The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,347

the side track who was sacrificed to prevent the runaway trolley from killing five workers on the main one. All of these phenomena—emotional connotation, plausible deniability, and the ascription of motives—can be exploited to alter the way an action is construed.

A second mechanism of moral disengagement is gradualism. People can slide into barbarities a baby step at a time that they would never undertake in a single plunge, because at no point does it feel like they are doing anything terribly different from the current norm.290 An infamous historical example is the Nazis’ euthanizing of the handicapped and mentally retarded and their disenfranchisement, harassment, ghettoization, and deportation of the Jews, which culminated in the events referred to by the ultimate euphemism, the Final Solution. Another example is the phasing of decisions in the conduct of war. Material assistance to an ally can morph into military advisors and then into escalating numbers of soldiers, particularly in a war of attrition. The bombing of factories can shade into the bombing of factories near neighborhoods, which can shade into the bombing of neighborhoods. It’s unlikely that any participant in the Milgram experiment would have zapped the victim with a 450-volt shock on the first trial; the participants were led to that level in an escalating series, starting with a mild buzz. Milgram’s experiment was what game theorists call an Escalation game, which is similar to a War of Attrition.291 If the participant withdraws from the experiment as the shocks get more severe, he forfeits whatever satisfaction he might have enjoyed from carrying out his responsibilities and advancing the cause of science and thus would have nothing to show for the anxiety he has suffered and the pain he has caused the victim. At each increment, it always seems to pay to stick it out one trial longer and hope that the experimenter will announce that the study is complete.

A third disengagement mechanism is the displacement or diffusion of responsibility. Milgram’s mock experimenter always insisted to the participants that he bore full responsibility for whatever happened. When the patter was rewritten and the participant was told that he or she was responsible, compliance plummeted. We have already seen that a second willing participant emboldens the first; Bandura showed that the diffusion of responsibility is a critical factor.292 When participants in a Milgram-like experiment think that the voltage they have chosen will be averaged with the levels chosen by two other participants, they give stronger shocks. The historical parallels are obvious. “I was only following orders” is the clichéd defense of accused war criminals. And murderous leaders deliberately organize armies, killing squads, and the bureaucracies behind them in such a way that no single person can feel that his actions are necessary or sufficient for the killings to occur.293

A fourth way of disabling the usual mechanisms of moral judgment is distancing. We have seen that unless people are in the throes of a rampage or have sunk into sadism, they don’t like harming innocent people directly and up close.294 In the Milgram studies, bringing the victim into the same room as the participant reduced the proportion of participants who delivered the maximum shock by a third. And requiring the participant to force the victim’s hand down onto an electrode plate reduced it by more than half. It’s safe to say that the pilot of the Enola Gay who dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima would not have agreed to immolate a hundred thousand people with a flamethrower one at a time. And as we saw in chapter 5, Paul Slovic has confirmed the observation attributed to Stalin that one death is a tragedy but a million deaths is a statistic.295 People cannot wrap their minds around large (or even small) numbers of people in peril, but will readily mobilize to save the life of a single person with a name and a face.

A fifth means of jiggering the moral sense is to derogate the victim. We have seen that demonizing and dehumanizing a group can pave the way toward harming its members. Bandura confirmed this sequence by allowing some of his participants to overhear the experimenter making an offhand derogatory remark about the ethnicity of a group of people who (they thought) were taking part in the study.296 The participants who overheard the remark upped the voltage of the shocks they gave to those people. The causal arrow can go in the other direction as well. If people are manipulated into harming someone, they can