How Ordinary People Can Do Bad Things

It seems like a daily occurrence that we read, hear about or see instances of people intentionally hurting others through their words or violent actions. Mainstream and social media provide us in graphic detail instances of gun shootings, physical abuse, sexual abuse, persecution, racism, and political verbal and physical attacks.

?History is replete with entire groups of people, organizations, and nations, engaging in horrific, immoral behavior, ranging from genocide to riots and killings, to massive greed and corruption. Frequently, these are the behaviours of large organizations under the control of a poisonous leader rather than individual actors. We too frequently blame the leader for misbehaviour, but without willing followers, the destruction would never take place.

?All too frequently, psychopathy, mental illness, or irrational conspiracy theories are used to justify terrible and destructive behaviour. The underlying premise is that criminals are outliers and marginalized members of our society who operate outside the norm and that the typical individual would not voluntarily participate in harming others.

?Not so. There is ample evidence that many ordinary people can willingly choose to commit those acts.

Nazi Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland in WWII

Historical records show that there were approximately 175,000 non-military German policemen during WWII recruited from the civilian population. It’s not widespread knowledge that these policemen were responsible for killing approximately 2 million Jews during the war, separate from the extermination camps.

A documentary and book, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, written by historian Christopher R. Browning, ?is the true story of Reserve Police Battalion 101 of the German Order Police, which was responsible for mass shootings as well as round-ups of Jewish people for deportation to Nazi death camps in Poland in 1942. Browning argues that most of the men of ?RPB 101 were not fanatical?Nazis but, rather, ordinary middle-aged, working-class men who committed these atrocities out of a mixture of motives, including the group dynamics of conformity, deference to authority, role adaptation, and the altering of moral norms to justify their actions.

?During 16 months, Reserve Police Battalion 101, a unit of just over 450 men from Hamburg, was responsible in Poland for the shooting of 39,000 Jews, including many women and children.

?What sort of men were they? Browning bases his answers on the judicial interrogation in the 1960s of 210 men from the battalion. They were ordinary men,? middle-aged, working, family men. They included men who, before the war, had been professional policemen as well as businessmen, dockworkers, truck drivers, construction workers, machine operators, waiters, druggists and teachers. Most were in their 30s and 40s and too old to be conscripted into the Army.

?Browning says their moral compasses were formed before the rise of Nazi culture, and many of them hadn’t chosen to join the battalion but were drafted into it, meaning that they didn’t sign up to be a part of the war. Only a minority were members of the Nazi Party, and only a few belonged to the SS.

?After examining studies dealing with this phenomenon and evidence of such conduct in other wars, Browning determines that it's not just Nazism or Germans that produces such men: There were American units in the Pacific that boasted of never taking captives. ``If the men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 could become killers under such circumstances,'' he writes, ``what group of men cannot?''

?Browning attributes a significant portion of the battalion's shooting decisions to the need to fit in; they simply didn't want to be perceived as cowards by others. In addition, many of them were probably individuals who agreed with the Nazi view that Jews were Germany's adversaries. Browning thinks that although many of the men who chose not to shoot after at least one execution gave the reason of bodily repugnance, there may have actually been an underlying ethical or political resistance that they were just unable to express.

?Browning turns to the question of why so many of these seemingly ordinary men became mass murderers during the war, especially since they were given the freedom to choose not to kill. Ultimately, there is no single answer to this question. It was a combination of factors, including prevalent racism combined with the ongoing war, the tendency to respect authority, the men’s belief in German superiority due to widespread Nazi propaganda, and, as the men themselves admit, the desire to conform to the group. This, however, has some dark implications. Many of these factors are present in most people’s everyday lives, which leads to one important question: if the men in RPB 101 were transformed into killers under such common circumstances, are there many people who wouldn’t?

?Most of the policemen reported that the first shooting they performed was difficult, but even when they had to shoot, subsequent shootings somehow got easier. In fact, after Jozefow, Poland, the shootings became, for many, routine -- even, for some, fun. For a few, the initial horror was replaced by gory sadism, in which Jews, totally naked, preferably old and with beards, were forced to crawl in front of their intended graves and to sustain beatings with clubs before being shot. One officer even brought his new and pregnant wife from Germany to show off his mastery over the fate of the Jews.

?According to Mr. Browning, the killing of Battalion 101 wasn't the type of "battlefield frenzy" that occasionally occurs in all battles, where soldiers butcher enemy prisoners or even civilians after facing death or witnessing the deaths of their buddies. Instead, it was the ruthless execution of German national policy, requiring the policemen to go through a process of accommodating orders that forced them to carry out actions they never imagined they would ever have to and to rationalize or otherwise reinterpret them so they would not view themselves as evil people.

?Because of the orders to kill, the pressure to comply, and the worry that they would face punishment or, at the very least, damage to their careers if they didn't kill, Browning's meticulous account and his own astute reflections on the actions of the battalion members clearly show the significant impact the situation had on those men. In actuality, the minority who made an effort to avoid murdering succeeded; but, the majority thought they had little option, or at the very least, could convince themselves of this.

But Mr. Browning's account also illustrates other factors that made it possible for the battalion's ordinary men not only to kill but, ultimately, to kill in a routine, and in some cases sadistic, way. Each of these factors helped the policemen feel that they were not violating, or violating only because it was necessary, their personal moral codes.

The policemen were also helped by the habit of not referring to their actions as killing; instead, they were engaged in "actions" and "resettlements," and the responsibility didn't actually belong to them; rather, it belonged to the authorities -- their commanding officer, Major Trapp, and, ultimately, the leaders of the German state -- whose orders they were merely carrying out. Indeed, by breaking the assignment up into smaller portions and delegating it to other individuals and procedures, they were able to distribute any responsibility they did have.

?It is obvious that regular people are capable of obeying the worst kinds of orders. The respect for the lives and rights of all people, which nations must fight to preserve, is what separates civilization from genocide. The policemen's acts were made possible by the ideological and psychological environment that Nazi Germany offered. The lives and dignity of all of its residents can only be protected by governmental structures that acknowledge the worst aspects of human nature while also creating societies that reward the best.

The American Experience—Abu Ghraib Prison

In an article by American Psychological Association president Philip G. Zimbardo examining why good people do bad things, he describes the terrible acts committed by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison. During the early stages of the?Iraq War, members of the?United States Army?and the?Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of?human rights violations?and?war crimes?against detainees in the?Abu Ghraib prison?in?Iraq, including?physical abuse,?sexual humiliation, both physical and psychological?torture,?rape, as well the?killing of Manadel al-Jamadi?and the desecration of his body. Zimbardo argues “ that situations pull people to act in ways they never thought imaginable.”

"That line between good and evil is permeable," Zimbardo said. "Any of us can move across it....I argue that we all have the capacity for love and evil--to be Mother Theresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It's the situation that brings that out."

Zimbardo explains how situations can foster “evil” behavior. He says they:

• Provide people with an ideology to justify beliefs for actions.
• Make people take a small first step toward a harmful act with a minor, trivial action and then gradually increase those small actions.
• Make those in charge seem like a "just authority."
• Transform a once compassionate leader into a dictatorial figure.
• Provide people with vague and ever-changing rules.
• Relabel the situation's actors and their actions to legitimize the ideology.
• Provide people with social models of compliance.
• Allow dissent, but only if people continue to comply with orders.
• Make exiting the situation difficult.
• Particularly notable, Zimbardo said, is that people are seduced into evil by dehumanizing and labelling others.
• "They semantically change their perception of victims, of the evil act, and change the relationship of the aggressor to their aggression--so 'killing' or 'hurting' becomes the same as 'helping,'" he said.

A person's anonymity can be induced by acting in an anonymity-conferring environment that adds to the pleasure of destruction, vandalism and the power of being in control, Zimbardo noted.

"It's not just seeing people hurt, it's doing things that you have a sense that you are controlling behavior of other people in ways that you typically don't," Zimbardo said.

So is it a few bad apples that spoil a barrel? "That's what we want to believe-- that we could never be a bad apple," Zimbardo said. "We're the good ones in the barrel." But people can be influenced, regardless of their intention to resist, he said.

Roy Baumeister noted in his seminal work?Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty, “the myth of pure evil,” making the point that the factors driving people to do bad things to each other are highly complex. The notion of evil is a simplistic one. Nevertheless, for practical purposes, he uses the term in his analysis.

Baumeister says: "There are four major root causes of evil or reasons that people act in ways that others will perceive as evil. Ordinary, well-intentioned people may perform evil acts when under the influence of these factors, singly or in combination."

1. The simple desire for material gain.
2. Threatened egotism.
3. Idealism: "What they perceive to be noble ends are often seen as justifying violent means."
4. The pursuit of sadistic pleasure: "only 5 or 6 percent of perpetrators actually get enjoyment out of inflicting harm.”

While the victims' motto is "Never forget," Baumeister contends that people frequently tend to downplay the negative effects of what they are doing or rationalize their actions (even when motivated primarily by a desire for material gain or by threatened egotism), often considering the impact of their action to be much less significant than that felt by the victim or believing that the victim threatened, provoked, or otherwise deserved what was done to them.

?Apart from the evil villains in Hollywood films, Baumeister observes that "most people who do evil do not think of themselves as doing evil [...], most of them regard themselves as good people who are trying to defend themselves as the good guys fighting against the forces of evil. The world breaks down into us against them, and it almost always turns out that evil lies on the side of 'them'" (referring here more to violence between groups, nations, ideologies, etc. than to indiscriminate acts of violence).

?Both the good and bad aspects of human nature have been amplified by the internet and social media, which has increased the availability of both high- and low-quality information, equalized the ability of individuals and groups to disseminate information widely, and broken down traditional group boundaries while also encouraging new "tribal" affiliations.

"All evil begins with a big ideology," Zimbardo?said. "What is the evil ideology about the Iraq war? National security. National security is the ideology that is used to justify torture in Brazil. You always begin with this big, good thing because once you have the big ideology then it’s going to justify all the action."

Other Characteristics of Harmful Behavior According to Research

• When people rename terrible actions, they're easier to do. For example, when bribery becomes "greasing the wheels" or accounting fraud becomes "financial engineering," unethical behavior can seem less bad. Research says that the use of nicknames and euphemisms for questionable practices can free them of their moral connotations, making them seem more acceptable. (e.g.: killing civilians becomes “collateral damage.”
• If someone in authority grants people permission to do evil things, they are more likely to do them.?In?the book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolsky offers an inspired synthesis of how biology shapes human behavior—both the good and the bad. Sapolsky cites?a study?in which white participants were more accepting of social inequalities after being primed with the idea that race is essential and fixed, and less accepting when primed with the notion that race is a social construct with no genetic basis. “In-group parochialism is often more concerned about Us beating Them than with Us simply doing well,” he writes. “This is the essence of tolerating inequality in the name of loyalty.”??This paradigm manifests across the world and especially in the political realm, where a politician’s success is often dictated by the ability to prime a group of supporters to the similarities between him and them, rather than their differences (especially when the differences between a candidate and his base are objectively vast on a measure like income).?

Leadership ethicist Craig Johnson says that processes take place that enable leaders and followers to disconnect their moral thinking and principles and rationalize their unethical behaviour. Johnson contends that in many of these circumstances, the leaders and followers are not initially terrible or corrupt people.

?Beginning with the claim that people mistakenly think we are more moral than we actually are, he goes on to explain how moral disengagement causes us to behave immorally and then rationalizes our poor actions.

?First, we start to focus on desired outcomes and justify the means to achieve them. If an outcome is significant, we start to believe that the "ends justify the means." For instance, the waterboarding of suspected terrorists is justified because of the desired outcome of defending citizens from terrorist attacks. This "deactivation of moral standards," as Craig Johnson calls it, is a slippery slope.

?Johnson asserts that another way we justify immoral behaviour is through the use of "euphemistic language," such as the term "collateral damage," which is used to describe the deaths or injuries of civilians during bombing or drone attacks, or the term "subversive" or "spy," which makes it simpler for the government to imprison or execute a journalist or tourist.

?They minimize their own bad behaviour by contrasting it with the even worse behaviour by others ("Sure, I stole a little money, but my boss really took the company for big bucks," etc.), which is another way people explain their bad behavior.

?This explains mob behaviour, such as looting during riots ("everybody was doing it"), or hazing behaviour ("it's a tradition, and I was hazed when I was a newcomer").

?Devaluing the victims ("they started it"; "they deserved it") also leads to bad behaviour, and our moral thinking fails us in these cases, and these processes can escalate violence ("he pulled out a knife, so I pulled out my gun").

?Summing Up

I draw Ordinary Men to your attention because we are now experiencing some echoes of that horrific history today with political insurrection and violence, the persecution of LBTGQ people, book and curriculum bans and racism, and vitriolic social media where there are thousands if not millions of people willingly participating in harmful and destructive behavior against their fellow citizens. Ordinary Men should be a wake-up call. I encourage you to watch the documentary on Netflix.

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