Nine out of Every Ten

You may have heard of the Stanford prison experiments. A psychologist who teaches at Stanford, Philip Zimbardo, randomly assigned nine people as guards and nine as prisoners (after screening them so nobody unbalanced got it). Within a couple of days, the guards were “abusing” and humiliating the “prisoners” in pretty horrific ways. The implication of the study was that, if the groups had been reversed, the same results would have happened.

I was talking about this with my colleague, psychologist Charles Hackney, and he told me about the Milgram experiments. Subjects were told to press a button which administered an electric shock to a man sitting in an adjacent room if he answered a question incorrectly. They weren’t actually doing it; the machine wasn’t rigged up, and the third person would put on an act. But the subjects thought they were. As it turns out, around 2/3 (61%-65%) of the subjects would administer increasingly intense electric shocks, to the point that the other person would die (450 volts). These people would sweat and shake, and ask to stop; and the person hooked up to the machine was instructed to scream, beg the subject to stop, claim that they had a heart condition, etc. And yet, 2/3 of the subjects continued with the shocks for no other reason than that they were told to do it.

Even worse: in a variation of the experiment, subjects would not administer the shock themselves, but only pass the order on to someone else – and the compliance rate jumped to 90%. The implication: 9 out of every 10 people will torture and kill another human being, as long as they don’t have to do it themselves, for no other reason than that someone else is telling them to do it. As I remember, this variation was tested on 1000 subjects, with a consistent “success” rate just above 90%.

I’d like to think, of course, that I’d be one of those brave souls who resisted. And there were Christians who hid Jews in Nazi Germany, at risk of their lives. But many more Christians were complicit. And we’re all hard-wired to think of ourselves are morally superior to others, aren’t we? (Anyone inclined to disagree is referred to Cordelia Fine’s book, A Mind of Its Own, which was written about on this blog.)

As I talked with Dr. Hackney about this, I said to him, “So the point seems to be that our morality and goodness is almost entirely dependent on circumstance – but once circumstances change, it’s not difficult for most people to start doing horrible things to other human beings.” And Charles agreed.

There’s been a lot about death on this blog lately. The reason for this is I want to live, as much as I can, without illusion. I don’t think anyone can live entirely without illusions; probably most of us can’t function in full view of death. But I want to live, as much as I can, knowing that I am entirely frail physically, and entirely frail morally. Part of me is certain my body will never fail, and that I’m a fine chap who would always stick up for others. But it’s not true. “Teach me to number my days . . .”

How much of our conversation is self-distraction? How much of our social events and business and energy is expended on maintaining our illusions that we aren’t going to die, that we aren’t that bad? And how much more convincing might our Christianity be if we lived, as much as one mortal can, without illusion?