Psychology
by Morgan Dash

Yes, this is how it works. We torture and humiliate prisoners, perhaps kill some. The Others are angry, they call us bestial. They decapitate one of Ours. Our leaders go on television and call Them "barbarians" and "animals." An angry Senator is angry because so much fuss is made over a few incidents of bad behavior against killers, rapists and insurgents who have probably killed some of Us.

We can treat them as less than human because They are less than human to Us---they are predatory animals we must kill before they kill us. And vice versa. There is truth to the killing part, of course. Some of Them are killing some of Us. Some of Us are killing some of Them. But thinking of each other as Other, as less than human, is the key to how these "excesses," these alternatives to good, clean, fair slaughter from distant silos, happen.

PBS Newshour had a group of psychologists to explain how good American boys and girls could engage in torture. Maybe this is why psychologist rarely appear on TV---neither they nor the anchors know how to do this right. The psychologists gave a number of plausible, somewhat plausible, and not very plausible explanations. The basic thing wrong with them was the assumption that those American boys and girls were acting on their own (which was today's mantra, helped by the carefully parsed testimony of the investigating General who said that according to the interviews he did no one ordered them to specifically do those specific acts. If you look at that closely, it's the rationalization of somebody whose internal report was made public, and he wants to keep his job.)

Whereas the attorneys for one of those charged, the young woman, said that she maintains she was specifically ordered to pose for those pictures. She was handed the leash, she was placed in those pictures, so that the photos could be used on entering prisoners, to make them talk or be subjected to the same horrifying humiliations.

But though the moderator repeated a few times that they weren't trying to prejudge the accused, that's exactly what they were doing. They were explaining why and how these soldiers invented these acts, performed them, and took pleasure in performing them. They even explained that taking "trophy photos" and not thinking they could be used against them later, was consistent with their analysis. So now we know WHY they are guilty, although of course we don't know IF they are guilty.

The psychological explanations were about context: put people in certain situations and they will behave in certain ways. Put people in charge of a prison and they will torture the inmates, as a Stanford experiment proved. I've heard this kind of explanation before, and I just don't buy it. Sure, put people in particular situations, and they are perhaps more likely to act in ways radically different from how they would act otherwise. And yes, people will generally react in predictable ways according to the roles they are assigned. But sometimes is not most of the time, and most of the time or generally, is not always. And it most definitely does not mean: has to happen. Can't do nothing about it.

The Stanford experiment said more about the willingness of rich college kids to torture other college kids than about human behavior, let alone the behavior of trained people selected for their jobs because of aptitude, attitude and proven skills, commitment and judgment. Certainly, poorly trained kids with no leadership, experience or understanding of what they're doing, left alone with only each other and the military structure to protect them in a place very far from home filled with people who might kill them, are likely to do what they believe they have to do to survive.

One of the accused soldiers was trained---as a mechanic. The woman involved claims she wasn't trained at all. As her lawyers say, no one has proved she did anything, except pose in the photos.

And in general terms, these experiments get their patina of determinism---the situation made me do it-from the fact that "everybody" in the experiment acts in a particular way. That everybody is a fraud. In one of the most celebrated experiments, I know this for a fact.

It was the famous electroshock experiment in New Haven in 1970, when test subjects were told to give shocks to people in another room when they gave wrong answers, and even when they heard them cry out in pain and beg them to stop, they did it anyway because they were told to. Every single one of them did this.

But every single one of who? Of the people who participated in the experiment. Why did they? Maybe for money. I was in New Haven in 1970, down on my luck, and I saw the ad in the paper soliciting people to participate in an experiment on learning or perception or something vague. It paid $25. It turned out to be this very experiment, although I didn't know it at the time.

I called the number. I asked about what the experiment would entail. The answer I got was very vague and maybe deceptive. It didn't pass my smell test. At the time I was suspicious about experimenters giving weird drugs. I guess I'd read about experiments like that recently. It never occurred to me I would be told to hurt someone else. So I've kicked myself since for not showing up for the experiment, because I know I would have refused.

I recently communicated my misgivings about this experiment to a social scientist who knows the study well. He claims that the test subjects were a good mix, not just students and indigents who really needed the $25. And he didn't much credit my objection that perhaps the kind of people who wouldn't have cooperated were the kind of people who wouldn't have participated at all. He also said that I couldn't know what I would do in those circumstances, even if I thought I did. Lots of people think they are "good people" but when told to do something questionable by authority figures in white coats, they could rationalize it and do it.

But that wasn't my point. It wasn't because I thought I was a good person. I had explained to him what I was like in 1970. I was battered because I had been fighting authority figures for several years-first in college, later in the job world, and between them the big one: the draft, the people who were trying not only to kill me but to force me to kill other people I did not want to kill. I went to considerable lengths to prevent them from putting me in that position, and I would have gone even further. There was absolutely no way it was going to happen.

So the idea that I would give painful electric shocks to strangers because I was told to by assholes in white coats dangling $25 in front of me, after what I'd been through and the attitude I had, was laughable, and remains preposterous. Not only would I have refused, it would have absolutely made my day to tell them to fuck off, and to walk out of there. Who knows, I might have busted up their idiot lab on the way out.

My point in telling him this was to suggest that in 1970 I wasn't an isolated case. It was just about a highwater mark for anti authority behavior. Do they really believe that Abbie Hoffman would have followed their orders? And the many people who were suspicious of authority were likely not to agree to participate in their stupid experiment anyway.

My point in repeating this story now is that circumstances can have a great influence on behavior, and they may very well force you to make choices, but they don't determine behavior. Perhaps there is a situation which can be replicated in an experimental situation that would prove me wrong, but I haven't seen it yet.

More to the point, according to relatives of one of the young Americans involved in the Iraqi prison nightmare, he did object. He took it to his superiors, he asked for clear instructions, he asked for the rules of the Geneva Conventions. Somehow this story is more credible to me than the one being told by the Bushies and their minions, and supported unwittingly by those psychologists.

But at least they didn't blame it all on testosterone. With women in the pictures and in command positions involved, that hoary notion is gone.