How can we explain kindness and cruelty? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Why do people so often disagree about moral issues? This course explores the psychological foundations of our moral lives.
Skepticism About the Self
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Moralities of Everyday Life
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The Big Answers
We’ll discuss some clever studies that show how our moral behavior is powerfully influenced—often at the unconscious level—by the situations that we find ourselves in. Such findings raise some hard problems about determinism, free will, and moral responsibility. Most of all, if our actions are determined by our brains, our genes, and our situations, in what sense can we be said to be moral agents? The course will end by trying to address this question.
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Paul BloomBrooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University
Psychology
We've talked about the influence of genes, of neurological
causes, but many psychologists are very interested in an
external causes, environmental causes. And there's one way to introduce this.
I want to present a puzzle.
And the puzzle involves the actor Mel Gibson.
So, Mel Gibson is a very famous,
well-regarded, extremely rich actor, and, and a few
years ago he gets caught at a traffic stop.
Sorry he gets, he gets caught for drunk driving and, and he's quite drunk, and
he unleashes this, this, this, trade of ugly
sexist and anti-semitic remarks towards the police officers.
Later on he has a dispute with his
girlfriend, and tapes come out of messages he
left for her, and there are, they're obscene, they're racists, they're, they're
anti-gay, they're anti-black, they're anti-Jewish, and people discussed this.
And, and Mel Gibson has his defenders and his critics.
And what his defenders tend to say is look, he's a decent guy, he does
good things you know, I know him he's a friend, and so on, so on.
This is not
his true self, it's not who he really is.
Other people who attack him say look, you might think you know him, but
you, what you really, you really know
a person, when they're pushed to their extremes.
You really know somebody when they're drunk.
You really know somebody when they're enraged.
And you can see, this is an everyday problem.
It's a problem we all, can, can understand.
Think about the person you love the most in the world.
Think about yourself.
Which is your real self?
Is it when you are drunk, or angry, or exhausted?
Does your real self, your true self, your
true beliefs, shine through, or is it the opposite.
That your, your real self when you're at your best.
When you're sober, when you're calm, when you're contemplative.
And people could have different answers to this.
Many of us believe there is an answer
to the question, what's the true self, what, what is somebody really.
Some people believe that we have multiple selves, that there's
more than one true self, there is drunk Mel Gibson, and
sober Mel Gibson, there is kind Mel Gibson, and cruel Mel
Gibson, and they sort of live together in the same head.
But many social psychologists, and many
psychologists in general would say, that really
isn't such a thing as a true self.
And some people would take it stronger and say, maybe there's no selves at all.
Or to put it in a sort of more moderate way, maybe we are
powerfully influenced far more than we might think we are.
Not by who were are, but by the situation that we find ourselves in.
And we could reasonably view, view the whole field of social psychology.
As exploring over and over again in different ways, how
people are influenced by the situations, that they find themselves in.
And there are by now some powerful demonstrations that, that, that the right
situation or the wrong situation, can have a profound effect on a person.
Perhaps the most famous example of a social psychology study
that makes this point, is the work of Stanley Milgram.
And this was work done, at this very institution
Yale, when Stanley Milgram was a faculty member here.
The research was done a few blocks away from where I stand.
And this research involved bringing in normal in, in these studies male new
haven residents, and saying, you're here for an experiment.
And the experiment is they brought people in, in pairs.
And they said this is an experiment on learning.
And we're going to split you up randomly.
One of you will be the learner, and the other one will be the teacher.
And the learner will go into another room, and then
the teacher will stay in this room, and over an
intercom device, give the learner test a learner on a series of words.
An experiment is looking at the effects of punishment on learning, so
when the learner makes a mistake the teacher's supposed to give electric shock.
There's a series of switches, a flip that cause an electric shock.
And this is all made up. This is
what the subjects thought they were doing.
But it wasn't an experiment on learning at all, it was an experiment on obedience.
And although two people walked into the lab, one of
them was the subject, the other one was a confederate.
And the choice was rigged, so that, the, the subject, the
person who didn't know what was going on, was always the teacher.
The learner was some guy who was acting.
So what you see here is the list of shocks.
This is the same list of shocks with
the designations that the, the teacher would see.
Everything from slight shock to danger, severe shock, and XXX.
And what would happen is, the experiment would go along,
and then the learner would start, start to make mistakes.
And then the teacher would start to shock the learner.
And the question
that Milgram was interested in was, how far would people go?
Nobody held a gun to the teacher's head.
Nobody says you have to shock, or gotta kill you or something.
Are you.
There was no coercion.
But what there was, was this guy in a white
lab coat, who just says, the experiment must go on.
You must do this, the experiment must go on.
Now he has no real authority,
he's not a police officer, he's not, not the government, he's
not, not your parents, just some guy in a white coat.
But Milligram wondered whether some guy in a
white coat telling you, basically, you have to keep
leveling up the shocks, you have to kill this
guy, would be enough to make people do it.
So, as this experiment goes on, the guy it's
actually a series of tape recordings, but, but the learner
hear somebody says, this really hurts.
Then finally the guy says, okay get me out of I heart,
I have a heart trouble, I can't, I can't do this anymore.
And then he says, I refuse to go on, let me outta here.
And, and, and he starts screaming.
And the question is, how far would people go?
Would people keep on doing this?
Apparently they asked a lot of psychologists, a lot of
lay people before the experiment started, how far would people would
go, and people very skeptic, people say, no one's ever going to
do this, no one's ever going to shock the guy to death.
But the results are quite different.
In these studies over half of the people Milgram tested, go all the way.
In other words, over half of these people who
are just walking into a laboratory to do an experiment,
are sufficiently influenced by the context, that they kill a guy.
They don't really kill a guy, but they think that they kill a guy.
By the time the experiment comes to an end, they think
that they have given that somebody enough shock to kill them.
The person on the other end is silent, he's unconscious, he's dead.
And, and this is a striking demonstration.
Now, there, there, there's various objections you
could make to this, and I think
think some are unfounded.
So, some people say, well Milgram chose this bizarre group of subjects.
It's not true actually.
The sub, the, the experiment was replicated many
times, and they always get the same result.
People tend to obey.
This this, this experiment is often sometimes
misinterpreted, as suggesting that people are sadistic.
That it is in our natures
to get pleasure, from this sort of thing.
But that's wrong too, you could watch the videos of, of, of
these, some of them are available online, of the subjects in Milgram's experiment.
And they aren't having a good time, they aren't liking this, they are in extreme
distress, they're in anguish as they do it,
but they couldn't bring themselves to say no.
There's more serious, I think,
responses and, and ways to think about the Milgram study.
So, one issue which has preoccupied many people, and and, and is still a matter of
a lot of controversy and debate, is, what
does this tell us about real world atrocities?
So Milgram was motivated, to explain the holocaust.
Among other things he wanted to explain, how apparently
ordinary Ge, Germans could do these horrific things, and
he argued as a matter of obedience. He, he argued that his study, served as a
model for people's bad behavior, in that they would obey orders from above.
Now, this is an interesting historical
analysis, and it's actually reasonably controversial.
So scholars like, like Goldhagen and
others have argued that this is mistaken. People who participate in
genocide, in atrocities, in the holocaust in particular, are actually not obedient.
Obediently, doing things that they wouldn't otherwise do.
Rather they're they're, they're willing, they're happy, they're enthusiastic.
And its not the sort of thing that will have a black and white answer.
I think there's some cases of people doing horrific things,
where they are being obedient to what they're being told.
As Milgram would put it.
There were other cases where they don't need to be
told what to do, they volunteer for it, they enjoy it.
A second thing to emphasize is, not everybody in the Milgram's study did it.
So, Milgram's study is certainly, an example of the power of the situation.
He, he wouldn't have done this if wasn't for the situation.
But it could also be taken to some extent,
as a demonstration of the power of the individual.
Some people would say, the hell with this, I'm not
going to shock this guy, you can't make me shock this guy.
They're, you see this on video, people say, this
is ridiculous and they get up and walk out.
Others stay.
And so, so although this is taken as the classic demonstration for the
power of the situation, it's also an
interesting demonstration of power of the individual.
There was more than one pay per person.
Finally, it should be acknowledged that the Milgram experiment was
extreme, in that it was perfectly designed, to elicit obedience.
You had the authority of Yale, and the
value of science, these, this, the, the, this
you know, this prominent university, these guys looking
like scientists, saying this is important for the experiment.
the, the person who was telling them to shock the guy, would always
say, was incredibly assured, self assured, and
he kept saying, I'll, I'll accept all responsibility.
And that, that sentence is a powerful one.
It kind of takes away your own morality and brings it to this other person.
The learner and the experimenter, did not see each other, they were separated.
and, and in fact other studies find that if they
could see each other, or in one study when the,
when the learner had to sorry when the teacher had to, hold
down the learner's hand on an electric shock machine, people don't do it.
The more distance you have from something, or from somebody,
the easier it is to do a bad thing to them.
Dropping a bomb on somebody, is less psychologically difficult
than killing them with a bayonet. Shocking somebody
who's in another room, is much easier than
shocking somebody who you could look into their eyes.
And finally, the situation was bizarre.
The situation was totally novel, and people had no model as to how to behave.
They were, they were knocked off their feet.
It was this weird situation inside a laboratory, and,
and, and they were into some extent at their worst.
And, and so the question arises.
Are people influenced
by all sorts of ques, including in the moral domain in more everyday cases?
In, in real life. And that answer's probably yes.
There's a lot of demonstrations that say, even in people's everyday
life, in normal situations people can be powerfully influenced, by their situation.
This is a graph of, of a study done in Israel,
and what it was is of a parole board. And the, the question
is you could see that there's big differences, in the percentage of the
time these people gave a favorable decision about parole.
They say yeah, that's fine, let them go on parole.
And it goes all over the place, It goes down, down,
down, down, down, then up, down, down, down, down, down then up.
And the psychologists were interested,
what makes it go up? Are these particularly persuasive cases?
Are there's, is there something special about, about it
that appeals to these people's rationality and reason or kindness?
No, it's food breaks.
The, the study finds that after a food break, people are far
more likely to offer parole to these prisoners than, than when they're hungry.
They get hungrier and hungrier, then they get meaner and meaner.
Then they're offered some, some food, and all of the sudden, boom, they get nicer.
Now not one of them would say, when
they're asked, why did you give this guy parole?
Why were you so nice to him?
They say, you know, because I just ate. That's not how we reason.
But it is in fact, the sort of thing that affects us.
Here's another study.
This study was done in the sixties, when they had pay phones.
They still have pay phones, but they're different now.
The, the pay phones they had back then, you'd always pay
with money, and it have a little slot at the end.
Now, the way life went back then, is sometimes the slot contained money.
Leftover coins from the last person's who was there.
Sometimes it wouldn't.
And everybody would reflexively after making a phone call, hang
up and you'd check the slot to see if there's money.
So this experiment was done in front of a
payphone, and what would happen is, some you know,
some psychologist would walk, and she'd dump her papers
on the ground, and then start to pick them up.
And the question is, when the person's leaving the phone, would they cu, help?
And the way they did the experiment was, for half of the subjects,
before they went to the phone, they stuck a coin in the coin slot,
they stuck a dime in the coin slot.
And what they found was, people were seven times more likely,
to help the stranger, if they had just found a coin.
This tiny amount of money, but it
boosted their mood, and it affected their altruism.
Another study was done in a shopping mall.
And it looked at whether people would help somebody,
depending on the location where something happened in the mall.
In particular, did it happen
in front of a place that smelled nice?
That had for instance, the smell of
freshly baked cookies, versus one that didn't.
And in fact, people were three times more
likely to help, if somebody was dropping their
papers next to an area which had sort
of an arousing, and pleasant, and pleasing smell.
And these are all examples of how
subtle factors, factors almost beyond your conscious recognition,
can influence you in powerful ways.
Now, there's another situational factor that I think is of extreme
importance and this is the presence or absence of other people.
The classic example that people give from this from real
life, is the case of Kitty Genovese who was living in
New York, and was walking back to her apartment late at
night when she was accosted, and stabbed, and killed by somebody.
And the story goes that, that this was in the sort
of center of, of an apartment complex, and people were all watching.
But they looked around and they saw that other people were watching.
And they did nothing.
They did nothing because they assumed somebody else would do something.
They did nothing because the responsibility was, was diffuse.
Now, there's been a lot of controversy over this case.
The way I've described it up to now, is the standard way
of describing sort of intro psych textbooks and in, and in popular talks.
And there's been a lot of debate over whether this is accurate.
But what's clear enough is regardless of what happened in that tragic case, people,
the, this happens in, in a real world a lot.
This is a video, watch the man crossing the street.
This is in Hartford Connecticut, a large city about an hour away from me.
And this is a typical case of something, where something horrible happens.
But it happens in public.
It happens in public when there's a lot of people around.
And when there's a lot of people around,
and something bad happens, people are far less likely to help.
The social psychologist Latimer, did a series of studies
where he manipulated how many people were around, when there's
some sort of crisis like a fire alarm goes off,
or somebody yells for help or, there's smoke comes in.
And it turns out that people are far more
likely to help, when there's not other people around them.
If
I walk down a street, and I see this, and I'm the only person around,
I imagine I would run to the guy and say, oh my gosh what happened?
But I see everybody else, and so that makes me less likely to help.
All of this suggests a conclusion about human nature,
which was nicely summarized by Ian Parker, in a discussion
of the Milgram research, where he talks about what he
says is, a great psychological truth, perhaps the great truth.
Which is that people tend to do things because of where they are,
not who they are.
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