The social nature of evil
Most conclusions flowing from Milgram's experiments may be seen as variations on one central theme: cruelty correlates with certain patterns of social interaction much more closely than it does with personality features or other individual idiosyncracies of the perpetrators. Cruelty is social in its origin much more than it is characterological. Surely some individuals tend to be cruel if cast in a context which disempowers moral pressures and legitimizes inhumanity.
If any doubts on this count have been left after Milgram, they are likely to evaporate once the findings of another experiment, by Philip Zimbardo,13 are given a close look. From that experiment, even the potentially disturbing factor of the authority of a universally revered institution (science), embodied in the person of the experimenter, has been eliminated. In Zimbardo's experiment there was no external, established authority ready to take the responsibility off the subjects' shoulders. All authority which ultimately operated in Zimbardo's experimental context was generated by the subjects themselves. The only thing Zimbardo did was to set the process off by dividing subjects between positions within a codified pattern of interaction.
In Zimbardo's experiment (planned for a fortnight, but stopped after one week for fear of irreparable damage to the body and mind of the subjects) volunteers had been divided at random into prisoners and prison guards. Both sides were given the symbolic trappings of their position. Prisoners, for example, wore tight caps which simulated shaven heads, and gowns which made them appear ridiculous. Their guards were put in uniforms and given dark glasses which hid their eyes from being looked into by the prisoners. No side was allowed to address the other by name; strict impersonality was the rule. There was long list
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of
petty
regulations invariably humiliating for the prisoners and Stripping
them of human dignity. This was the starting point. What followed
surpassed and left far behind the designers' ingenuity. The
initiative
of the guards (randomly selected males of college age, carefully
screened
against any sign of abnormality) knew no bounds. A genuine
'schismogenetic
chain', once hypothesized by Gregory Bateson, was set in motion. The
construed superiority of the guards rebounded in the submissiveness
of the prisoners, which in its turn tempted the guards into
further displays of their powers, which were then duly reflected in
more
self-humiliation on the part of the prisoners ... The guards forced
the
prisoners to chant filthy songs, to defecate in buckets which they
did not
allow them to empty, to clean toilets with bare hands; the more they
did
it, the more they acted as if they were convinced of the non-human
nature
of the prisoners, and the less they felt constrained in inventing
and
administering measures of an ever-more appalling degree of
inhumanity.
The sudden transmogrification of likeable and decent American boys into near monsters of the kind allegedly to be found only in places like Auschwitz or Treblinka is horrifying. But it is also baffling. It led some observers to surmise that in most people, if not in all of us, there lives a little SS man waiting to come out (Amitai Etzioni suggested that Milgram discovered the 'latent Eichmann' hidden in ordinary men).14 John Steiner coined the concept of the sleeper to denote the normally dormant, but sometimes awakened capacity for cruelty.
The sleeper effect refers to the latent personality characteristic of violence-prone individuals such as autocrats, tyrants, or terrorists when the appropriate lock and key relationships became established. The sleeper is then roused from the normative stage of his behaviour pattern and the dormant, violence-prone personality characteristics become activated, in some way, all persons are sleepers inasmuch as they have a violent potential that under specific conditions can be triggered.15
And yet, clearly and unambiguously, the orgy of cruelty that took Zimbardo and his colleagues by surprise, stemmed from a vicious social arrangement, and not from the viciousness of the participants. Were the subjects of the experiment assigned to the opposite roles, the overall result would not be different. What mattered was the existence of a polarity, and not who was allocated to its respective sides. What did matter was that some people were given a total, exclusive and
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