Booting

I started reading an article in Rolling Stone about hazing at Dartmouth fraternities and there was a line in it about the ability of perfectly nice, normal people to do horrible things to each other. The article is very graphic and I'm guessing the most frequently occurring word in it is "vomit," but it's worth a read if you have a strong stomach.

The point, though, is what human beings are willing to subject each other to in certain circumstances. There's a well known psychology study called the Milgram Experiment, where subjects thought they were the experimenters, and were asked to administer electric shocks to an actor posing as a subject of the fake experiment. There were not actually any shocks and they could only hear but not see their supposed subject, who seemed to emit what were pre-recorded shrieks. The actual subjects, given direction by the person in charge, believed they were giving shocks of increasing voltage (up to 450 volts, 4 times what's in a regular electrical outlet), causing increasing pain, and yet continued to do so because that was what they were "supposed to do."

The experiment is very interesting and as authoritative as social science experiments get, and it was key in promoting ethics in psychology. It didn't do much for the real world, however, except to expose what most of us already knew was the case, that people can be cruel given proper encouragement.

Casual cruelty is all too common in modern America, whether it's finding comedy when someone is kicked in the groin in movies or in easy sarcasm. As a teacher, I find it interesting that students, who may be genuinely nice people, say insulting things to their peers in class that they would never dream of saying to the same person one-on-one, and probably wouldn't even say behind someone's back.

What is going on that group dynamics encourage this kind of behavior? Why is it acceptable to behave in this manner? The only thing I can come up with is the overwhelming need of people to feel good about themselves, regardless of the collateral damage. It's not unusual for insecure adolescents to insult others to uplift themselves. The frat boys at Dartmouth want to feel like membership in their group is so desirable that pledges will endure torture to join. And I guess on some level they are right, because people do go through the hazing and come out the other end to treat new pledges in the same fashion. (Full disclosure: I was in a fraternity in college and we used to brainstorm ideas and joke about hazing, but we never actually did anything).

I'm all in favor of feeling good, and I'm a subscriber to the belief that almost all human behavior is self-centered, but I don't think this is okay and more importantly I don't think it bodes well. I'll pick this up in another context in a subsequent post.