual morality, and then twists words around to get you to act on whatever the Authority tells you must happen . . .
And doesn’t every war exploit dehumanizing, literally “demoralizing” words for the enemy? That’s why I started thinking of Rush Limbaugh as Tokyo Rose; he’s got a catchy, dehumanizing word for everybody and everything.
Nance,
The 4 incidents involving Dr. Zimbardo that I’m personally aware of were in pre-Viagra days. The little blue pill may have made it easier for old men to act on their lecherous urges but it certainly didn’t create those urges.
I don’t buy the whole blame-the-situation excuse. The environment may encourage or discourage someone from doing something, but the individual ultimately has free will. It is his/her responsibility to resist the temptation to do something wrong.
No one is excusing anything. Personal sexual behavior doesn’t automatically invalidate a professional psychologist’s life work, that’s all, and to say it does or even argue it should, is bizarre to me. I was the loudest critic (who wasn’t a political opportunist among his sworn enemies) of Bill Clinton as a serial sexual harasser and abuser of his institutional power over women, and I still believe I was right about that, but I can separate that from his political and policy work both in office and out.
Coincidentally Dale McGowan uses a famous philosopher of science quote to open his new post at “Parenting Beyond Belief” and it’s a slap-down of our universally human (but misguided) sense that our subjective personal conviction is fact, while the science of cognitive psychology is just some kind of subjective excuse.
What is needed is not the will to believe but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. — Bertrand Russell
Well, CW, I don’t care who the Dr. diddled. I was just trying to follow the ideas.
JJ, I mean the good guys too. Us. You know, the ones fighting on the right side of every war.
We use, I think, the same sort of brainwashing to get our 18-year-olds to think it’s OK to kill the “other” guy.
Nance
Nance, yes, on the same page there. The Abu Ghraib soldiers for example, were ours and supposed to be good guys . . .
Young Son has been so enamoured of military history the past couple of years, that we spend a good deal of effort working through that kind of thing here. Like FavD and her study of religions, I think it helps to have so many different causes and sides over different nations and centuries, for him to compare and contrast. It prevents that stubborn ethnocentric tunnel vision that your side or your god is singularly right and above the rules of the rest of the universe.
I should clarify that I’m not aware of any cases where an undergraduate became involved in an inappropriate relationship with Dr. Zimbardo. It wasn’t exactly sexual harassment either since there was no quid pro quo and he stopped when rebuffed. It was just icky…
So what do you think of his SCIENCE?
Is it even possible to have an objective opinion about a person’s work when one has a vehement dislike of that person based on a negative encounter with him/her?
Bingo! Is it ironic that if true, this very problem validates his science? — isn’t that the whole point, that once made visceral through vehement dislike of another person, feeling over thinking can cause us to lose own higher order moral understandings, become less human and less sentient ourselves . . .