Why death symbols should be banned in the military

Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, Chief of the Australian Army, recently issued a minute ordering the ban on soldiers using death style imagery. This ban has been met with condemnation by veterans and accusations of political correctness by commentators but is there any research evidence for such a ban?

In his statement, Campbell referred to the Army’s values and ethics and wrote, “Such symbology… is always ill-considered and implicitly encourages the inculcation of an arrogant hubris and general disregard for the most serious responsibility of our profession, the legitimate and discriminate taking of life.”

Is this true? Surely our soldiers are well trained and of strong enough character to uphold their responsibilities and not to be swayed by simple imagery? A rational view would support this, however, social psychologists present a different perspective where moral judgement is not an isolated single act but rather an ongoing process spread out over time and different situations. Phillip Zimbardo’s research (2007) shows that good people turn evil as a result of dynamic social processes. Zimbardo has personal experience of this as the architect of the infamous 1970s Stanford Prison experiment and has also more recently been an expert witness in the Abu Ghraib prisoner scandal where American soldiers were found to have committed crimes against prisoners. Zimbardo claims that we are all capable of evil depending on the right situational and systemic factors and quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who said that “The line between good and evil is in the centre of every human heart.”

Zimbardo (2007, p. 223) addresses the question of what factors affect behaviour and identifies a number of dynamic social forces. Deindividuation is the process of reducing individuality and encouraging anonymity. Research into anonymity by cultural anthropologist Watson Jr. (1973) shows how this affects behaviour. Watson studied cultures around the world using data from the Human Relations Area files. He studied 23 societies and found that in 15 of them the warriors changed their appearance. Of these 80% of them brutalised their enemies (12 of 15) as compared to the societies where warriors did not change their appearance where 7 out of 8 of them did not engage in such behaviour. Zimbardo (2007, p. 25) proposes that, “Any setting that cloaks people in anonymity reduces their sense of personal accountability and civic responsibility for their actions.”

Conformity and adherence to group norms has a similar effect on self-regulation. Research into conformity and adherence to group norms research dates back to 1935, when Muzafer Sherif (1935) tested the tendency of Americans to conform. This research was challenged by Solomon Asch (1951, 1955), who tested participants for visual perception and asked them to judge the relative size of lines. Asch found that 70% of participants would conform to the (incorrect) group judgement. Of the 30%, only a quarter of them were able to maintain their independence throughout the testing. Follow up studies showed that when pitted against one person with erroneous judgement, independence was maintained, however when pitted against three people errors rose to 32%. If the subject was given a partner with similar views, the power of the majority decreased and errors were only one fourth of what they had been when there was no partner.

De-humanisation facilitated by labels, stereotypes, slogans and propaganda images also facilitates the suppression, inhibition and distortion of emotions associated with unethical behaviour. This concept is supported by Bandura who proposed that situational factors can encourage moral disengagement (1999; 2000).

More recent research has tested the interactions of perceptions, contextual cues and sub conscious priming on ethical behaviour. Ferguson and Bargh (2004) reviewed findings on how social perception can automatically influence behaviour and found that the simple act of reading words or imagining events triggers stored knowledge that then influences subsequent behaviour – without the person’s knowledge. For example, subtly priming a person with the words ‘intelligence’ or ‘stupidity’ has an effect on how they perform in subsequent tests with those primed with intelligence outperforming those primed with stupidity. The concept of priming and automatic behaviour has been studied with regard to ethics (Reynolds, Leavitt, & DeCelles, 2010) with the researchers concluding that implicit assumptions can be triggered by contextual cues and that this can influence immoral behaviour beyond cognitive processes. The implications are that organisations may bear more responsibility for the actions of their employees than previous research implies.

The implications of this research from the field of social psychology are significant as it indicates that the creation of unethical outcomes is influenced by more than just a process of ethical decision making dominated by higher order reasoning. Significant factors include personal, situational and contextual factors; perceptual biases, and the effect of flawed justifications and rationalisations. These factors not only impact upon the creation of unethical outcomes, but also interact with each other to influence the overall dynamic process. Importantly, the research on the effects of priming on the activation of mental models or schema shows that contextual cues can influence subsequent behaviour and that there is less moral agency in moral decisions than has been previously considered in the ethical decision making literature. In conclusion, this research supports the position taken by Lieutenant General Angus Campbell.

 References

Asch, S. E. (1951). Studies of Independence and Conformity: A Minority of One Against a Unanimous Majority. Psychological Monographs, 70.

Asch, S. E. (1955). Opinions and Social Pressure. Scientific American, 31-35.

Bandura, A. (1999). Moral disengagment in the perpetration of inhumanities. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 3(3), 193-209.

Bandura, A., Caprara, G. V., & Zsolnai, L. (2000). Corporate Transgressions through Moral Disengagement. Journal of Human Values, 6(1), 57-64. doi:10.1177/097168580000600106

Ferguson, M. J., & Bargh, J. A. (2004). How social perception can automatically influence behavior. Trends in cognitive sciences, 8(1), 33-39.

Reynolds, S. J., Leavitt, K., & DeCelles, K. A. (2010). Automatic Ethics: The Effects of Implicit Assumptions and Contextual Cues on Moral Behavior. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(4), 752-760.

Sherif, M. (1935). A Study of Some Social Factors in Perception. Archives of Psychology, 27, 210-211.

Watson Jr., R. J. (1973). Investigation into Deindividuation Using a Cross-Cultural Survey Technique. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 25(3), 342-345.

Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect - How good people turn evil. UK: Rider.