What Turns Us Into Torturers

Even good people can find themselves doing evil things when placed in a powerful, overwhelming situation, research shows.

Friday, May 21, 2004

By Daniel DeNoon

WebMD Medical News

Reviewed By Michael Smith, MD

Nearly all of the participants administered painful shocks to the learner. About two-thirds of them went all the way, repeatedly administering 450-volt shocks.

"Over 60% of people were willing to give increasingly severe shocks to the maximum, in spite of the fact that there were clear-cut protests of increasing intensity. The 'learner' says he wants to get out. He says he has a heart condition. And then he finally goes silent. Here is a condition in which all humane instinct tells you this shouldn't be happening. But it was happening."

Under certain conditions, Milgram found he could get up to 90% of people to go all the way.

WebMD
The line between good and evil does not run between nations, but through every human heart." -- Writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

There are two reasons why it's hard to look at the pictures of mistreatment and torture from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

One is that the images portray abuse being heaped upon imprisoned individuals. But the second is even more disturbing. It's that the faces of the torturers are very much like our own -- and like those of our grown children, says Charles B. Strozier, PhD, director of the center on terrorism and public safety at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.

"These are just ordinary, well-fed, American faces," Strozier tells WebMD. "The potential for torture and evil and masochism -- there is a potential for this in all of us. Even without any external pressure, evil can be evoked by certain situations."

That's not what we like to think. But it's true, says Thomas Blass, PhD, professor of psychology at University of Maryland Baltimore County.

"We think that what we do comes in a direct line from who we are: that good people do good things and evil people do evil," Blass tells WebMD. "But it is not the kind of person you are, it is the situation you find yourself in. The pressure of the situation we find ourselves in has a stronger effect on our behavior than we think -- strong enough to override our moral principals."

A Shocking Experiment

Barrel of Evil: The Stanford Prison Experiment

How to Resist Evil

(More: WebMDHealth)

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Dan