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Our capacity to inflict pain
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Imagining Milgram ... Rod Dickinson's 2002 TV reconstruction of the Milgram experiments
If you have any interest in Psychology, you may recall psychologist Stanley Milgram (1933 – 1984) and his obedience studies in the 1960s. In them, Dr. Milgram instructed his subjects to use electrodes to inflict pain on people they could hear but not see. The subjects did not know that they were not actually administering electric shocks, or that their screaming victims were actors. They believed the pain was real, and thought they were the ones inflicting it.
The subjects were told they’d been recruited as “teachers” to explore the effects of punishment as a learning tool on “learners”. Each time the learner made a mistake, the subject received instructions to inflict an electric shock. Whenever a subject asked if he or she should increase the voltage, the experimenter said yes.
Worried subjects occasionally asked the experimenter who was responsible for any harmful effects on the learner. The experimenter assured them that he assumed full responsibility. Satisfied, subjects then continued to administer what they believed were increasingly more painful shocks.
The experiment revealed that no one refused to continue before reaching 300 volts. Over 60% of the subjects continued to administer electrodes until they reached the maximum 450 volts, thinking they were inflicting pain, but reassured they were not personally responsible.
The results raised eyebrows. People who inflict pain, it seems, are willing to continue inflicting pain if they feel they won’t be blamed for it. Is it because we are afraid to disobey or have someone disapprove of us? Is it because the experimenter and the environment are intimidating? These have been the traditional interpretations of the results.
However, the troubling truth – the real clue – may be that the subjects expressed concern, NOT for the learners, but for themselves, when they asked who would be responsible for any harmful effects. They quickly resumed inflicting pain when they learned they were not responsible. Is that because we can disconnect ourselves from someone else’s pain, as long as we can rationalize the blame away from ourselves? Are we just essentially, secretly indifferent to suffering and only express compassion for show?
A later experiment at Ohio State University, which appeared in the July, 2008 issue of the Perspectives on Psychological Science journal, added another aspect to the study. This time, the learner cried out for the subject to stop when the shock reached 150 volts.
Subjects who held themselves accountable stopped. One third of the subjects determined that “the learner’s right to stop carried greater weight than the experimenter’s right to proceed,” and refused to keep going.
On the other hand, two thirds of the subjects – a pretty grim and scary percentage – held the experimenter accountable, and so continued to inflict increasingly more painful shocks, even though the learner was begging them not to. Only an additional 10% to 15% dropped out before reaching the maximum voltage. All of the subjects were undeterred by earlier sounds of discomfort or pain.
In a separate study at Santa Clara University, the subjects performed a little better. Only 50% agreed to proceed after the learner screamed for them to stop.
The results after the learner screamed, “Stop!” could indicate that identification with the victim prompted subjects to refuse to continue with the experiment. However, they only did so if they felt personally responsible. If they didn’t feel personally responsible, they carried on.
So what does this study mean to us, as we strive for spiritual growth? It could explain the behavior of prison guards at Abu Ghraib. It could explain war atrocities throughout history. It could explain office politics, and high school cliques. It could explain “group think” where we follow the crowd against our teachings, our conscience, and our better judgment. It could even explain the act of avoiding eye contact with a homeless person or avoiding giving money to charity, or any of the other choices we make to avoid assisting someone when we have the opportunity to assist. The experiment could suggest wider-ranging implications than we might think, by holding up a mirror to humanity without its makeup or hair combed.
Results like the ones in that experiment do not come out of nowhere.
They may indicate that subjects who stop have a more active internal moral mechanism that recognizes situations in which they are personally accountable, even when they are assured they are not. This moral mechanism compels them to reject that reassurance as having less weight than their own conscience. They apparently comprise a small minority of us.
Every day we symbolically inflict each other with painful electrodes, sometimes out of duty, or indifference, or to advance our own interests, or because we don’t feel accountable for someone else’s pain, even when we’re the cause of it. We encroach on each other’s comfort and rights, routinely taking something away from someone else in order to obtain what we want, or to enhance our own position. We’re triumphant and celebratory, rather than humble and gracious, when our win inescapably results in someone else’s loss. We ignore the suffering we see all around us, and move on to more important life issues, like getting that car or promotion we want. If we are challenged to look again, we scoff and call the people who care about suffering “bleeding hearts,” which we all know is an insult because people who suffer brought it on themselves, and have only themselves to blame; anyone who thinks otherwise is a chump.
We’re comfortable with this scenario when the results are blurred and don’t reflect poorly on us. We’re only shocked into sitting up straight when we demonstrate we’re essentially not very nice at all as a species…because it reflects on us as individuals, and we prefer to be seen with our hair combed.
Granted, we all have “good hearts,” right? We all know that about ourselves. We do this bad thing just this one time, or for a good reason, or because we couldn’t help it, or because that person really deserved to be punished, or because someone else made us do it. That person we exclude from office social gatherings isn’t like the rest of us, and doesn’t belong, and couldn’t possibly expect us to include him. That girl we shunned and ridiculed in high school was just weird, and didn’t count. No big deal. We still have “good hearts.”
When someone at the office comes to us for United Way contributions, we pledge our 2%. It’s tax deductible, it’s relatively painless, and the boss is watching. Nevertheless, we’ve done our part, and are absolved from further compassion or generosity. That homeless man is just a bum, and he’ll only buy booze or drugs with the money – he makes us indignant, rather than sorrowful. That single mother should have kept her legs crossed. That old woman on welfare should have saved more before she retired (Oh, she was a housewife? Well, then she should have gotten a job.), instead of making herself a burden on the rest of us. The unemployed are just lazy, or too proud to work for minimum wage.
Our entire day is a series of opportunities to choose the right thing or the wrong thing. Throughout the day we all demonstrate a remarkable capacity for rationalization and denial. We all shift responsibility to evade blame. We all have occasions where we squirm away from the right thing if it’s hard, or means we lose something, or if the wrong thing is more tempting and we can think of a good excuse. Then, if we’re confronted and held accountable, we react with affront because someone has challenged our choice, and we justify it, or we blame someone else, or we react with feigned bewilderment: we didn’t know, so it’s not our fault
Our self-image requires that we be “nice” and “right”, but our real selves grasp for what we want, even if it hurts someone else. And when we succeed in grasping something, we view it as a “win” without regard for the impact this might have on the person who must relinquish it to us, because that person is “just a loser.”
Spirituality is not solely a mystical connection between us and our God, and is not about memorizing lines of text in a book, then quoting them. Spiritual growth is not just about attaining wisdom or “knowing”. The stepping stones to spiritual growth are actions and choices, in the real world, as we interact with real people. It is an increasing understanding that the right choices move us forward, and the wrong choices set us back. As we come to understand this, that mystical, spiritual connection becomes easier to achieve because we’re closer to being attuned to, and on the same wavelength as, the God, or universal force, with which we’re trying to connect.
Spiritual growth is the act of striving to change the things we wish we weren’t, even if we fail at it. It’s a subtle shift in priorities from “me” to “you”, and genuinely caring how our choices affect other people. It involves honestly examining ourselves without our makeup or hair combed, and brutally identifying our meanness or pettiness or insincerity or selfishness – whatever it is that we personally find in our own mirror. It is then snapping ourselves with an imaginary (or real) rubber band around the wrist whenever we catch ourselves indulging in our weaknesses. It is improving on those weaknesses, just a little, or at least honestly accepting them without blaming someone else for them.
It’s hard. It means pressing on, and trying again when we fail. But it gets easier with practice. Spiritual growth begins with letting go of our need to justify all the “wrongs” we choose throughout the day and doing the right thing, or the kind thing, or the selfless thing with a clear heart, even if we seem to lose a little of what we want. We know we’re really getting there when absolute fairness and justice are critical to us. We know we’re really getting there when we can’t imagine hurting someone, or grasping something that would deprive someone else, and find it more painful to take than to give.
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