Shifting Baseline

Milgram experiment (1962)

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

Good Kill (2014)

»If you let an Artificial intelligence program run its deadly course, your soul will suffer far less damage than if you press the trigger yourself. It is well known that pressing a button or firing a drone is much easier than stabbing someone with a bayonet or killing someone with an ax on your own. The more technical the system, the more uninhibited not only its use, but also those who use it. If the autonomous weapon system is fully automated, the question of responsibility should be put into perspective.« [1]

»Many studies of Nazi killers have suggested a different kind of selection, namely self-selection to the Party and SS by unusually violence-prone people. Shortly after the war, Theodor Adorno and others developed the notion of the “authoritarian personality.” Feeling that situational or environmental influences had already been studied, they chose to focus on hitherto neglected psychological factors. They began with the hypothesis that certain deep-seated personality traits made “potentially fascistic individuals” particularly susceptible to antidemocratic propaganda. Their investigations led them to compile a list of the crucial traits (tested for by the so-called F-scale) of the “authoritarian personality“: rigid adherence to conventional values; submissiveness to authority figures; aggressiveness toward out-groups; opposition to introspection, reflection, and creativity; a tendency to superstition and stereotyping; preoccupation with power and “toughness”; destructiveness and cynicism; projectivity (“the disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world” and “the projection outward of unconscious emotional impulses”); and an exaggerated concern with sexuality.

They concluded that the antidemocratic individual “harbors strong underlying aggressive impulses’ and fascist movements allow him to project this aggression through sanctioned violence against ideologically targeted outgroups. Zygmunt Bauman has summed up this approach as follows: “Nazism was cruel because Nazis were cruel; and the Nazis were cruel because cruel people tended to become Nazis.”

Those who emphasize the relative or absolute importance of situational factors over individual psychological characteristics invariably point to Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment. Screening out everyone who scored beyond the normal range on a battery of psychological tests, including one that measured “rigid adherence to conventional values and a submissive, uncritical attitude toward authority” (i.e., the F-scale for the “authoritarian personality”), Zimbardo randomly divided his homogeneous “normal” test group into guards and prisoners and placed them in a simulated prison. Though outright physical violence was barred, within six days the inherent structure of prison life—in which guards operating on three-man shifts had to devise ways of controlling the more numerous prisoner population—had produced rapidly escalating brutality, humiliation, and dehumanization.

Most dramatic and distressing to us was the observation of the ease with which sadistic behavior could be elicited in individuals who were not sadistic types. The prison situation alone, Zimbardo concluded, was “a sufficient condition to produce aberrant, anti-social behavior“. Perhaps most relevant to this study of Reserve Police Battalion 101 is the spectrum of behavior that Zimbardo discovered in his sample of eleven guards. About one-third of the guards emerged as “cruel and tough.” They constantly invented new forms of harassment and enjoyed their newfound power to behave cruelly and arbitrarily. A middle group of guards was “tough but fair.” They “played by the rules” and did not go out of their way to mistreat prisoners. Only two (i.e., less than 20 percent) emerged as “good guards” who did not punish prisoners and even did small favors for them.

Zimbardo’s spectrum of guard behavior bears an uncanny resemblance to the groupings that emerged within Reserve Police Battalion 101: a nucleus of increasingly enthusiastic killers who volunteered for the firing squads and “Jew hunts”; a larger group of policemen who performed as shooters and ghetto clearers when assigned but who did not seek opportunities to kill (and in some cases refrained from killing, contrary to standing orders, when no one was monitoring their actions); and a small group (less than 20 percent) of refusers and evaders. If obedience to orders out of fear of dire punishment is not a valid explanation, what about “obedience to authority” in the more general sense used by Stanley Milgram—deference simply as a product of socialization and evolution, a “deeply ingrained behavior tendency” to comply with the directives of those positioned hierarchically above, even to the point of performing repugnant actions in violation of “universally accepted” moral norms.

In a series of now famous experiments, Milgram tested the individual’s ability to resist authority that was not backed by any external coercive threat. Naive volunteer subjects were instructed by a “scientific authority” in an alleged learning experiment to inflict an escalating series of fake electric shocks upon an actor/victim, who responded with carefully programmed “voice feedback”—an escalating series of complaints, cries of pain, calls for help, and finally fateful silence. In the standard voice feedback experiment, two-thirds of Milgram’s subjects were “obedient” to the point of inflicting extreme pain.

Several variations on the experiment produced significantly different results. If the actor or victim was shielded so that the subject could hear and see no response, obedience was much greater. If the subject had both visual and voice feedback, compliance to the extreme fell to 40 percent. If the subject had to touch the actor/victim physically by forcing his hand onto an electric plate to deliver the shocks, obedience dropped to 30 percent. If a nonauthority figure gave orders, obedience was nil. If the naive subject performed a subsidiary or accessory task but did not personally inflict the electric shocks, obedience was nearly total. In contrast, if the subject was part of an actor/peer group that staged a carefully planned refusal to continue following the directions of the authority figure, the vast majority of subjects (90 percent) joined their peer group and desisted as well.

If the subject was given complete discretion as to the level of electric shock to administer, all but a few sadists consistently delivered a minimal shock. When not under the direct surveillance of the scientist, many of the subjects “cheated” by giving lower shocks than prescribed, even though they were unable to confront authority and abandon the experiment. Milgram adduced a number of factors to account for such an unexpectedly high degree of potentially murderous obedience to a noncoercive authority. An evolutionary bias favors the survival of people who can adapt to hierarchical situations and organized social activity. Socialization through family, school, and military service, as well as a whole array of rewards and punishments within society generally, reinforces and internalizes a tendency toward obedience. A seemingly voluntary entry into an authority system “perceived” as legitimate creates a strong sense of obligation. Those within the hierarchy adopt the authority’s perspective or “definition of the situation” (in this case, as an important scientific experiment rather than the infliction of physical torture).

The notions of “loyalty, duty, discipline,” requiring competent performance in the eyes of authority, become moral imperatives overriding any identification with the victim. Normal individuals enter an “agentic state” in which they are the instrument of another’s will. In such a state, they no longer feel personally responsible for the content of their actions but only for how well they perform.« [2]

Endorsing the Final Solution in Hawaii: Ridding the World of Misfits Imagine that you are a college student at the University of Hawaii (Mano a campus) among 570 other students in any of several large evening school psychology classes. Tonight your teacher, with his Danish accent, alters his usual lecture to reveal a threat to national security being created by the population explosion (a hot topic in the early 1970s). This authority describes the emerging threat to society posed by the rapidly increasing number of people who are physically and mentally unfit. The problem is convincingly presented as a high-minded scientific project, endorsed by scientists and planned for the benefit of humanity. You are then invited to help in „the application of scientific procedures to eliminate the mentally and emotionally unfit.” The teacher further justifies the need to take action with an analogy to capital punishment as a deterrent against violent crime.

He tells you that your opinions are being solicited because you and the others assembled here are intelligent and well educated and have high ethical values. It is flattering to think that you are in this select company. (Recall the lure „Inner Ring.”) In case there might be any lingering misgivings, he provides assurances that much careful research would be carried out before action of any kind would be taken with these misfit human creatures. At this point, he wants only your opinions, recommendations, and personal views on a simple survey to be completed now by you and the rest of the students in the auditorium.

You begin answering the questions because you have been persuaded that this is a new vital issue about which your voice matters. You diligently answer each of the seven questions and discover that there is a lot of uniformity between your answers and those of the rest of the group. Ninety percent of you agree that there will always be some people more fit for survival than others. Regarding killing of the unfit: 79 percent wanted one person to be responsible for the killing and another to carry out the act; 64 percent preferred anonymity for those who pressed the button with only one button causing death though many were pressed; 89 percent judged that painless drugs would be the most efficient and humane method of inducing death. If required by law to assist, 89 percent wanted to be the one who assisted in the decisions, while 9 percent preferred to assist with the killings or both. Only 6 percent of the students refused to answer.

Most incredibly, fully 91 percent of all student respondents agreed with the conclusion that „under extreme circumstances it is entirely just to eliminate those judged most dangerous to the general welfare”! Finally, a surprising 29 percent supported this „final solution” even if it had to be applied to their own families!

So these American college students (night school students and thus older than usual) were willing to endorse a deadly plan to kill off all others who were judged by some authorities to be less fit to live than they were after only a brief presentation by their teacher authority. Now we can see how ordinary, even intelligent Germans could readily endorse Hitler’s „Final Solution” against the Jews, which was reinforced in many ways by their educational system and strengthened by systematic government propaganda.« [3]

[1] Precht, KI und der Sinn des Lebens, 2020, Page 202
[2] Browning, Ordinary Men, 1992, Chapter 18
[3] Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 2007, Page 284
[4] Make Peace No Alternative for Holocaust