The factors that drive obedience and conformity

There was an old TV program called Candid Camera that used hidden cameras to capture what people did when confronted with awkward or unexpected situations. While the aim of the program was humorous, usually at the expense of the hapless person who happened to be caught on camera, some of the episodes serve as useful experiments on human behavior.

One particularly revealing one involved the desire of people to conform to powerful norms of behavior that we all follow without even thinking about it. For example, when people get into an elevator, they space themselves as far as possible from others, immediately turn around and face the front, and not make eye contact or speak, apart from sometimes a quick nod of greeting upon entering. But in this episode, the camera noted what happens when the norms seem to suddenly change.

Although the above experiment is amusing, psychologist Philip Zimbardo, the person behind the famous Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) , reflects on it and the Milgram obedience study, and says that the Candid Camera elevator experiment reveals how the strong desire to conform to the norms of the people around us can lead to behaviors that are evil, something he calls ‘the Lucifer effect’. (Zimbardo has written a book titled The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil that I have bought and plan to read and write about soon.)

Zimbardo points an interesting feature in the Milgram obedience and the SPE studies about the role that religion plays in the willingness to obey authority and inflict pain on others even when one’s own moral instincts are repulsed by the idea.

The large, diverse cast of ordinary characters in the obedience studies and the normal, healthy, intelligent cast in the prison study also serve to make vivid the tragic conclusion that we all hate to acknowledge: The goodness of Everyman and of Everywoman can be transformed and overwhelmed by the an accumulation of small forces of evil. The character transformation seen in many of the participants in both studies represents “The Lucifer Effect” in action. Both studies teach us lessons about authority; the obedience research teaches us to question authority when it is excessive and unjust, while the SPE teaches us the dangers of too little responsible authority when it is needed to perform oversight of the behavior of individuals within its agency.
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Religious upbringing also comes to play in a complex way, leading both to unquestioning obedience to doctrinal beliefs as well as a profound caring for one’s fellows. The first values should lead to greater obedience to authority in the Milgram paradigm, while the second should lead to less obedience to such authority. Support for the first prediction comes from a Milgram-like study that compared participants with various measured levels religious orientation in the extent to which they obeyed one of three authority figures: neutral, scientific, or religious. The results reveal that the shock scores elicited in this experiment were highest for the most religious participants, less for those moderately religious, and lowest for the least religious. Among those highly and moderately religious, the scientific and religious authorities were more effective than the neutral authority in eliciting the most obedience. Those who scored lowest on the religious measures, that centered around beliefs that one’s life is under divine control, tended to reject any authority, be it religious or scientific. [My emphasis]

There is no question that scientific figures carry authority which is why scientific malpractice or fraud is taken so seriously. It is perhaps not hard to see why being religious or having a religious authority figure makes people more likely to be persuaded to go along with cruel acts. Religious people have usually been indoctrinated from childhood to believe that god is the ultimate authority figure and that unquestioning obedience to god’s commands constitutes a virtue that will be rewarded. Their religious texts also have countless examples of the most appalling atrocities that their god has done or commanded people to do and which are supposed to serve a greater good. The appalling doctrine known as ‘divine command theory‘ justifies such actions by saying that whatever god commands has to be good, even if it goes against every norm of humane behavior. Such beliefs can be a powerful force that can overcome the scruples that come with normal feelings of empathy towards other living things.

As a side note, a few months ago, I wrote about people who get lost in Death Valley and have even died because they followed the instructions of their GPS system even when it erroneously instructed them to take roads that barely existed. I wonder if that is another symptom of this phenomenon. After all, an assured and confident disembodied voice telling them what to do is somewhat like what they imagine some god-like authority figure would do, and they follow blindly.

More evidence of religion’s decline

The Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society & Culture at Trinity College surveys the religious views of Americans and their latest ARIS (American Religious Identification Survey) report done in 2008 found the following:

  • 86% of American adults identified as Christians in 1990 and 76% in 2008.
  • The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not come from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion.
  • The “Nones” (no stated religious preference, atheist, or agnostic) continue to grow, though at a much slower pace than in the 1990s, from 8.2% in 1990, to 14.1% in 2001, to 15.0% in 2008.
  • Based on their stated beliefs rather than their religious identification in 2008, 70% of Americans believe in a personal God, roughly 12% of Americans are atheist (no God) or agnostic (unknowable or unsure), and another 12% are deistic (a higher power but no personal God).
  • In 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990.

The report finds that when looked at as a percentage of the population growth from 1990 to 2008, the ‘nones’ category captured 37% of this growth while the don’t know/refused to answer category (which the report says shared many of the social profiles and beliefs of the ‘nones’) had 15% of the growth, leaving just 48% of the growth to religiously affiliated people.

There is a lot of data in the report. What I found particularly interesting is that 30% of married respondents did not have a religious ceremony and 27% do not expect to have a religious funeral or service when they die.

I am not sure when or if they will be doing another study to see if the decline continues as I expect it will.

Riddle: What is torture in Bahrain but not in the US?

An interesting report came out last week. The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) investigating the protests in Bahrain delivered its report last week and said that the Bahraini government had used “excessive force and torture” on demonstrators. (The full report can be read here.) This was significant in that the authoritarian Bahraini government that was responsible for those actions, and was aided by the Saudi Arabian military in its harsh crackdown, was still in power. The fact that they created a commission and allowed such a report to be released is a tribute to the fact that popular protests seen worldwide against the repressive government had created considerable pressure on even such a government to try and mitigate the damage.

The commission used as its definition of torture Article 1 of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment that says that:

For the purposes of this Convention, the term “torture” means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

But although the report said that the government had used torture, the news reports that I read in the US were curiously coy about exactly what actions were considered to be torture. However much I searched for them, I could not get the details. For example, this typical report in the New York Times, which prides itself on being ‘the newspaper of record’ and usually provides the most details in US media shows how they skated over the issue:

Five detainees were tortured to death while in custody, the panel concluded, and other detainees endured electric shocks and were beaten with rubber hoses and wires.
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In Washington, the Obama administration welcomed the report, but said the onus was now on Bahrain’s government to hold accountable those responsible for abuses and to undertake reforms to make sure they do not occur again.

The subtle implication in this report is that being given electric shocks or beaten with rubber hoses and wires was not part of the torture regimen. I finally found an NPR story that provided more details.

Using words like torture, mistreatment and threatened rape, the head of the commission said the kinds of things that are rarely said out loud — especially in the conservative, oil-rich Gulf.

The commission head, Cherif Bassiouni, listed abuses he says were committed against protesters who were detained: They were blindfolded, forced to stand for long periods of time, whipped, beaten, subjected to electric shock, deprived of sleep, and exposed to high temperatures and insults.

These acts, Bassiouni said, amounted to torture. [My emphasis]

I now understood why the mainstream media was shy about specifying the acts. These are the very same actions, or even worse, that are done by the US on its detainees and since the US media is deferential to the claims by the US government that it does not torture, this element of the Bahraini report must have caused considerable cognitive dissonance and had to be suppressed. In the US, in an effort to excuse the Bush administration from war crimes, there was hesitancy to say that even waterboarding was torture, so all these other forms of torture have to be also not mentioned.

Eric Lewis, a lawyer whose efforts to prosecute Donald Rumsfeld and the military chain of command for torture were opposed by the Obama administration, blasts Obama for his hypocrisy on torture, comparing his statements as a candidate with his actions as president, and says that by not prosecuting those who committed such acts, he has left the door wide open for the use of torture by any future president.

The president has rejected three clear opportunities to erect a high legal wall against the return of torture: he has made it clear that criminal prosecutions for torture will not go forward; he has opposed the creation of a truth commission to examine events comprehensively; and he has affirmatively intervened to stop civil litigation by detainees against their torturers.
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Had President Obama shown the courage of candidate Obama, he would have strongly supported civil litigation under the Constitution against officials who authorized torture. The argument that it involves the courts in foreign policy or causes officials to be wary in their actions is nonsense. The ban on torture should be absolute; it is not a foreign policy or defense issue and it is salutary for officials to know that they will be held accountable for torture.
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The Obama administration can’t just say, “Trust us.” Its challenge was not only to stop the American government from torturing detainees, but to institutionalize the legal infrastructure that would prevent the resumption of torture. President Obama had the opportunity to leave an unambiguous legal legacy that prohibited torture and inhibited the torturers of tomorrow from finding legal cover. Instead, we may reap the whirlwind of his timidity, and soon.

Until such time as we are willing to bring those who commit torture to justice, irrespective of who and where they are, these abuses will continue.

Sleep

I like to sleep. I need a minimum of eight hours a night. But it is not just the good feeling that comes with resting that I find attractive. I really enjoy sleeping, the sensation of drowsing off, and usually have no difficulty doing so anywhere at any time, even on cramped airline seats on long flights. On weekends, I take a long nap after lunch and sometimes take a short nap seated up at my desk during the weekday.

I used to worry that this was a sign that I was lazy but learned later that most people don’t get enough sleep and that this can really be harmful.

Here is a 60 Minutes report on the importance of getting enough sleep every day.

Now comes a new study that suggests that the variations in sleep needs can be traced to the influence of a specific gene.

I learned from the news report that Einstein needed 11 hours of sleep per night, which makes me a real slacker in the sleep department.

Airbrushing the Bible

The Bible poses a real problem for Jews and Christians. In it, god commands the most awful things that we now would recoil in horror from doing. So what options do they have? The literalists say that god must have good reasons for making those commands, even if those reasons are elusive to us, and that we have to simply trust in his goodness.

Of course, that is a tough sell for the more sophisticated believers and some of them have taken the tack of trying to re-interpret the plain text of the Bible to suggest that it actually says things that are more benign or even good than what appears on the surface. One such apologia can be seen in the essay Are Biblical Laws About Homosexuality Eternal? by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky, based on their book The Bible Now, where they tackle the highly problematical attitude of god towards homosexuality, which is turning out to be the Achilles’ heel for Christianity and Judaism in America.

The essay itself is a fine example of the contortions one has to go through to salvage the idea that the Bible contains some moral value. Adam Kirsch of The New Republic reviewed the book and Jason Rosenhouse analyzed the essay and both come away unimpressed.

As Kirsch says, the Bible seems pretty clear about god’s views on homosexuality.

Just look at Leviticus 20:13: “And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death: their blood shall be upon them.” The law as written does not apply to women, but for homosexual men it means death.

At this point, the twenty-first-century Jew—like the Protestant and the Catholic, anyone whose religion views the Bible as holy writ—has two simple choices, and one messy and unsatisfying one. The first simple choice is the one the Satmar Hasid would take: the Bible being God’s word, homosexuality is ipso facto an abomination, Q.E.D. The second is the one any secular rationalist would take: the Bible is not God’s word, and it has no more binding force than any other ancient Near Eastern law code. The Code of Hammurabi, for instance, holds that “If a man’s wife be surprised with another man, both shall be tied and thrown into the water,” but we are no more obligated to follow this law today than we are to follow Leviticus. Both reflect millennia-old views of gender and sexuality that now appear simply unjust.

The third choice is the one represented in The Bible Now, the new book by Richard Elliott Friedman and Shawna Dolansky. They have set out to explain “what the Bible has to say about the major issues of our time,” in particular “five current controversial matters: homosexuality, abortion, women’s status, capital punishment, and the earth.” Some people turn to the Bible for guidance, they observe early on, “because … the Bible is the final authority and one must do what it says.” But as secular academics, Friedman and Dolansky recognize that the Bible was written by historically situated human beings, with various political and religious agendas. They belong to the other category of Bible-seekers, they say, those “who do not believe that the Bible is divinely revealed, [but] turn to the Bible because they believe it contains wisdom—wisdom that might help anyone, whatever his or her beliefs, make wise decisions about difficult matters.”

Kirsch goes on to say that by using a tortured analysis, Friedman and Dolansky manage to turn that ghastly Leviticus passage into something positive.

This is a remarkable performance. Before you know it, a law that unambiguously prescribes death for gay men has been turned into an example of latent egalitarianism. Friedman and Dolansky imply that it was not homosexuality the Bible wanted to condemn, but the humiliation of the passive partner. And since we no longer think of consensual sex acts as humiliating, surely the logic of the Bible itself means that homosexuality is no longer culpable: “The prohibition in the Bible applies only so long as male homosexual acts are perceived to be offensive.”
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What licenses this kind of reading is the principle that “God is free to change,” that is, to change his mind about what is offensive and inoffensive, good and evil—but only, it seems, in ways that bring him more in tune with the views of people like Friedman and Dolansky (and, I hasten to add, myself).

Rosenhouse points out another fact that makes all this convoluted argumentation seem pointless.

I would add that if we take the text seriously then it is not the authors of Leviticus who are issuing prohibitions, but God Himself. As Kirsch notes, Friedman and Dolansky do not accept the divine authorship of the Bible, so they are free to understand the text as the creation of an uninspired human writer. But in that case, what is the point of this exercise? Why would it even occur to anyone to think the author of this portion of Leviticus, writing thousands of years ago, had any particular insight into sexual morality?
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I have no doubt that in the small community of Biblical scholars, this sort of analysis is considered very clever and highbrow. No doubt they endlessly pat each other on the backs for it and shake their heads sadly at those who think that when God personally describes something as an abomination, He actually intends to express His disapprobation for that something. But their arguments amount to nothing. To accept their conclusion we must believe that the Biblical authors once again (let us recall that the early chapters of Genesis come in for similar treatment at the hands of Biblical scholars) expressed themselves in ways that are most naturally understood in a manner almost precisely opposite to what they meant to say.

This is not reasonable. If you want to use the Bible as a moral guide then you are stuck with it. The text is not infinitely malleable, and you cannot reasonably interpret X to mean not X. Rather than try to twist the text to fit modern moral sensibilities, which despite their denials is precisely what Friedman and Dolansky are doing, why don’t we simply discard this particular ancient book and move on to more promising approaches to morality?

This is a very important point that I wish to re-iterate. If a person believes that the Bible is of divine origin and thus infallible, then it makes sense that one would try to explain away the morality that is presently unacceptable. But few of the more sophisticated biblical apologists and theologians would claim that the words in the Bible were of divine origin and literally dictated by god. Almost all of them accept that they were the work of humans who lives thousands of years ago and were merely reflecting the morality of their times. Why don’t they simply reject the obnoxious ideas in them just the way we would other old books?

What people like Friedman and Dolansky are seeking to do is to find a way to make the Bible less embarrassing to modern believers. It is another example of how modernity, and the sensibilities that come with it, are in direct conflict with the archaic attitudes of religions.

Deporting US citizens

The agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency “operate in a secretive judicial environment where detention hearings are held out of public view”, according to this news report and this lack of oversight leads to abuses in which even US citizens are picked up, kept in detention for long periods, and even deported.

After a detailed examination of federal immigration records, Prof. Jacqueline Stevens of Northwestern University estimated this year that about 4,000 American citizens were illegally detained or deported as aliens in 2010. In a study published last summer, she found that as many as 20,000 citizens may have been wrongly held or deported since 2003.

“If they can’t even protect the rights of citizens, think about the others who are being put through this system,” Stevens said. “You have agents making life and death types of decisions and there is no check on their honesty.”

A US citizen who was detained for 43 days and almost deported is now suing the ICE agency for $1 million.

Once again, this shows the abuses that inevitably occur when people are given power that they can exercise in secret. Transparency has to be the foundation of a democracy but the government keeps steadily increasing the levels of secrecy under which it operates.

More on that $7.77 trillion Federal Reserve deal with the banks

Last Thursday, I wrote about how the Federal Reserve, in secret, committed itself to $7.77 trillion in support to the big banks. The Daily Show gives more details of the how the rip-off worked. It turns out that the Fed gave the banks money at interest rates of 0.01% (essentially free money) that the banks then used to buy US Treasury bonds. In essence the Fed was borrowing its own money back from the banks at much higher rates than it lent it out to the same banks. Any idiot could make money on such a deal and it should be no surprise that the banks made a quick $13 billion in profits, which they then doled out to their executives as huge bonuses as a reward for their business acumen.

The fact that there has been no outcry against Federal Reserve head Ben Bernanke shows how the entire government and the major media is in the tank for the banks. The secrecy under which the Federal Reserve acts must end. It is a public body that is supposed to work for the public interest. It should not be allowed to become the private slush fund of the oligarchy.

And now, peak Gingrich

This year’s Republican primary race has to be the strangest in recent history.

As this graph of poll averages from Real Clear Politics shows, the party continues its lurching from one non-Romney to another, with Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and now Newt Gingrich having their peaks of support, while that of Mitt Romney and Ron Paul maintain steady but at low levels, and Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman are also steady but almost non-existent. And of course, at one time we had The Donald, the effects of whose brief cameo appearance is not recorded

RCP poll.png

It says a lot about the modern Republican party that such a repulsive opportunist blowhard like Newt Gingrich is being touted as a clever person, a man of ideas. For a party that has turned its back on science and knowledge in general, their embrace of Gingrich, a man who oozes contempt for everyone else, requires some explaining. I think Paul Krugman was right when he said: “He’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.” Republicans seem to be impressed by cocky smart mouths (Sarah Palin being the poster child), and repelled by people with real knowledge and expertise.

gingrich-smartest-guy-in-the-world.gif

The person who has the most reason to be righteously aggrieved by this parade of successive contenders to Romney is Rick Santorum, who must have hoped that his smug religiosity, devotion to the oligarchy, and homophobia would appeal to the not-insignificant bloc of knuckle-dragging Neanderthals in the party. Every time the leading non-Romney stumbled, his hopes must have been raised of being anointed the next flag bearer, only to see others being awarded the prize. One can almost hear him wailing in prayer in his lonely hotel room in Iowa, “Why have you forsaken me, Lord? When will it be my turn?”