Recently I picked up a copy of
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil by Philip Zimbardo. This is not a review, but suffice it say that it is a book that I highly recommend. Anyway, one of Zimbardo's claims to fame is the
Stanford Prison Experiment. I won't give a blow by blow account here, but for those uninformed I'll summarize it briefly:
Several undergraduate students at Stanford university were recruited by Zimbardo for a two week study on the psychology of imprisonment. They were randomly assigned to either be prison guards or prison inmates in the basement of the psychology building on Stanford's campus, which Zimbardo made into a makeshift jail. All of the participants were screened to ensure that they brought no psychopathology into the experiment, and people were excluded from participating on the basis of a criminal history. In short, everyone was ostensibly "normal". The experiment was slated to last two weeks, but was called off after less than one week.
What happened during the study was that the guards became increasingly brutal and authoritarian while the prisoners became increasingly docile and passive. Several of the prisoners suffered emotional break-downs and had to be released. One prisoner even went on a hunger strike to protest the treatment from the guards. Everyone involved with the project, from Zimbardo on down, lost touch with this as an experiment: it became a prison. In short, otherwise normal, healthy college kids were transformed into something entirely different.
Now, on the basis of that research (and replications that have been performed), the apparent conclusion is that situational influences can and do have a profound impact on moral decision-making ability and behavior - partially contradicting the western notion of a sort of immutable, individualistic morality (the proverbial "bad apples").
So what would you do? If you're like most people (myself included) you're probably thinking that you would never do such things. You wouldn't mistreat prisoners. You wouldn't deliver 400V of electricity to helpless victims (as fully 2/3 of participants believed they were doing in Stanley Milgram's studies on obedience). You would be the one standing in front of the tank at Tienanmen square.
Zimbardo fully expects that from most people, and relates the idea of a
self-serving bias. That we would all think as such in order to protect our own egos and self-esteem. However, he also notes that, perhaps, entertaining such biases would actually make someone more vulnerable to situational manipulation because they are unaware of the forces acting on them.
After about half-way though the book, I read an editorial in my local paper about the book. It essentially stated that all people need to do in order to be good moral people, even in despicable situations, is to maintain a good relationship with god and that morality flows from that relationship.
After finishing the book, and after reading that editorial, I wondered a few things. First and least relevant to the R/T forums - isn't that completely missing the whole point of the book (if anyone else here has read it, please chime in)?
The main thing I wondered is this: is religion a moral "wedge"? When it comes to morality, people like to think in terms of "us" and "them" insofar as "we" are virtuous and "they" are depraved. Moral wedges come in different flavors, such as race, socio-economic status, nationality, mental illness, etc. It runs anathema to the notion of the "banality of evil". In short, such wedges allow us to ascribe some trait to the perpetrators of violence that clearly separates "them" from "us" when, in reality, we have a lot more in common than otherwise. So, I ask again, is religion a moral wedge?
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