Ethics of Research and the
Lucifer effect
Book review by Kristo Ivanov (April 2011, rev. 120423)
Parts of earlier versions
were published at amazon.com and amazon.co.uk.
Please
note that controversial amazon-reviews of controversial books may be object
of spam-attacks aimed at slandering the writers. This happens both in the
text of the reviews and in their ratings by readers-customers
in the form "X out of Y people have found the following review helpful".
In its
extreme form this is exemplified in the case of Warren Farrell's
book (accessed in April 2011) The
Myth of
Male Power.
TABLE
OF CONTENTS
The discovery of evil
Situational forces, situational power,
and systems
The
neglected complexity of action
Psychology's
turning into a social system
The
surprises of taxonomy, philosophy and forgotten love
Introduction
This research considers the ethics implied by Philip Zimbardo's The
Lucifer Effect: How Good People turn Evil (Random House: 2007). The review
that follows is focuses on the "why of the how", and is motivated by my disappointment
in witnessing what I
perceived
as
a decreasing
interest
for ethical aspects in the work by researchers and students at universities,
not to mention managers, administrators and politicians in the society at large.
The question which attracted my interest was why and how is that possible, that
is, how are these concerns explained away in common thinking about everyday
matters. When I discovered this book I acclaimed as a welcomed contribution to
forcing attention on ethical behavior. As I went reading and reflecting upon
it, however, I came to realize that its message missed the point and conveyed
an
ultimately false message. The book by itself may not deserve a painful extensive
review effort but I felt that my mission became to expose in detail its structural
lure in order to help others to reject similar ineffective if not outright
dangerous teachings. They follow from unfortunate hidden fundamental errors despite
the great effort that must have been made in good faith by the book's acclaimed
author.
Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology became better know by the general public for his bestseller on the emergence of evil behavior by people in certain particular experimental and real social situations such as in universities, prisons and war. The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (2007) gathers descriptions of the author's and others' scientific experiments and general experience, supporting the main tenet that "anybody" may can commit evil (or good!) deeds depending on situational influences. Therefore the book concludes with a prophylactic chapter on "resisting situational influences and celebrating heroism". The chapter suggests a ten-step self-managed individual program which recalls a scheme of cognitive self-therapy or the Alcoholic Anonymous' twelve-steps rehabilitation program: it has the purpose of building individual and communal resilience against "undesirable influences and illegitimate attempts at persuasion", where the concepts of undesirability and illegitimacy, as many others in the book, appear to be taken for granted. The chapter also develops a taxonomy of social heroism where heroism is understood as the individual's "inner power, sense of personal agency, to resist evil external situational forces" (p. 180). The whole book strives towards making heroism, as well as evil, an egalitarian attribute of human nature rather than a rare feature of the elect few (p. 488).
A
great part of the fascination exerted by this book seems to be caused by the
medial success of the reported research, its encyclopedic referencing of books
and empirical findings, its anchorage in the research politics of the social
network of its author, and its outspokenness in reporting details of examples
of the type "sex & violence" or evil cruelty in the West's recent
history. All this unavoidably underscores the author's all too obvious good
intentions and sincerely committed moral pathos, as well as the common reader's
feeling of his own comparative goodness and political correctness. It is also
attractive to believe that all people are good or at least morally neutral and
become good or, especially, evil only as a result of external circumstances
that evade our immediate sphere of responsibility. This fascination only works
on those readers, possibly a majority, who have not prior knowledge of such examples by reading classics of the world literature at the
heights of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's
Socratic dialogues, e.g. The Brothers Karamazov, where "the quest for God, the problem of Evil and
suffering of the innocents haunt the majority of his novels", or in the
lowlands of the Enlightenment morality philosophically illustrated by the
famous Marquis de Sade, e.g.
in his novel Juliette. Not to mention the old and
well known "classical" phenomena of hazing, and of crowd psychology that arguably influenced the
emergence of fascist theories of leadership during
the 1920s. And not to mention
late contemporary examples as the Norwegian case of mass murder by Anders
Breivik that
I analyze in another
context. If
the
reader
(and Zimbardo) had read and seriously considered, say,
Dostoyevsky and Sade, or the case of Breivik, he would have met much worse
and unexplained behaviors which do not fit the book's conclusions and program.
They
would not
have missed
some philosophical and theological implications of the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment that he
neglects, and which historically were object of extensive intellectual debates
that followed the publications of such classics. I will focus upon the way in
which the book's misunderstanding runs through the text in the form of the key
terms like "situational forces".
Situational forces, situational power,
and systems
Throughout
the book Zimbardo is focused on so called situational forces, but the term
force, as the closely related term energy which he seldom if ever uses, is a metaphoric
psychological entity, in analogy and contrast to the very carefully defined
concept of force in the Newtonian world of de-humanized physics. This
de-humanization is underscored by e.g. Rudolf Steiner e.g. in his Der Entshehungsmoment der Naturwissenschaft
in der Weltgeschichte und ihre seitherige Entwickelung (1922-1923/2011, also available in Italian, Nascita e sviluppo storico della scienza, i.e. Birth and
historical development of science). It is a highly interesting and relevant
reading disregarding whether one agrees with the anthroposophy of its author. This force, then, is used in
the context of an undefined branch of a psychology which during centuries has
talked about instincts, will, and motivations (not to mention phenomenological
intentions) that belong to humans or, rather, to their psyche, spirit, mind,
brain or whatever, but never their situations, whatever that means, as the
undefined term is used in the book. From the point of view of methodology of
science this sort of confusion between human, mind and situation, amounts to
one further example of misunderstandings about internal vs. external, or inputs
and outputs, (i.e. situational forces) that could have been defined as, rather, "environment" in
a conceptual system as conceived, for instance, in West
Churchman's The design of inquiring
systems (1971, p. 107).
It
is then necessary to examine in detail Zimbardo's recurring theme of
situational forces. For instance we have the statement (p. 15) that "human
beings are capable of totally abandoning their humanity for a mindless ideology,
to follow and then exceed the orders of their charismatic leaders." One
question arises whether humanity, which does not seem to be a situation, also
is a force and whether it is internal or external, i.e. whether it is an inborn
humanity or an external, culturally inherited humanity, perhaps even part of
a
religious of other tradition, and whether humanity is necessarily only good,
despite all the debate on e.g. the Nietzschean theme of Human,
All Too Human. Another question is the relation between situational forces and
ideology or mindless ideology, whatever mindless is, if not the opposite of
mindfulness, whatever that is, and
how it should be tested. A further question is whether charismatic authorities
are necessarily disprovided of humanity, or how (their) humanity should be
tested and whether their orders always can be succinctly motivated or should be
resisted. And what is charisma, including what are its essence and source, and its
relation to mindless and mindful ideology. And if ideologies and charisma also
are situational forces then almost anything can be a situational force,
following the undefined terms force and situation.
The resilience of the
book against any serious criticism is enhanced by not being possible to overview
at once all its fragmentary texts which extend themselves along more than 500
dense pages full of all kinds of references, most of them avoiding
philosophical and religious sources as well as historical complex debates about
the nature of evil. For instance the above-mentioned humanity is not even to be found in the book's index except in the
irrelevant connotation of crimes against humanity.
But
let's take up again situational forces. If they are to be found neither
in humanity nor in mindless
ideology where are they or where do they come from? Is their energy uniquely
or distributively located, and how are they triggered in action? There
is, indeed,
a big difference between thinking and acting evil, but the book does not
problematize action except in terms of an obscure "decisional lines"
(see below), to the point of the word action not even appearing in the word
index. In the text, however, the author once almost confesses (p. 180) his
impotence in face of the confusion of his simultaneous roles of researcher and
"superintendent", short of mentioning the more correct term
"actor". By the way, the confusion could have been avoided if
Zimbardo had defined his situational forces or, as he also calls them, systems
forces, in terms of the roles of decision-maker, researcher, and client along
the lines proposed in, say, West Churchman's The Systems Approach (1968). In that same context (p. 180) he goes
for once deeper in oversimplified psychological jargon by mentioning, albeit inconsequentially,
a process of transformation of "one's
thinking, feeling, and action". But at the same time he offsets this complicating
insight by postulating that such a transformation is obscurely controlled or
triggered, again, by "the power of Situations" (sic, with capital S,
and
this time power, not force).
The
neglected complexity of action
I
will try to show that despite the wealth of information, moral pathos,
and interesting thoughts expounded in the book
there are some basic and serious conceptual shortcomings, which lead to an
unfortunate underestimation of the complexity of the problem of evil. It is the
same underestimations which prompted an assumed "marxist" like Leszek
Kolakowski to write a whole book on Conversations with the devil,
also translated as
Talk
of the Devil. Zimbardo's book evades the basic rational analyses
that historically have been homed
in
philosophy, religion and theology. An example of what is evaded is, as we have
seen, the consciousness of the essence and importance of action as related to "thinking" and "feeling"
or, the absolutely most common word, in not concept, in the book:
"force", such as in "external situational force" (p.180),
akin to "situational imperatives" (p. 289). It is symptomatic that
in
such approach there is no place, for instance, for a Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) with his
thesis on action (1893), which argues for the inescapability of the Òreligious
problemÓ, and which brought him into the heart of theological and philosophical
controversy of his time. Wikipedia points out that Blondel developed a philosophy of action that integrated classical Neoplatonic thought with modern
Pragmatism in the context of a Christian philosophy of religion. Zimbardo
has nothing to say about Christianity (not found in the word index) or
Catholicism (pointing to Inquisition in
the word index) and their two thousand years' action against evil, except for
repeated references to the evils of just the Inquisition (p. 8-9, 289,
442), and to the Church and its State alliances "run by men" (p. 9).
Some positive fragments must be sought where referring to "Catholic
grace" in the context of Mother Teresa (p. 481), to a "common sense
of decency" (p. 486, more below) or, concededly, to anonymous "moral
structures derived from the past" (p. 455).
Compare one text by
Blondel (The Internet
Encyclopedia of Philosophy) about the context of action:
"The freedom of the will and
the capacity for reflection, for rationality, cannot be maintained as purified,
however, as they were for Kant, for the attempt to guarantee autonomy of the
will as a condition for moral action ignore[s] the requirement of commitment,
of a necessary degree of heteronomy. In order to act in a world that is not simply
dominated by the subject, the subject must allow its action to de determined
in part by the exigencies of the situation. A certain heteronomy is therefore
the
condition for the possibility of autonomy.
'Submitting itself to a heteronomy
in order to maintain its own sovereignty, it brings to the service of a chosen
tendency the very forces of the rival tendencies; it does what it does with the
power that it would have used to do everything that it does not do.' [...]
Action is a sort of co-action, not
simply the imposition of force externally, but a relation to what one wills to
act upon and with. Blondel makes a distinction between the willing will (volontŽ voulante) and the willed will (volontŽ voulue)
which are both
aspects of this play between autonomy and heteronomy in co-action."
This means that what Zimbardo tries
to expose with his numerous examples and recurring references to situational
forces is a very old and well know human problem, which in contrast to his
approach has been framed taking into account historical approaches and
Christian philosophy of religion. It disapproves sheer autonomy of so-called "critical"
reason, which turns out to be a rather frivolous criticality, very often adduced
by the author. Furthermore, Blondel's heteronomy includes Zimbardo's
situational forces. Christian philosophy has the advantage of taking into
consideration what Zimbardo hides in his ambiguous and vague attitude to
authority which despite its minimal appearance in the book's index is
repeatedly mentioned as a negative entity throughout the text, equated to the
"system" and, further, to unjust system. Its only appearance in a
possibly just and positive connotation is in the mention of respect for just
authority
(p. 454, and 213 but only under the connotation of role). And from the pragmatic point of view it is not possible to critically
review all authority since most of our knowledge has to rely directly or
indirectly on autonomously unchallenged authority, as show by Steven Shapin in
his A Social History of Truth (1994).
The
assumed self-criticism of the autonomous ego
Returning to the question criticism
as a weapon against mindless ideologies and obedience to authority, one
antidote suggested by Zimbardo is found in chapter 12 dedicated to
investigating social dynamics. It appears that social dynamics is seen as also
encompassing psychological dynamics, and in this sense the whole book tends to
reduce psychology to sociology. Situational power is explained as dealt with
by
means of a section titled "Beware Self-Serving Biases May Be at Work"
(p. 261). The paradox arises in that the reader is warned that most of us
construct self-enhancing, self-serving, egocentric biases that make us feel
special - never ordinary, and certainly "above average". But this is
exactly what most people feel when they consider themselves to be
"critical". As the author notes, what he calls as such
"cognitive biases" serve to boost our self-esteem and protecting
against life's hard knocks, explaining away failures and disown responsibility
for bad decisions, blinding us to our similarity to others and distancing us
from reality. But all this is what psychoanalysis has been all about. But it is
never adduced in the book except cursorily and implicitly. See, for instance,
the unconsequential reference to "ego-defense mechanisms" (p. 214) or
to Erich Fromm (pp. 274, 456). In catholic doctrine, in contrast to Zimbardo's
"democratization of evil" (p. 211) all this is about the sacrament of penance,
and confession with a doctrinaire conceptualization
that indicates the book's neglected complexity of the process. In analytic
psychology what Zimbardo warns about is termed "the shadow" (as his famous "roles" are termed "the Persona").
What is too easily seen as our similarity to others is consequently the minimum
common denominator of our personal unconscious, beyond the collective
unconscious, the basic unconscious drives or instincts which the book hides
under the too easy term of situational forces or situational power. In this
perspective it is quite trivial to verify that anonymity and deindividuation
(p. 298) foster irresponsible and cruel behavior. The author does not really
explain how to stand against deindividuation, against the temptation of letting
action replace thought (p. 305), except for appealing, for instance, to so
called mindfulness or frame-vigilance (pp. 452, 454). Like his associate
researcher Christina Maslach who distances herself from analytical psychology
in her research on individuation (as in her homepage on the Social
Psychology Network, accessed 1 April 2011), he
does not resort to depth psychology and its interpretations of mythological
themes. But he still resorts to unconsequential appeals to mythological sources
of that psychology, and related historical studies like Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. There we find Greek mythological themes of Apollo and Dionysus,
and Zimbardo spells out his own one-sided Apollonic solution (p. 219) of maintaining "cognitive control" against the "dionysian excesses" or onslaughts
of tautologically bad "mindless emotional responses" (p. 305).
Compare this with the contrasting hypothetical idea of e.g. maintaining mindful
emotional control against cognitive onslaughts, which would have immediately
required adducing the problems of a Freudian "anal personality" and
the dimensions thinking-feeling plus sensation-intuition of analytical depth psychology.
For the rest, in other contexts of the book, Zimbardo paradoxically seems to
condemn the separation of cognition and emotion, as when denouncing the
"psychic numbing" of detaching affect from cognition (p. 215). This
is an example of contradictions in the book, which can always be explained away
because of the neglect of definitions, in this case: of affect and emotion.
All the above, however, is reduced
by Zimbardo to the idea of combating the shadow by means of simple cognitive
exhortations to confess having "made a mistake" (p. 452), possibly
through conscientization by means of knowledge of experiments with "basic
perceptions of the world" where supposedly obvious (to the
researcher-observer) "erroneous information provided by the group"
influences the observed individual's basic perception, at variance with (the
observer's) "social reality" (pp. 263-264). This argument, again,
bypasses and ignores the whole question of the determination of what is
erroneous and what is reality beyond consensus (vs. dialectics) in philosophy,
theory of science, and systems theory (West Churchman, The Design of Inquiring
Systems, chaps. 5-7). A problem with Zimbardo's approach is, once again, that
while studying the individual vs. the group he does not problematize the
essence of the "circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to
know or feel that he is doing wrong" (p. 484). Our author, while talking
about "reality checks" or realizing that one is comfortably living
within a lie, or is trapped by the persuasive lures and mind-numbing rhetoric
of diabolic preachers (pp. 452, 473, 479) apparently never imagines that this
could be just another aspect of not only religious conscience but also of the
phenomenon of political correctness which has prompted another author, Howard
Schwartz to report a couple of psychoanalytically oriented studies of
organizations (The Revolt of the
Primitive, and Society Against Itself).
Political correctness has the advantage of also encompassing the much more
common case of dangerous group influences upon the individual even in the
absence of outright persuasive lures, mind-numbing rhetoric and such. Among a
group of researchers in, say, a university department, it is enough to have a
silent consensus: it may be enough for not considering ethical, or not even
political or economic issues in ongoing research, while blinded by the technological
imperative and the expected availability of research grants.
Psychology's
turning into a social system
A most central issue must be what constitutes the essence of the
individual in its relation to the group that is apparently identified with
situational forces or opportunities provided by "the system" of
prejudices (p. 288). This is especially important in the context of the book's
recurring theme of rebellion against "authority" (starting in the
preface, pp. xi-xii), blandly countered by some frivolous, rare if not only
exhortation to "distinguish" between deserved vs. undeserved
authority (p. 454). This is the same question as the distinction between rational
or recognized, or recognizable authority and "domination" which,
symptomatically, is treated quite ambiguously in one "classic" of so
called critical theory, Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization
(1955, pp. 33 vs. 205), closely related to problematic socialist feminism in
Erich Fromm's The Crisis of Psychoanalysis-Essays
on Freud, Marx, and Social Psychology (1970, pp. 121-135). The point cannot
be the individual's resisting the pressure from the group or the orders from
the authority. It must rather be to recognize whether the pressure or the orders
are good or ethically justified in relation to the own limited cognitive
abilities and spiritual degree of development. All too often it is taken for
granted that group pressure as well as (individual or systemic group) authority
if for bad and should be resisted by the individual (or the group) on the basis
of his "critical" judgment, whatever this elusive criticality really
means in view of the conundrum of autonomy and free will. It should be obvious
that the first level of analysis of this problem is to relate it to the
classical discussion of rhetoric, criticized as early as by Plato, and to bureaucracy as analyzed by Max Weber. In this light what Zimbardo requires
from the individual is nothing less than a rebellion of modern man against justified
rhetoric, and bureaucracy that he confuses with his undefined and vague term "system".
It is a system that he presumes can be overviewed, evaluated, and challenged
at considerable or prohibitive personal risk by the
single individual, preferably a university professor, but with a secure tenured
position (cf. the case Norman
Finkelstein). This single individual will have
to rely upon a limited and "stoic" cognitive ability (p. 474) which
is assumedly unphilosophical and irreligious since neither philosophy nor
religion is taken seriously in the book which is written in the American
tradition of an empirical social psychology inherited from the critical Frankfurt
school and Kurt Lewin, despite Zimbardo being sometimes introduced as a moral
psychologist (as in Christina Mislach in Wikipedia accessed 1 April 2011).
As
it stands, Zimbardo himself seems to have been victimized by political
correctness when he, for instance, explains away the participation of a
criminal woman in the rape of other women. It is the case of the former Rwandan
national minister of family and women's affairs who lectured on women's
empowerment. Her crimes are explained away with that "she was a political
opportunist in a male-dominated administration" (p. 14). By the way,
Zimbardo is throughout the book quite soft on feminism in the form of dwelling
on oppression of women, consistently with critical theory's doctrine suggested
in Eros and Civilization, mentioned
above. It leads to curious paradoxes like when he rightly criticizes the
development of a new language with innocuous-sounding words concealing the
truth of human cruelty (p. 228f) such as: Sonderbehandlung
(special treatment) since it was the code name for the Nazi physical
extermination of people. But Sonderbehandlung
corresponds e.g. to the Swedish Sþrbehandling,
which is what in English is acclaimed as desirable affirmative action aiming, for instance, at the
extermination of male supremacy of numbers of actives in determinate branches
of society. Obviously the similarity does not reside in the incomparable
concrete consequences of the use of these words but in their political function
of discriminating and incriminating groups of people of the basis of biological
characteristics in a kind of argumentation that recalls biopolitics and eugenics. Symptomatically, the book's attempt at this kind of semantic
analysis and its recurring references to the Holocaust contribute nothing to
explain evil socio-psychological phenomena that are ignored in the book, like
those associated with the so called Society for Cutting Up Men
- SCUM.
Be
as it may, the case of the former Rwandan national minister is supposed to fit
Zimbardo's main thesis that good or "any" people may turn evil under
unfavorable circumstances, but it is rather an example of the consequences of
the book's misunderstanding of the roots of evil. It is a misunderstanding
which explains evil away, in this example psycho-socializing it as related to
male-dominated administration, while supporting politically correct radical
feminism with its abysmal and unexplained aberrations as extremely illustrated
by tragic destinies such an Andrea Dworkin's. And there may be also many and "new Andrea Dworkins" in
the make like, for instance, Eve Ensler showing that there is something rotten in the reign of feminism
that, in contrast to the rottenness of Man's or of the radical Right's world, because
of some symptomatic reason remains unchallenged in this book about evil.
Here again we can notice that it
does not occur to Zimbardo to express the possibility and necessity of sheer
listening to one's conscience, a word which I only saw mentioned, in an
unconsequential, trivial meaning (e.g. p. 484), a couple of times in the book.
The reason why the word conscience
is understood mainly, if not only, in its
trivial meaning is possibly its positive Christian connotations that are
generally avoided in the book, and the word's corruption in critical theory.
The latter is displayed in the sentence explaining the historical
intensification of the role of conscience conditioned by paternal love as due
to that "the person develops an outlook in which the fulfillment of duty
becomes the central concern of life, because only that can provide some minimum
guarantee of being loved" (Fromm, The
Crisis of Psychoanalysis, p. 129, 134). This is at variance with, for
instance, teachings on the concept of catholic conscience (see also in the Catechism, §§1778-1806) that is nowhere considered in the book. It is this same word that prompts
entries in dozens of paragraphs of the Catholic
Catechism and has been the object of a special address by Joseph
Ratzinger, a lecture at the American Bishops' Conference
on moral
theological questions in 1991 (Wahrheit,
Werte, Macht. Die pluralistische
Gesellschaft
im Kreuzverhör, Herder 1995, pp. 29-62). Zimbardo's implicit, hidden conscience is supposedly bolstered
by taking "a
Zen moment to reflect on the meaning of the immediate situation before
acting" (p 453), a mystical and exceptionally positive Zen which, like "Talmudic
scholars", (but unlike the absent word "prayer") makes some
other whimsical appearances in the text (p. 165, 449, 451). And it is
symptomatic for the level of analysis in the book that accounts of European
Christians who helped the Jews during the Holocaust is summed up as a sort of
banality of goodness (my paraphrase of the book repeated reference to the
banality of evil) arising out of a "common sense of decency" (p. 486).
This is indeed a mysterious decency, which, in another context (p. 215) happens
to be supposedly defined through the "polarities of cruelty and decency" [sic].
Decency as the opposite of cruelty, or...? As much other terminological confusion
it is quite mind numbing. Such confusion is also apparent in the
book's reference to so called cognitive
dissonance (p. 219) where dissonance
is said to be a tension that can powerfully motivate change in one's public behavior or in one's private views in efforts to reduce
dissonance. The remarkable turn of the text that follows (p. 220) makes it
clear that in the absence of a hierarchy with an overarching conscience it becomes
difficult to conceptualize something like a safely moral reduction of
dissonance or civil
disobedience or what the author calls heroism.
The greater the discrepancy between beliefs and behavior under evil influences,
the stronger will be the motivation to achieve consonance at the expense of the
private beliefs, a term which will have supplanted and obliterated religious
faith, or the ignored conscience.
In summary, the whole impact of two
thousand years' Catholicism with its concept of conscience is attributed to a
sort of spontaneous, intuitive influence of a common sense of decency which
apparently does not even reach the level of complexity which is historically
accorded to the concept of dignity.
In contrast to Catholicism that is associated to a banal common sense of
decency as a banality of goodness, positively loaded "Buddhist style"
and "Zen-like" tactics for mental survival in other relevant contexts
(p. 165) are apparently more easily associated to "religious
experience", religion being a word which I noticed mentioned only once in
the whole book (p. 165). Conscience in practical thinking, however, cannot be
done away, as evidenced by it being implicitly presupposed in unqualified affirmations
such as: "situational power is most salient in novel settings, those in
which people cannot call on previous guidelines for their new behavioral
options" (p. 212). So, conscience became "previous guidelines",
where a guideline is a term that would correspond to rules and authority, synonyms
that paradoxically are mostly anathema in the rest of the book.
All this has consequences if we
return to the linchpin of the book's question of how to "resist destructive
authority" while it rightly questions psychological assessments of personality
(p. 487), "dispositional tendencies" or "attributes of pathology
or goodness" which in the struggle between evil and heroism are taken to
reside within the (undisguised) human psyche or genome (p. 485). But according
to this argument our conscience would supposedly be reduced to an attribute of
personality analyzable by means of personality tests. This reveals a shallowness
of the book's analysis. Evil and heroism are classified as being
"conditions", whatever that means as compared to situations. Such
conditions are said to emerge in particular situations at particular times
[implying that time is not a component of situations] when situations forces
[arising from or getting their energies from where - in an imperfect metaphor
of physical forces] play a compelling role in moving particular individuals
across a decisional line from inaction to action [as if a decision to act
necessarily leads to action, and whose decision is it, if the forces belong to
the situation and not to the individual]. That is, there is a decisive
decisional moment [if there are any non-decisive decisional moments] when a
person is caught up in a vector of forces [hoping that the reader knows what
a
vector is] that emanate [possibly equivalent to emerge, whatever that is] from
a behavioral [obviously equivalent to situational] context.
The
surprises of taxonomy, philosophy and forgotten love
I may have annoyed the reader of
the last paragraph above but this was done to reveal the rhetoric of poorly
defined
concepts, or of a science on shaky grounds which allows the book's empirical
psychology, influenced by Kurt Lewin (p. 207) as associated to the Frankfurt School, to neglect other
branches of psychology, as well as philosophy, and theology. Zimbardo's
implicit view of theology and religion, beyond some superficial and inconsequential
references to the Luciferic background in the initial chapter that works like
a
disclaimer, becomes evident in the diagrams that conclude the book's last
chapter on "resisting situational influences" (pp. 468-471, 483). There,
Jesus, together with Joan of Arc, Jose Marti, and Steve Bico is taxonomically classified within the heading of social (as
opposed to civil and military) heroism, among martyrs who are distinguished
from e.g. "religious figures" like Buddha or Mohammed,
"politico-religious figures" like Mohandas Gandhi, and "good Samaritans" like
Albert Schweitzer. At the same there is no taxonomic place for what Zimbardo
seems to be quite fascinated by, the Dutch graphic artist C.M. Escher whoÕs good-evil image "Circle Limit IV" both initiates and terminates the book. It recalls both
the tendency of aesthetics and art to replace religion's inclusiveness, and some
phenomenologists' fondness for the same artist as illustration of the Heideggerian-atheological "self-reference", possibly a late expression of the Nietzschean theme of "eternal return" (symptomatically dissociated from its
religious meaning).
It
may
suggest
some
hidden
foundations
of
Zimbardo's
convictions.
As it stands, the book is mainly
an interesting example, along with the curious revival of so called psychological
cognitive
therapies, of strong and passionate commitment to the moral issues on an apparent
unconscious main basis that a good willed reader may attribute to an "enlightened" stoic philosophy (mentioned in passing, p. 474) that in turn recalls the later
Kantian cathegorical
imperative. Against this supposed
deeper background it is symptomatically revealing that Zimbardo misses one main
point in his own chain of facts and arguments: the place of love. The issue of
love itself seems to mentioned only once, and it is dismissed immediately in
an
awkward sentence well below the level of analysis of friendship (cf. Aristotle's
Nicomachean
Ethics): "Knowing when to stay
involved with others, when to support and be loyal to a cause or a relationship
rather than dismissing it, is a delicate question that we all face
regularly" (p. 447). It is remarkable if not startling that the author's
does not dwell upon the fact that his insight into his own evil-doing in the
course
of the famous "Stanford Prison Experiment" (SPE), as reported and
analyzed in the book, came from a young woman, Christina Maslach (pp. 163, 168-171). He was in love with and dating her at the
time, in a situation and process that is remarkably and significantly analogous
to Pentagon
Papers' Daniel
Ellsberg in relation to his future wife Patricia Marx, as told in the documentary
film
The Most Dangerous Man in America (2009
Academy Award nominee for best documentary feature). Christina
had
been
his teaching assistant, research collaborator, and informal editor of several
of
his books.
They eventually
married
and the
whole
book is dedicated to her. An incident which came to be a threat to their
relationship is described in the book as having been her shock and
disappointment with Zimbardo when coming into contact with the research experimental
situation he had managed, to which she reacted with something like "What
you are doing to those boys is a terrible thing!" (p. 171). Zimbardo
reports that after having felt threatened to loose her love he got a sudden and
growing insight into the evil he was inflicting to the experimental subjects,
causing him to discontinue the experiment, in a process, which eventually led
to the book itself. Zimbardo captures additional sympathy from the readers,
besides those raised by his self-definition as an oppressed underdog youngster
in
the preface's confessions (p. xi-xii), by practicing an act of public "confession" which
obviously helps him to clean up his conscience and public image. That is, he
benefits of that confession and that conscience, which are not acknowledged
elsewhere in the book.
Let's associate the above threat
to
his love relationship to what Zimbardo writes elsewhere about his unconsciously
having become, during the experiment, an evil authority figure: "The very
nexus of that authority figure is one that I have opposed, even detested, all
my life - the high status, authoritarian, overbearing boss man." (p. 180).
Even without being a psychoanalyst it is difficult not to read into that statement
the hypothesis of someone opposing the love of his rejected father in favor of
the expectation of a loving mother. No surprise, then, that the terror in view
of being abandoned by a prospective loving mother-substitute in the role of a
future wife is capable of generating insight through instilling the sort of awe
that religious monotheistic people would find in the thought of being abandoned
by God father, further represented in their conscience. Unless, of course, if one
hopes to find consolation in feministic fantasies expressed in recurrently emphasizing
women's oppression (p. xi, 9, 24, 252), and so called homophobia (p. 118), leading
to a feminization and socialization of psychology. It denies the priority of "patriarchal"
conscience and duty that is then seen as sheer fear of losing what can "provide
some minimum guarantee of being loved", as in the earlier reference to
Erich Fromm, and it leads to a social psychology of situational forces. It is
not a coincidence that the Fromm's statement appears in a chapter dedicated to
"The theory of mother right and social psychology" which constitutes
an extremely informative reading, the more so when contrasted to, say,
Alexander Mitscherlich's Society Without
the Father, and to a related, recently published book by Howard Schwartz on
Society Against Itself (2010).
Conclusion? It is love that redeems us from evil. And this has been the main message of main world religions, and in particular of Christianity. And if conventional research is necessary one can always check, for instance, R.J. Laub, J.H. Sampson & C. Wimer's published paper on marriage reducing crime (in Criminology, vol. 44, no. 3, 2006, pdf-copy here). But love is the message of neither critical theory nor its feminism. The psychologist and humanist, Carl Jung, writes (in his Collected Works 7, ¤78) that logically, the opposite of love is hate, and of Eros, Phobos (fear); but psychologically it is the will to power. Those who do not understand this message are the same who misunderstand the essence of love and believe that it may be forced through cognition and various forms of cognitive therapies, balance of power, emancipation and egalitarianism. What remains of Zimbardo's remarkable book is its impressive wealth of information, his own empirical material corrupted by doubtful experimental methodology already pointed out in others' reviews (see e.g. amazon.com's 1 star and 2 stars reviews), and the author's moving and a bit too obvious live commitment against perceived evil. But it would gain in not being mixed up with doubtful theoretical considerations or, rather, in being reworked in the light of other types of psychology, philosophy, and theology, consciously and preventively avoiding the objections raised against the merging of these disciplines, objections that are illustrated in the work of moral philosophers such as Elizabeth Anscombe or Philippa Foot, far from the earlier insights of the previously mentioned Maurice Blondel.
Another main conclusion is that because of its theoretical shortcomings and its empirical bias with hidden connection to the type of critical theory of the Frankfurt School, the book will not be read and understood by those who would need it most. Examples will be several USA government officials involved in past scandals that are named and referred to in the book. They will feel that Zimbardo uses straw man arguments. I may have missed evidence presented in the book but I have not seen proofs that the book's approach has fundamentally prevented any significant number of people to counteract what is called there as dangerous situational forces. On the contrary, Zimbardo himself reports abuses of the book for non-intended evil purposes (pp. 252-254). Furthermore, most people who are intended to be in need of the book for their salvation from performing evil deeds will probably follow the behavior which Zimbardo identifies and seems to accept, such as: "most students are not concerned with power issues because they have enough to get by in their world, where intelligence and hard work get them to their goals." (p. 208). This is also what I myself have experienced in contacts with universities, government and business. It is also symptomatic that despite the repeatedly advanced thesis that there are no good and evil people (e.g. p. 211) but, rather, that anybody can behave in a good or evil way depending upon the impact of situational forces, at the end of chapter 11 on ethics (p. 257) the author claims that situations can matter in turning good people into evildoers. This reveals that he still entertains the classical Rousseau-inspired belief about the natural goodness of some if not all humans. This is a rhetorically attractive hypothesis for people who will always appreciate to believe that they are naturally good, but possibly evil only under the influence of rare, unfortunate situational forces. Rhetorically attractive are also many juicy descriptions of evil sex and violence that may bolster the extreme popularity of the book. The sources of popularity include, further, as Zimbardo writes (p. 224), "two events helped to helped to catapult into national prominence a little academic experiment designed to test a theoretical notion of situational power": the massacre at California's San Quentin State Prison and a massacre at New York State's Attica Correctional Facility. This "serendipity", with USA-national repercussions that contributed to the diffusion of ZimbardoÕs research, coincided also with the concurrent rise of the politically explosive Black Panther Party and the Weather Underground radical student group.
When all is said one can wonder why the writing of such a book could have dispensed from neglecting not only whole branches of psychology other than the implicitly chosen one, but also the philosophy from which the psychological discipline itself arises, and, further the philosophy of religion such as the autonomous reason's Enlightenment father Kant exposes in e.g. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793). The chaotic complexities introduced by Kantian philosophy are well illustrated by examples of its absurd discussions about good and evil. Indeed it all stands at the basis of much still unresolved controversy that includes the integrative pretensions of his famous third critique, Critique of Judgment on an aesthetics that today has replaces religion with a cult of "design" and of "entertainment industry" or edutainment. Such aesthetics tries to supplement the limitations of the sort of Kantian reason that is implicitly assumed in the book one-sided talk about critical reason while Zimbardo neglects the conscience of Kantian practical reason. Aesthetics appears in Zimbardo's book under the label of "The power of media and visual images" (p. 247), and in the powerful rhetorical layout of the book itself, its underlying research program, and its "industrialization" in the form of Internet sites (p. iii, prior to the preface) such as www.prisonexperiment.org, www.zimbardo.com, and www.LuciferEffect.com, supplemented by his wife's Christina Maslach's maslach.socialpsychology.org.
Here we find one further and final
main shortcoming in Zimbardo's book. Despite his avowedly critical attitude
against "obedience to authority" he never seems to notice and reflect
seriously upon one most important hypothesis, which is on the verge of being
a fact. The great question of his book, including the feasibility and outcome
of
his main experiments may not at all
be obedience to authority but rather obedience to the authority of science, or obedience to science. It is
a science which assumes the connotations of a system in the vague, poorly defined sense which Zimbardo
paradoxically wants to criticize (pp. 179f, 226f, 446), and turns into sheer scientism, the more so because its neglected dimensions mentioned above.
The reason why Zimbardo was allowed
and able to set up his experiments, why he was trusted by his experimental
subjects (in fact, objects), and why his experimental results were accepted
must have been his social competence and commitment-pathos grounded in a solid
academic reputation as a successful psychological scientist at one of USA's
tops universities which later also gave a halo effect to the SPE "Stanford
Prison Experiment". This can be seen as a special awkward example of
"adult role playing" that Zimbardo condemns (p. 217). It is a play
he
implements anew in the writing and distribution of the book whose prestige
borrows from or recycles his previously abused prestige. The industrialization
of the serendipitous outcomes of this experiment apparently allowed that the
book be backed by an enormous amount of references of all sorts including methodological
considerations. They culminate with psychological technical conceptions (pp.
197-210) that must be impenetrable for the average amateur reader. On the top
of this Zimbardo acknowledges that his or (as he softens the concession) all research is "artificial"
being only an imitation of its real-world analogue: "Nevertheless [...]
when such research is conducted in sensitive ways that capture features of
"mundane" realism, the results can have considerable
generalizability" (p. 206f.) Anybody who is familiar with controversies on
theory of science will recognize that such a statement is mainly smart rhetoric,
fitting others' reviews of methodological aspects referred to above, not to
mention the author's own confession of having had to develop useful
"street-smart strategies" during his formative years (p.xi). His methodological
statement quoted above may happen to come true but nobody knows if and when,
and that is not science. And then he goes on referring (p. 207) to a section
by
Aronson et al. on Experimentation in Social Psychology, in a Handbook of Social Psychology (1985),
and further to Kurt Lewin. Eventually he holds to his prestigious scientific
role-playing when putting the rhetorical question "was the pain endured by
the participants in this experiment offset by the gain to science and society
generated by the research?" That is, as it were: was there the gain that is taken for granted?
Compare again with West Churchman, a systems scientist who in contrast to
Zimbardo has really given substance to the talk about "systems". He
advanced long time ago arguments against the use of the classical experiment
in planning
[for a better society], not only on technical and logical grounds but, rather
on the immensely important moral grounds, since it's questionable whether many
experimental subjects understand what they are agreeing to, including electric
shocks in experiments, akin to Zimbardo's prison experiment (C.W. Churchman, The Systems Approach and Its Enemies,
1979, pp. 56-60, 122, 146f, but also The
Design of Inquiring Systems, 1971, pp. 113, 159, 192.)
The conclusion, again, is that the lesson to be drawn from The Lucifer Effect must be mainly the need to mistrust and challenge so called scientism in general and social psychology in particular. The need to distrust authority in general was already a well-known tenet regarding politics, business, and many forms of religion. The book thrives by sharing the prestige of science, but both science and its prestigious practitioners should be mistrusted as much as politicians and businessmen whenever their foundations are divorced from broader psychological science, philosophy, and theology. This book is a captivating and psychically numbing, excellently designed rhetorical artwork. It overwhelms the reader and this explains its marketing success as well as my merciful evaluation. As design draped in cognition it has the same pretensions as science and aesthetics of being substitute for both philosophy and religion..
And
if anybody dislikes the ultimate reference to philosophy and religion I
would like to adduce the epochal work by Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy
in America that deals with the core of democracy. In a masterly chapter with
the title What
Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear, Tocqueville
concludes his analysis in a previous chapter by showing how blind obedience,
which is one main concept in Zimbardo's thesis, arises out of the shortcomings
of a misunderstood democracy. And this very same same blind obedience seems
to be the very same phenomenon of political correctness mentioned above.
It clearly escapes Zimbardo's implicit political base in critical theory,
and it exposes the shortcomings of its social psychology.