Social Psychology 101

I had a bit of an "Aha!" moment this morning, while reading yet another commentary about whether or not Geraldine Ferraro's remarks were racist. My thought, by the way, has been that, racist or not, what she said was certainly demeaning and condescending. In other words, pretty much Standard Operating Procedure for Hillary Clinton and her surrogates. Case in point, Hillary's absurd reduction of Barack Obama's accomplishments to one speech he gave in 2002. Anyway, I don't know why this didn't occur to me sooner, given that I'm actually teaching the social psychology section of my intro psych class right now. But this is a classic example of the self-serving bias. This is our tendency to take credit for success (self-enhancing bias) and deny any responsibility for failure (self-protective bias). In other words, if I get the promotion, it's because I worked very, very hard for it. Also, I'm brilliant. And charming. But if someone else gets it instead, they obviously just got lucky. Probably "knew the right people, scratched the right backs" and so forth. I ran a red light? Oh my goodness--I never do that sort of thing! But my kid is sick, and I was in a hurry to pick up some medicine, and I guess I was just preoccupied. Someone else ran a red light? Clearly a reckless scofflaw with a callous disregard for human life. I'm actually teaching this chapter again tonight. Somehow, I'll find a way to resist the temptation to mention Hillary Clinton's campaign when I'm giving examples. :)

Tell us about your childhood, Duncan

I'm confused. Atrios, aka Duncan, is *far* too important to even acknowledge the existence of the mere mortals of the blogging world. Yet he does. He saw fit to write about my "I can't believe it's not a meritocracy" post, although I didn't know it until Maryscott posted about what he'd said. And today I find out from skippy that he popped off a one liner about Terrance's thoughtful post which delved into the psychology/sociology of the linking issue, blogger caste system, etc. Interesting. Veeeery interesting. Why should it matter to Duncan if some nobodies are saying stuff about him in their puny, insignificant, non-blogroll-worthy corners of cyberspace? I decided to consult some professionals. I tried asking this guy, but he wasn't much help. Duncan Black? Sorry--name doesn't ring a bell for me.... Alfred Adler thought the behavior was evidence of an inferiority complex. John Watson said that was a load of poppycock. But he wasn't surprised that one of Freud's followers would come up with such nonsense. He said that Duncan's anger was clearly a conditioned emotional reaction. And while we were on that subject, Watson wanted me to remind everyone really *did* have every intention of curing the experimentally induced phobia of that little Albert kid. And he would have, too, if Albert's mom hadn't freaked out and disappeared with the boy. Albert Bandura thought it had something to do with observational learning. Typical Bandura. But you never know--could be some backstory to the classic study that I'd never heard of before. Maybe Bobo made the June Cleaver-looking lady angry when he dissed her ideas about "blogroll amnesty". So naturally she felt compelled to beat the crap out of him. And when the little kids saw her do that, well, "monkey see, monkey do". Albert Maslow didn't know for sure, but he was pretty clear on the fact that people who are truly self actualized don't engage in such dickish behavior on a regular basis. And speaking of dicks, I thought I should round out this imaginary discussion by checking in with someone who always seemed to be thinking about them. Hey! Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar! Sorry, Sig. I probably have some aggressive feelings towards you because of all that misogynistic crap you subjected us to over the years and I'm sublimating, or something. Oh, you don't mind if I call you Sig, do you? 'Course not. You're dead. And I'm making all of this up. But if we were able to ask Sigmund Freud about why Duncan gets so upset when he learns that the peasants are speaking his name in tones other than awe and reverence, what might he say? Maybe he'd explain it as an overactive id. Or maybe he'd say Duncan is identifying with his father--a healthy outcome of the phallic stage. Or that the behavior is some form of defense mechanism. Maybe some people are just schmucks and you shouldn't spend too much time worrying about them. Huh? Who said that? Was that you, Sig? No wait--that was me! But that makes a lot of sense. I really should listen to me more often...

Dr. Philip Zimbardo on The Daily Show

From last night's Daily Show, in which Jon Stewart interviewed Dr. Philip Zimbardo, who recently wrote a book entitled the Lucifer Effect. *I* recognize him from those Discovering Psychology videos, which I have been showing to my psych classes for years. (Demetrius still maintains that he looks uncannily like The Master from Doctor Who.) Philip Zimbardo: It's great to be here--nothing I've done in my whole career is going to earn me more "pizazz units" than being on your program. As my students say, "It's totally awesome, man!" Jon Stewart: Students at *Stanford* talk that way? Philip Zimbardo: Students everywhere talk that way. Jon Stewart: I'm going to start talking that way! Your book, it's called the Lucifer Effect. Now, I was a psychology major-- Zimbardo: What did you get in Introductory Psych? Stewart: Introductory Psych 101, I got "Yes, your essay was long enough." (Laughter.) But the two famous experiments are the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram shocking experiment, that we're all taught that people are much more evil than they would appear to be on the outside. Tell us about the Stanford experiment. Zimbardo: No, people are *not* more evil than they would appear to be on the outside. The Stanford Prison Experiment that I detail at great length in the Lucifer Effect really describes the gradual transformation of a group of good boys, 24 college students who volunteered to be in the experiment. Only the normal, healthy ones, randomly assigned by a flip of the coin to be guards or prisoners. What we see is how quickly the good boys--and that's important, they start off good--become brutal guards, and the normal kids become pathological prisoners-- Stewart: Now when you say "the slow descent from good to evil, it took a week, did it not? Zimbardo: No, it actually took 36 hours. (Laughter) We were counting in minutes. (More laughter.) No, at 36 hours, the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown, and each day after that, another one followed suit. So the study was supposed to go two weeks; I had to end it in 6 days because it was out of control. These good guards were totally into the role of being sadistic, controlling, and dominant. The prisoners rebelled and they got their asses kicked, and the guards just dominated them, and we ended the study because it was out of control. Stewart: Are those people now running the country? (Laughter and applause.) Zimbardo: Some of them got jobs at Enron. (Laughter.) Stewart: It boils down to this--I get the sense that we're in the trouble we're in because of this idea that there is good and there is evil. Zimbardo: Right. Stewart: And it doesn't mix, and we are locked in some sort of Hobbit-like battle between the two, but what you're suggesting is, it's pretty much of a flux. Zimbardo: Oh, absolutely. Essentially what The Lucifer Effect is, is a celebration of the human mind. The human mind is this exquisite organ, which has the infinite capacity for any of us to be kind or cruel, selfish or destructive, villians or heros, and because of that capacity, it really is the situation that moves us in a path to be perpetrators of evil--most of us do not, but are innocent bystanders. And the good thing that comes out of my research is, some of us get moved to be heros. And so the question is, why do good people turn evil, and how can we get ordinary people to be more heroic? Stewart: Well, here's an interesting thing. We had a kid on the show named Ishmael Beah, from Sierra Leone. As a teenager, they gave him a mixture of gunpowder and cocaine, gave him a gun and told him, "These people killed your family" and turned him into a killer. And then he, himself, worked out of that and has become somewhat heroic. So each person has that same capacity. But, in the so called "death cult", is that how they get people to be this way. Is there a certain kind of technique to turn people into that? Zimbardo: Yes, but that's extreme. In Rwanda, it was enough to have the local government announce on the radio that starting today, the Tutsi are our enemy. And they went around giving each Hutu family a macheti and a club, and they say "We want to destroy the enemies, because they are a threat to our *national security*"--you've heard that song before. And in three months, Hutus killed 800,000 of their neighbors. And the "weapon of mass destruction" was what? It was a machete and a club. Stewart: Is there an innoculation? Zimbardo: Yeah, of course. None of these things happen--in the Stanford Prison study, I draw the parallels of Abu Ghraib, which are identical. I mean, the things that happened in our study all happened at night shift. The worst things that happened at Abu Ghraib were on night shift where there was no supervision and no oversight. You want to eliminate evil in institutions, you have to have strong oversight. You have to have leadership that says, "This is what we will do, this is what you can't do. We will do no harm, and if you do harm, here's what's going to happen. You're going to get in trouble, you're going to lose your job. Usually in situations like that, the leadership backs off--they let you do whatever you want. In Abu Ghraib, those abuses went on for three months--who was watching the store? Stewart: So you're saying they should have stopped Abu Ghraib after 36 hours. Zimbardo: And the same thing with the war we're in--maybe 48 hours. Stewart: Absolutely. It's unbelievabley fascinating, even for someone who did very poorly in psychology. The Lucifer Effect, it's on the bookshelves now--Philip Zimbardo. (Applause)