I went to hear Albert Bandura give a talk this afternoon on “Moral disengagement in the perpetration of inhumanities.” Bandura holds the David Starr Jordan Chair of Social Science in Psychology [which no longer seems to exist—December 2023] at Stanford and is well known for his theory of social modelling, which describes how people learn from others (not just from their own mistakes) and for his social cognitive theory, which sees people as active agents, not at the mercy of either their inner drives or their environments.
Although I had heard his name before, I didn’t know much about him, but he’s obviously one of the more influential psychologists of the twentieth century, so I was glad of the chance to hear him speak. His talk today began with the premise that people develop moral selves and manage their own behavior to keep it in line with their moral standards, but that’s only part of the story. Evil actions are often the product not of people with no moral standards, but of people who have disengaged themselves from their moral standards, so that they can do things they would otherwise describe as wrong, without losing their peace of mind or sense of themselves as decent people. His talk examined the mechanisms by which this moral disengagement happens, with lots of examples of the mechanisms in action.
Moral justification and euphemism have been around a long time and are familiar today: moral sentiments are used to justify actions that harm other people, and language is manipulated to make it sound like what we’re doing is not that bad or is not exactly our doing (e.g.: mistakes were made, surgical strike, collateral damage). Comparing harmful behavior to something benign is another tactic (Bandura quoted someone in the gun industry as saying that just as the fashion industry tries to come up with new products, so do gun makers).
Another set of mechanisms involves obscuring the role of the individual: displacing the responsibility onto an authority whose will you are duty-bound to carry out, diffusing responsibility (“Collective crimes incriminate no one,” said Napoleon), and minimizing, disregarding, or disputing the harmful effects. This last, he said, is why the famous photo of the young Vietnamese girl burned by napalm was effective in mobilizing resistance to the Vietnam War; it made it impossible to deny the horror of the war. He also discussed the complex ways in which a responsible authority is kept in deliberate ignorance, and wrong-doing by underlings, when discovered, is described as an aberration, perpetrated by people who didn’t know what the rules were. (I thought of Abu Ghraib.)
The last set of mechanisms involve dehumanizing the victim, through demonizing or bestializing him or maybe blaming him. This is another very old and very familiar strategy.
Bandura described these mechanisms at work in the tobacco industry, the gun industry, and the perpetuation of social inequities. He had lots of good quotes illustrating the twists and turns the human mind can take in trying to justify its decisions (including one from Orrin Hatch: “Capital punishment is our society’s recognition of the sanctity of human life”).
This was all interesting, but the last five minutes of the talk were the most thought-provoking. He said that agression is not an inevitable part of human behavior that’s rooted in human nature. The capability is there, but since aggressive behavior varies so widely on the personal and group level, and can change dramatically over time on the national level, he said that the answer to human aggression lies in ideology, not biology. We need social structures that make it difficult to disengage ourselves from our moral standards, and we need to promote a sense of our common humanity. As far as I’m concerned, he could have started the talk with that and I would have been very interested to hear what those social structures might look like, and also how each of us can recognize and avoid these mental strategies in ourselves.
I don’t agree about the answer being in ideology and not in biology. Is it entirely the social environment that makes some people Quakers and some muggers? (I’m guessing it’s safe to assume there is no significant overlap in the two groups.) Is there no biological component to which circumstances predispose a person to aggressive behavior? If we need a social environment that helps us to be the best of who we are rather than the worst (and I think we do), surely it would help to understand all the factors that go into our environment, including physical factors. Biology can tell us not just about individual neurochemical differences that influence personality and behavior, but also about differences in propensities toward aggression over the course of a lifetime or maybe even cyclical variations over the course of a day or a year. In my opinion, the social and physical components of who we are and how we behave are so intertwined that we need to consider both if we want to change anything about how we are.
