Our Theories About Who We Are Shape How We Feel and How We Act
One scientific experiment greatly influenced, for decades, how many people thought about this question. This is the “obedience experiment” carried out by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s, just after the beginning of the Eichmann trial. In that experiment, a volunteer was asked to play a teacher to help another person, the “student,” learn word pairs. Each time the “student” replied with the wrong word, the “teacher” would seemingly give them an electric shock. The voltage of the shock was increased with each wrong answer.
The “teacher” sat in one room before an electronic control panel and could see through a window into the room where the “student” sat hooked up to wires. A white-coated experimenter stood in the room with the “teacher” encouraging and instructing with comments like, ”Continue using the 450 volt switch for each wrong answer.” The experimenter repeated these instructions even as the “student” began to scream⎼ and later drop over, silent. The “teacher” raised objections at times; but as the instructions continued, the “teacher” continued the shocks. The student was, in fact, an actor; the shocks to the “student” were not real. However, the emotional effect on the “teacher” was real.
It was initially reported by Milgram that 65% of the “teachers” continued to shock their students even to a lethal level. But, according to author and researcher Gina Perry, that statistic was only true with one of the 24 versions of the experiment. There were over 700 people involved in the experiments, and the 65% represented only 26 people. There were some variations of the experiment where no one obeyed the authority. If she is correct, this drastically changes how we might understand the experiment.
The philosopher Jacob Needleman studied the visual recordings of the experiment and commented on the facial expression and speech of one of the “teachers.” When questioned just after the experiment was over, the “teacher” said, “I don’t like that one bit. I mean, he [the “student”] wanted to get out and we just keep throwing 450 volts…” The teacher was dazed, and under further questioning couldn’t let themself comprehend what they had done. They couldn’t comprehend their own feelings let alone allow themselves to feel what the “student” might have felt.
A startling parallel to Milgram was a series of experiments by Doctor of Psychology, Daniel Batson, who tested whether people would act compassionately to save others from suffering. In one experiment, volunteer subjects, like Milgram’s teachers, watched people receive shocks when they incorrectly answered a memory task. The volunteer was told the person they were watching had suffered trauma as a child. They were then given the choice to leave the experiment or receive the shock intended for the supposed trauma victim. Many subjects felt such compassion for the other person they actually volunteered to take on their pain.
What is the message of these experiments? Milgram’s experiment is often considered a cautionary tale revealing the potential for evil in all of us⎼ and the “evil” demonstrated by Milgram arises from our propensity to obey authority despite clear evidence of the wrongness of the act. But why do we hear so much more about this experiment than Batson’s, whose work demonstrates the capacity for compassion?
The psychologist, Philip Zimbardo, talks about the “fundamental attribution error” which is a failure to recognize just how much other people and the context influence our behavior. He says that we tend to overestimate the role played by people’s personality and underestimate the power of the context. It is not just the authority figure that people follow, but the whole situation.
Our understanding of who we are and what is real and possible is formed in tandem with our understanding of our situation with others. If other people, in this case the experimenter, act as if the only important factor in the situation is whether the “student” answers correctly, and not their physical well-being, then it is less likely that the “teacher” would act compassionately. The second experiment demonstrates that even one thought about the subjective experience of another person, one biographical detail, can encourage us to identify and act compassionately toward them.
Maybe an obvious conclusion from these experiments, as well as one answer to my student’s original question, is that we are such social beings that how we feel about ourselves is greatly tied to how we feel about others ⎼ and how others relate to us. What we think is right is tied to the situation we are in. And compassion is natural to us. It can be developed and strengthened—or undermined—by the way a social situation (including a school community) is structured.
And whatever propensity for evil we demonstrate is related to our theories of who we are. For example, when we are taught to believe we are totally independent selves, separate and isolated from others and the world, we live a distorted view of ourselves that can be painful and allow all sorts of horrors to be made possible. It can lead us to believe that not only can’t we help being violent, greedy and selfish, but that we should be such.
The political universe is, for this New Year, involving all of us in a sort of Milgram experiment. Will we obey an authority, or authoritarian, or let him shock and manipulate us into spreading hopelessness and debilitating fear? Will we let a wanna-be dictator, and a mistaken notion of who we are, dictate to us? Or will we act to save ourselves and this planet, and assist in creating a social environment that encourages positive and compassionate action?
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This Post is republished on irarabois and is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: iStock
