Why Evil Lurks in Us All

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2000/dec/17/martinbright.theobserver
Revealed: why evil lurks in us all
Study shows that crude loyalty to our social group and blind obedience make tyranny possible anywhere
Martin Bright, home affairs correspondent
The Observer, Sunday 17 December 2000
Psychologists have struggled for decades to explain why ordinary people participate in atrocities such as the Nazi Holocaust or the Stalinist purges.
Now experiments carried out in Britain reveal that most people obey authority unquestioningly and would also walk past an injured stranger who did not come from their own ethnic or social group.
The findings will shake the long-held British belief that this country is immune from the kinds of tyranny found in other parts of the world.
Research carried out at Lancaster University on football supporters found that they failed consistently to come to the aid of an injured supporter from a rival team. Secret cameras filmed individual Manchester United fans as they ignored a Liverpool fan played by an actor while he writhed in pain on the floor. When the actor wore a Manchester United shirt, the supporters helped him in 80 per cent of cases. When he switched to a Liverpool shirt, all but a handful walked straight past. The results of the research will be revealed in a BBC programme, Five Steps to Tyranny , on the nature of evil to be presented by Sheena McDonald this week.
A separate experiment - again filmed with secret cameras - shows the majority of people on a train complying with a stranger's order to give up their seat. When the stranger is accompanied by a man in a uniform, not a single person chooses to disobey.
McDonald said she was shocked by what the experiments showed: 'The majority of people have a psychological tendency to obey and conform. All of us involved in the programme found ourselves looking at our own lives and examining whether we were beginning on the first step to tyranny.'
Dr Mark Levine, the psychologist who developed the football fan experiment, said: 'These are ordinary people. If you ask people whether they would help a stranger in distress, they say they would. But in reality they just don't do it. When we asked people afterwards why they didn't intervene, they said they didn't consider the pain as serious when they saw the person was wearing a Liverpool shirt.'
Colonel Bob Stewart, former commander of UN forces in Bosnia, said his experiences in the Balkans left him in no doubt that, given the right circumstances, similar human rights atrocities could be committed in Britain. 'What makes a man go for a drink with his neighbour one moment and shoot him the next? We still don't understand what causes normally good people to go over the edge. Until we do, there is the possibility that it will happen here.' The controversial programme argues that everyday prejudice can quickly develop into full-blown oppression and even genocide. The first step to tyranny, it suggests, is the creation of 'in' and 'out' groups based on irrational prejudice. The tabloid attacks on asylum-seekers are given as evidence that we are not immune to such blind hatred.
The new research draws on experiments such as the one in an Iowa school two decades ago when teacher Jane Elliott split her primary-school class into blue-eyed children, told they were superior, and brown-eyed children, told they were stupid and unattractive. Within hours the blue-eyed 'in group' were bullying their classmates.
The researchers demonstrated that little had changed since 1961, when Stanley Milgram, a young psychologist at Yale, discovered how easily ordinary citizens could become perpetrators of evil. Volunteers were taking part in an experiment to test people's ability to learn. They were then told to administer electric shocks to a stranger behind a screen when they failed to perform a simple task of memory, and gradually increase the severity if they continued to make mistakes. To Milgram's horror, two-thirds of the volunteers were ready to administer potentially lethal doses of electricity when encouraged to do so by a researcher in a white coat.
Professor Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University tells the programme that more crimes are committed in the name of obedience than disobedience: 'It is those who follow any authority blindly who are the real danger.' Zimbardo carried out a famous experiment in 1971 at Stanford University when volunteer students were split into guards and inmates in a makeshift underground jail. The experiment had to be abandoned after the guards began violently assaulting the inmates and several of the prisoners had breakdowns.
'It demonstrated the ease and speed with which things can get out of control. Within days the guards were behaving sadistically and the prisoners were acting pathologically.' But Zimbardo said there were some positive aspects: the research was used in Congressional inquiries into prison riots.