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How Can the Science of Human Behavior Help Us Understand Abu Ghraib? Comments delivered by Steven J. Breckler, PhD
Thank you all for being here and for showing an interest in what behavioral science can tell us about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. military personnel and others in the Abu Ghraib prison. My name is Steve Breckler, and I am the director for science at the American Psychological Association. I am a social psychologist. For over ten years, I worked as a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where I taught and did research on social attitudes, persuasion, and social influence. I then spent nine years as a program director at the National Science Foundation, where I had oversight for the federal funding of social psychological research. I joined APA two months ago. I'd like to begin my comments by clarifying our purpose here today. My colleague, Professor Kevin Murphy, and I are here to share with you the wisdom and insight of behavioral science. Decades of research, much of it funded by U.S. federal agencies, can help us to understand what happened and to prevent similar incidents in the future. We are not here to point fingers, to assign blame, or to assess guilt. We are here to tell you about the science. As scientists, we will confine ourselves to what we know with a good degree of certainty. We will not speculate about the unknown or guess about matters that have not been investigated. That is how we do science, and that is what we will do today. I am going to lay out for you two basic principles that capture a great deal of what we know about human social behavior. Professor Murphy will then speak much more directly to issues having to do with organizations, leadership, and training. Let me first identify the two principles, and then I will elaborate on each one. Let me also say at the start that many more principles can be invoked, and I will touch on some of them in my comments. But the "big two" deserve most of our attention. The first is that people underestimate the power of the situation to influence and shape their behavior. The second is that people show considerable and stable individual differences in their attitudes and in their actions. In other words, each of us has a personality that sets us apart from others, and our personalities tend to remain stable over time. Let me elaborate. People underestimate the power of the situation to influence and shape their behavior. We all like to think that we are masters of our own ships, that we possess free will, and that we behave in certain ways because we intend to behave that way. And in many cases, we are in control. Yet, very often, aspects of the situation create a far more powerful influence on our actions. One example comes from research on social conformity. When you drive down the highway, and notice that the drivers in front of you are all shifting lanes to the right, do you follow suit? Do you move, with the crowd, to the right? Most likely, the answer is yes. Why do you do it? In the absence of other information, you assume that the other drivers know something or see something that you don't know or didn't see. You conform to their actions. In most situations, conformity is probably a good thing. Yet, it can lead you astray. In the classic research on conformity, Solomon Asch found that people often follow the incorrect lead of others even when the truth is as plain as can be. Another example comes from research on compliance - accepting the requests of others. When a stranger approaches with a question - where is the capital building? - the natural tendency is to answer. We comply with the request. Very often we comply with requests without even thinking it through. Psychologist Ellen Langer approached people waiting in line to make copies and asked if she could step in front. If you are like me, you would find this annoying and send her to the back of the line. But when the request is accompanied by an explanation - any explanation - people are happy to comply. When Langer excused her request by saying "I need to make copies", people willingly complied. The excuse was an empty one. It was tautological. Of course she had make copies - so did everyone else. Yet, we are accustomed to yielding whenever people offer something that even resembles an excuse. The point is that our behavior can be influenced in subtle ways, and without our being aware of the manipulation. My third example comes from research on obedience to authority. This is perhaps the most relevant line of research bearing on the incident at Abu Ghraib, and many in the press have drawn the connection. Stanley Milgram, who was a professor at Yale University, conducted the classic research in this area. What he found is that ordinary people - people like you and me - accept the influence of an authority to cause profound harm to another person, or at least what they assume to be profound harm. Nobody ever guessed that the participants in Milgram's experiments would go along with the commands of the authority to the degree they did. Ordinary people could not predict it about themselves, and even experts - psychiatrists, for example - could not predict the extent to which people would obey a presumed authority. Let me emphasize that I have selected a small sampling of studies and results. They are backed up and reinforced by literally hundreds of other studies. It is a very deep scientific literature. What we know now is that people regularly underestimate the power of the situation in influencing their actions. But we know much more than that. First, the research also shows us how to reduce or mitigate these social influence effects. In the conformity experiments of Asch, the presence of just one other person who acted contrary to the crowd was enough to liberate people from the crowd's influence. In the obedience experiments of Milgram, the presence of one other person who refused to obey was sufficient to turn off the effects of authority. If one person is brave enough to defy the commands of authority, it can dramatically reduce that authority's influence on others. Second, the research shows that people are more likely to accept social influence - to conform or to obey authority - when the situation is ambiguous, when the "correct" answer is hard to discern. Third - and this is often overlooked - is that not everyone accepts social influence. Most people conform in the conformity experiment, but not everyone. Most people comply with empty requests, but not everyone. Most people obey the authority, but not everyone. These may be powerful situations that exert powerful effects on behavior, but not on everyone. This leads us directly to the second basic principle, which is that people show considerable and stable individual differences in their attitudes and in their actions. Personality psychology is the branch of psychology that deals with this fundamental aspect of human nature. In the realm of social influence, we can generally predict who will conform and who will not. For example, some of us are relatively independent thinkers, people who like to puzzle through solutions on our own and who strive to achieve our own goals. Others of us are less independent, we prefer to have solutions given to us, and to have others establish desirable goals. These are stable and reliable differences among people, and personality psychologists have devised effective ways to measure these differences. When we focus on individual differences in social influence, we find what you might expect. Those who refuse to conform to group actions, for example, generally tend to fall into the category of people who have independent personality styles. Those who are most likely to resist hollow persuasive arguments are those who like to think a lot and to puzzle things through. You may have noticed that I qualified the effects of personality. I said that certain personality traits generally go with this pattern or that pattern of behavior. The truth is that behavioral scientists have had a much harder time establishing relationships between personality and behavior than they have between situations and behavior. But the research goes on, and one day we will have a much better handle on it. This turns out, in fact, to be a very complex problem. It is almost a third basic principle. That is that situations and personalities interact to influence behavior. Think of it this way. In some settings or social contexts, you may be very timid and reluctant to engage in conversation. Yet, in other settings, you may be outgoing and the center of conversation. Are you shy or are you outgoing? Something at the intersection between your own stable personality and aspects of the situation combine to shape your actions one way or another. You can begin to see why it is such tricky business to predict behavior from knowledge of an individual's personality. There is another principle of social life that is relevant here. People are very quick to justify their actions - to explain to themselves and to others why they did what they did. When accounting for positive or beneficial outcomes, people will readily assume the credit. But when accounting for negative or harmful outcomes, people will just as readily avoid the blame. If we combine this idea with the knowledge that situations exert a powerful effect on behavior, we get some very interesting scenarios. Suppose that you are influenced to harm another person. Perhaps it is conformity brought about by peer pressure, or perhaps it is the result of obedience to authority. Whatever the mechanism, you are faced with the undeniable fact that you have caused harm to another person. Now, most of us are decent and moral people - we consider it inappropriate, even reprehensible, to harm others. Yet, here we are faced with the undeniable fact that harm has just been caused. How do we explain that? This is where social behavior gets very interesting. What the research shows is that people in these cases tend to deflect personal responsibility. Perhaps they blame the authority who ordered them to do it. Perhaps they blame the situation, which offered them no choice. Perhaps they even blame the victim, claiming that the harm was deserved. Whatever the explanation, people tend to shift the responsibility for their own harmful actions away from themselves. This aspect of social behavior can have serious and unfortunate consequences. Harm doing could very well be perpetuated as long as the harm doer fails to accept personal responsibility for their own actions. Yet, knowing this about people offers the opportunity to change the course of their behavior. The research shows that harm doing can be reduced by getting people to assume personal responsibility for their actions. Even in the Milgram obedience experiments, giving a little personal control back to the participants was a very effective way of reducing their harmful actions. I am sure that all of you have been following discussions that link the prison abuse incident with the famous Stanford prison experiment of 1971. That experiment was led by social psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who was recently president of the American Psychological Association. I'd like to say a few words about that experiment, and how it relates to the basic principles I've just outlined. It is true that when Zimbardo placed ordinary college students in the roles of prisoners and guards, a variety of unexpected and disturbing behaviors were observed. Those playing the role of guards became abusive of their prisoners to such an extent that the experiment was halted. The Stanford prison experiment taught us important lessons about the potential for prisoner abuse, even at the hands of ordinary and stable guards. It demonstrated, once again, the power of the situation. Yet, the experiment also showed that some of the guards were more abusive than others. Chalk one up for personality and individual differences. Perhaps most important of all, the Stanford experiment taught us that leadership and oversight plays a significant role in these settings. In some ways, the abusive behavior of the guards in the Stanford experiment was precipitated or allowed to develop because of the ground rules and culture established at the outset. In another similar prison experiment, conducted by social psychologists Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher, less maltreatment was observed when a less abusive climate was established by the leadership at the outset. This leads us into a discussion of organizations, leadership, and training. So, at the risk of stepping too much more into the area of expertise represented here by Professor Murphy, I will turn the podium over to him. |
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