What moves a person to become a hero or a villain? Do people perform heroic actions, acts which involve genuine risk to themselves, because they are special people, or is it just a matter of circumstance, being in the right place at the right time? Do people who perform evil actions do so because of flaws in their character, or are they just victims of an evil system that corrupts the innocent, inducing otherwise “good” people to do terrible things? Those who subscribe to situationism, such as Phil Zimbardo, have argued that given the proper circumstances virtually anyone could either become a hero or an evil-doer. Zimbardo has argued that the “banality of heroism” mirrors the apparent “banality of evil.” That is, people choose to perform either heroic or evil deeds mainly according to the circumstances in which they find themselves, rather than because of any inner qualities of goodness or pathology they might possess. However, a closer examination of Zimbardo’s writings on the subject reveals apparent double standards for good and evil, in that evil actions are attributed to external forces imposing upon a person, whereas heroic actions are attributed to internal qualities that empower a person to resist situational pressures towards apathy and inaction. Zimbardo’s own writings on the subject suggest that heroism is far from banal because heroic action involves doing the brave thing in situations when the more commonplace response would be to do nothing. Since heroes take responsibility for the consequences of their actions, does that not mean that evil-doers are responsible for their choices too?
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| Sometimes people must choose between good and evil. But how do they decide? |
Personal power and situational power: opposed or complementary forces?
One of the more generally accepted
theories in psychology is that behavior results from an interaction of the
internal features of the person (e.g. their personality, motives, and values) and the external features of the
situation, such as social pressures to behave a certain way. However, according
to the school of thought called situationism, there are situations that
are so powerful that they pretty much compel people to act in certain ways,
regardless of their internal dispositions or even their moral values. This view
is particularly associated with Phil Zimbardo, who claimed that “A large body of evidence in
social psychology supports the concept that situational power triumphs
over individual power in certain contexts” (2007).
I am not sure what body of evidence exactly he is referring to with this
statement, as a meta-analysis
of 100 years of research in social psychology found that the average effect
size of social influence on behavior was actually smaller than the effect of
personality (Richard, Bond Jr, &
Stokes-Zoota, 2003).[1]
Zimbardo has argued that powerful situations can induce “good” people to do
evil things. In particular, he has claimed that abusive behaviors that occurred
in the (in)famous Stanford Prison Experiment (which I
have analyzed in a previous post) and at Abu Ghraib
prison can be explained in terms of external situational forces rather than the
personal characteristics of those who were involved. More recently, Zimbardo
has argued that situationism can explain
not only the extremes of evil but the extremes of good as well:
The banality of evil is matched by the banality of heroism. Both are not the consequence of dispositional tendencies, not special inner attributes of pathology or goodness residing within the human psyche or the human genome. Both emerge in particular situations at particular times when situational forces play a compelling role in moving individuals across the decisional line from inaction to action.
In this
view, situational forces move people,
pushing some people to do evil,
others to turn a blind eye to evil-doers, while still others act heroically to
right wrongs at great personal risk. In an article arguing for this
situationist explanation, Zeno Franco and Zimbardo stated that “Some situations can inflame the ‘hostile
imagination,’ propelling good people to do bad deeds, while something in that same setting can inspire the ‘heroic imagination’
propelling ordinary people toward actions that their culture at a given time
determines is ‘heroic.’” (Emphasis added.)
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| The real life Braveheart: was he just an ordinary guy after all? |
Situations as a personality test
In the
language of social psychology, the situationist view attributes behavior mainly
to external, rather than internal forces. Hence, heroism and villainy are
unrelated to individual differences in personality or even conscious decisions
based on one’s values. This seems to imply a rather passive view of human
behavior in which people are largely at the mercy of circumstances outside
themselves, rather than rational actors capable of making choices. However, if
features of the person can be disregarded in favour of situational forces, then
it is very difficult to explain why it is that the same situation can elicit completely opposite responses from
different people. This would seem to suggest that situations elicit either
heroic or villainous responses in a random way that cannot be predicted, or
that situational factors alone are insufficient to explain the choices that
people make in difficult circumstances. An alternative view is that situations
do not so much suppress the individual personality, as reveal the person’s
latent potential (Krueger, 2008).
Therefore, a dangerous situation for example might reveal one person’s
potential for bravery and another’s potential for cowardice.
Within you, without you: The incongruity within situationism
As I noted
earlier, most psychologists believe that both situational and personal factors
need to be considered in understanding why people behave the way they do.
Franco and Zimbardo actually acknowledge this in one of their articles: “Just
as in the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram studies, the situation and
the personal characteristics of each person caught up in the situation interact
in unique ways.” When I first read this I thought it was a remarkable admission
considering that Zimbardo and his colleague Craig Haney responded with
hostility and dismissal (Haney & Zimbardo,
2009) to the suggestion that the results of the Stanford Prison
Experiment could have been influenced by the fact that people with certain
personality traits might have been more likely to volunteer for such an
experiment than others (Carnahan &
McFarland, 2007). Furthermore, it appears difficult at first to
reconcile an interactionist view with statements that Franco and Zimbardo have
made that that extreme behavior involving either heroism or evil is best
understood as a product of external circumstances and not of internal
dispositions. However, in practice, situationists
seem to offer a double standard when it comes to explaining evil versus heroic
behavior. Evil behavior is explained in terms of external situational and
systemic forces that compel otherwise “good” people to do bad things. Zimbardo explains that prisoner abuse is not due to a few “bad apples” but a
“bad barrel” that corrupts whatever is put into it. He even goes so far as to
say that “you can’t be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel,” implying that
people in such circumstances are passive victims without any moral agency. On
the other hand, heroism is explained in terms of the “heroic imagination,”
something internal to the person that enables them to actively resist external
pressures to turn a blind eye to injustices. And such heroes can even emerge in
an “evil barrel” like Abu Ghraib. Hence, people respond to the very same situation in either good or evil ways. When some do evil, the
situation is blamed, yet when others do heroic deeds, at great risk to
themselves, it reflects the strength of their own character. This seems like a
very unbalanced view that appears to reflect ideological biases more than
objective analysis.
In the
second part of this article, I will explore in more detail the situationist
analysis of evil and of heroism respectively, and will argue that a more
balanced view that takes into account personal responsibility and moral agency
is needed to understand these extremes of human behavior.
Further Reading
Challenging the "Banality" of Evil and of Heroism - Part 2 Follow up to the present article.
Footnote
[1] For the statistically minded, the average effect size of social influence was r = .13, compared to the effect size of personality which was r = .21. This was brought to my attention in a book review by Krueger (2008).
© Scott McGreal. Please do not
reproduce without permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to
the original article is provided.
This article also appears on Psychology Today on
my blog Unique - Like Everybody Else.
Image Credits
The One Ring - courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
William Wallace portrait - courtesy of Wikipedia Commons
References
Carnahan T, & McFarland S (2007). Revisiting the Stanford prison experiment: could participant self-selection have led to the cruelty? Personality & social psychology bulletin, 33 (5), 603-14 PMID: 17440210
Haney, C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (2009). Persistent Dispositionalism in
Interactionist Clothing: Fundamental Attribution Error in Explaining Prison
Abuse. Personality and Social Psychology
Bulletin, 35(6), 807-814. doi: 10.1177/0146167208322864
Krueger, J. I. (2008). Lucifer's last laugh. The American Journal of Psychology, 121, 335-341.
Richard, F. D., Bond Jr, C. F., & Stokes-Zoota, J. J. (2003). One
Hundred Years of Social Psychology Quantitatively Described. Review of General Psychology, 7(4),
331-363. doi: 10.1037/1089-2680.7.4.331
Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). The
Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (1st ed.). New
York: Random House.
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