The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,342

Darley, Zimbardo, and other social psychologists to make sense of the puzzling participation, or at least acquiescence, of ordinary people in unspeakable atrocities. Bystanders often get caught up in the frenzy around them and join in the looting, gang rapes, and massacres. During the Holocaust, soldiers and policemen rounded up unarmed civilians, lined them up in front of pits, and shot them to death, not out of animus to the victims or a commitment to Nazi ideology but so that they would not shirk their responsibilities or let down their brothers-in-arms. Most of them were not even coerced by a threat of punishment for insubordination. (My own experience in carrying out instructions to shock a laboratory rat against my better judgment makes this disturbing claim utterly believable to me.) Historians have found few if any cases in which a German policeman, soldier, or guard suffered a penalty for refusing to carry out the Nazis’ orders.269 As we shall see in the next chapter, people even moralize conformity and obedience. One component of the human moral sense, amplified in many cultures, is the elevation of conformity and obedience to praiseworthy virtues.

Milgram ran his experiments in the 1960s and early 1970s, and as we have seen, many attitudes have changed since then. It’s natural to wonder whether Westerners today would still obey the instructions of an authority figure to brutalize a stranger. The Stanford Prison Experiment is too bizarre to replicate exactly today, but thirty-three years after the last of the obedience studies, the social psychologist Jerry Burger figured out a way to carry out a new one that would pass ethical muster in the world of 2008.270 He noticed that in Milgram’s original studies, the 150-volt mark, when the victim first cries out in pain and protest, was a point of no return. If a participant didn’t disobey the experimenter then, 80 percent of the time he or she would continue to the highest shock on the board. So Burger ran Milgram’s procedure but broke off the experiment at the 150-volt mark, immediately explaining the study to the participants and preempting the awful progression in which so many people tortured a stranger over their own misgivings. The question is: after four decades of fashionable rebellion, bumper stickers that advise the reader to Question Authority, and a growing historical consciousness that ridicules the excuse “I was only following orders,” do people still follow the orders of an authority to inflict pain on a stranger? The answer is that they do. Seventy percent of the participants went all the way to 150 volts and so, we have reason to believe, would have continued to fatal levels if the experimenter had permitted it. On the bright side, almost twice as many people disobeyed the experimenter in the 2000s as did in the 1960s (30 percent as compared to 17.5 percent), and the figure might have been even higher if the diverse demographics of the recent study pool had been replaced by the white-bread homogeneity of the earlier ones.271 But a majority of people will still hurt a stranger against their own inclinations if they see it as part of a legitimate project in their society.

Why do people so often impersonate sheep? It’s not that conformity is inherently irrational.272 Many heads are better than one, and it’s usually wiser to trust the hard-won wisdom of millions of people in one’s culture than to think that one is a genius who can figure everything out from scratch. Also, conformity can be a virtue in what game theorists call coordination games, where individuals have no rational reason to choose a particular option other than the fact that everyone else has chosen it. Driving on the right or the left side of the road is a classic example: here is a case in which you really don’t want to march to the beat of a different drummer. Paper currency, Internet protocols, and the language of one’s community are other examples.

But sometimes the advantage of conformity to each individual can lead to pathologies in the group as a whole. A famous example is the way an early technological standard can gain a toehold among a critical mass of users, who use it because so many other people are using it, and thereby lock out superior competitors. According to some theories, these “network externalities” explain the success of English spelling, the QWERTY keyboard, VHS videocassettes, and Microsoft software (though there are doubters in each case). Another example is the unpredictable