After reading and studying a LOT of psychology stuff, I've been pondering some serious philosophical issues. A lot of what I've been studying has been examining the effect that different situations have on different people. Its basically the argument of whether a person's own unique personality and beliefs have more power over their behaviors then the environment or "situation" that they're encountering.
Why does this matter? Well people tend to over attribute a person's actions to their personality, internal programming and character (internal factors) rather then the situational factors. For example, you see someone snap angrily at someone else and you might assume that they are an aggressive and impatient person. But maybe they've just been fired from work, or have had a fight with their spouse and so their mood isn't in the greatest condition- the thing is, we don't know this, so we take a mental shortcut and assume the worst about the person, and we don't bother finding out if we're correct. This phenomenon is known as the fundamental attribution error.
And the power of the situation may be more powerful then ANY of us might imagine.
A famous study by Milgram was influential in learning about human obedience. In his experiment there was a "teacher" and "learner." He explained to the teacher that the experiment was a memory experiment where they had to teach the learner a whole bunch of pair words.
The idea was that he would read out all the pairs of words on a list and then he would say the first word of each pair and the learner would reply with the second word of the pair. If the learner got the word WRONG, the teacher would apply an electric shock to the learner.
There was a huge scale of electric shocks, starting at around 100V and ending at 450V, with about 20 switches in between. Every wrong answer would mean the next wrong answer would be one switch higher. Underneath the switches were labels such as "mild", "severe", "dangerous" and finally underneath 450 "XXX."
As they progressed through the experiment, whenever the learner was shocked, he would start to shout in pain. Then start yelling to the experimenter to let him out, complaining of a heart condition. At around 300V, after much shouting, he would just stop making any sounds at all. For all the teacher knew, the learner was dead (the learner was actually in league with the experimenter and was later introduced to the teacher to show them that they were okay).
When Milgram first started this experiment, he asked well respected psychologists what percentage of people they thought would go through the whole experiment, delivering 450V of electricity into someone they thought was dead. The only motivation they would have would be the experimenter telling them phrases such as "the experiment must go on," and "you must continue."
Most of the psychologists, like you or I might think, said that only 1% or 2% of people would go all the way through. The final results were staggering, 65% of all participants went all the way to the end of the shock scale. Most believing they were killing man or at least doing him much harm.
So what? Well this high level obedience goes to show just how powerful the situation can be. When you're hearing about it from the outside like you are now, you might think "I would stop. I couldn't do that to a man." But the question is, would you really? This experiment has been repeated numerous times with other revealing results. If you are put in a room of multiple "teachers"that all don't stop, the conformity effect causes obedience levels to go up to 90%. There was no statistically difference in personality types, cultures or gender of those that dropped out and those that didn't.
What does this mean in real life? Well with regards to human rights violations such as the Abu Gharaib tortures, the Hollocaust, the Rowanda masscre and many others, where people are under orders from an authority figure to commit acts of evil it gives us an understanding to why they might have done these horrible things. It explains to us that the power of the situation is something that is very hard to measure from an external perspective.
So it complicates things a lot. Were the people who committed these acts excused from their behaviour because they "had no choice?" Its easy to say no. To believe that they are evil, that they're monsters. But Milgram's studies tries to show us that these monsters could be people like you and me, manipulated by circumstance.
If there's anything to learn from Milgram's studies, its that you should NEVER discount the power of a situation. And before you judge someone, wear their shoes, see through their eyes and look at the whole picture.
Losing the Edge
1 hour ago
