Transcriber: Eunice Tan Reviewer: David DeRuwe
So I'm here to tell you about my journey from evil to heroism,
[My Journey from Evil to Heroism]
and it's an interesting journey.
[Why Do Good People Turn Evil??]
Oh, shoot -
[How? Why? Can it be Prevented?]
[I grew up in poverty - in a New York Ghetto of the South Bronx]
I think we're missing some of my slides.
Oh -
Anyway, I grew up in poverty in a New York City ghetto,
and as Bill Strickland said yesterday to all of us,
if you grew up in a ghetto,
you grew up without nature, you grew up in an ugly place.
And the problem is how do you keep that ugliness from getting inside of you.
I also had friends who were good kids who did bad things,
and I always wondered what went wrong.
Why did they go bad?
And so the question I asked as a kid:
"Is the line between good and evil impermeable?"
as my parents had led me to believe.
That good people like us were on this side
and bad people like them were on the other side?
Or was it permeable?
That good kids could be corrupted, seduced,
and at the same time, bad kids could be recovered?
And so that has guided my thinking since then.
And now that I'm a psychologist ...
I'm interested in evil.
I'm interested in understanding evil.
I'm interested in creating evil, so I understand how and why.
And there are really three kinds of evil.
One kind of evil is dispositional: this is in people.
What do people bring into a situation?
And we call these bad apples.
Anders Breivik is a young, handsome Norwegian guy who shot to death 69 kids,
thinking he was a martyr
for trying to prevent Norway from becoming a Muslim enclave.
Then there's situational evil, the main thing I'm going to talk about.
Situational evil is the barrel -
the bad barrel that you put good apples in,
and they get corrupted.
This was the case - we'll talk about it in a moment -
with Abu Ghraib.
So this is the social and physical environment
in which you put people in,
and it's that setting, the things all around us,
that are corruptible.
The third part of evil is the more powerful one.
It's the one we ignore.
It's what we call systemic evil.
It's the bad barrel-makers.
This is where power is.
This is cultural, historical, legal, economic.
And that produces the big evil,
although it's very effectively, typically disguised.
[Evil]
So, evil -
my definition is evil is about power,
and it's about the abuse of power to intentionally harm people
through prejudice, through gossip, through discrimination,
to hurt people physically through torture, through rape,
to kill mortally.
But, again, big evil is done by governments in wars,
and this is to commit crimes against humanity.
Stanley Milgram, little Jewish kid in the Bronx,
asked the question,
"Could the Holocaust occur again in America?"
because he wanted to know:
Could he be put in a concentration camp?
He asked,
"Would you electrocute a stranger if somebody like Hitler asked you to?"
We were high-school classmates
in the Bronx,
and we were both what we call "situationists."
We believed that if the situation were changed,
the things we saw around us -
if your father wasn't working, your sister was a prostitute -
things would be different.
If you grow up privileged,
you want to believe that goodness is in your genes
and that you don't want things to change
because you want to maintain that privilege.
So he did a very famous study,
which I will encapsulate for you very briefly.
He did it in New Haven, Connecticut - he was a Yale professor -
and he also replicated it in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
And it's a study about memory.
So he invites people to come to his laboratory, two at a time.
One of you is going to be the learner; one of you is going to be the teacher.
And the teacher gives the learner material to learn,
and when he gets it right, fine.
But when he gets it wrong,
you have to punish him by giving an electric shock.
And so he is the teacher,
and he is the experimenter in the lab coat.
And when he gets it wrong, you press a button.
The first button is 15 volts.
When you press it, there's no response -
the guy you're teaching is in another room.
And as you increase from 15 to 30 to 45, each increment is only 15 volts.
So it's a really very small, steadily slippery slope down.
When it gets in the hundreds, the guy starts screaming.
You're a good person.
You tell the experimenter, "I don't want to continue."
He says, "Sorry, you have a contract. You must go on."
And the study now is about not knowing how to exit.
Because now the guy is really screaming,
and the experimenter says, "It doesn't matter. He has a contract too.
You must continue."
The problem now is at the end of this shock box is 450 volts.
When it gets to 375, the guy screams, there's a thud and silence.
He's either unconscious or he's dead,
in which case you can't help him improve his memory anymore,
so probably everybody should quit.
So the question is who would go up to 450 volts?
Milgram described this study to 40 psychiatrists in New Haven,
and they said, "One percent.
That's sadistic behavior; only sadists would do that."
Well, it turns out they were wrong.
Maybe it was more; maybe it was 2%.
Maybe it was 5%.
Maybe it was 10%.
Maybe it was a third; maybe it was half.
In fact, in that research, and in many, many replications,
it turns out two-thirds of all ordinary people -
and Milgram tested 1,000 men between ages 20 to 50
and included one group of women -
two-thirds go all the way in that situation.
So yes, indeed,
if Hitler asked you to electrocute a stranger,
he could get the majority of people in virtually any audience to do so.
My message is all evil begins with 15 volts.
All evil begins the Friday night when you're going home
and somebody says,
"Hey, the numbers are not adding up. Would you warm up the books?"
That's a prelude to cooking the books.
All evil begins with a little gossip, a little putting somebody down,
a little laughing at somebody's racist, sexist joke.
Because once you do that, you're on that slippery slope down.
My sense is that it's very rare
that somebody will tell you to do a bad thing.
We grow up in institutions and families and schools.
We grow up in teams, businesses.
So what happens when institutions have their -
that we are enmeshed in an institution?
Now, you have roles.
There are rules;
there are group pressures; there are leaders.
There's a whole set of complex factors that impact your behavior.
So I did a study at Stanford University
40 years ago.
We put an ad in the Palo Alto newspaper;
we got 75 volunteers.
And we gave them a battery of personality tests and interviews
because we wanted two dozen who were the most normal and most healthy.
Okay? Good apples.
We flip a coin: half are guards, half are prisoners.
And then we assign half to be guards and half to be prisoners.
The prisoners are put in degrading little outfits.
We take away their names; they become numbers.
They are deindividuated.
The guards have handsome uniforms and symbols of power,
silvery reflecting sunglasses -
an idea I got from the movie "Cool Hand Luke" -
to promote the dehumanization in contact between prisoners and guards.
And it begins with jumping jacks, menial things, push-ups,
but it always goes down that slippery slope
to more and more humiliating, degrading activities -
cleaning toilet bowls out with their bare hands,
stripping them naked,
using every occasion to humiliate them more and more.
Within 36 hours, a student we chose because he was normal and healthy
had an emotional breakdown.
Okay?
We had to release him, of course; we replaced him with somebody else.
And the next day, another prisoner broke down.
So he became a model of how you get out of the prison,
because it was a prison run by psychologists.
It was an amazing Kafka, Pirandello-esque transformation.
It was a prison run by psychologists, no longer an experiment,
not only in the minds of the prisoners but also me and my staff -
two graduate students and an undergraduate.
We had to end the study, which was supposed to go for two weeks,
after 36 hours
because five students -
chosen because they were normal,
healthy on all personality tests and all of our interviews -
had emotional breakdowns.
It had spun out of control.
All experiments are artificial,
so you always want to know what are the real-world parallels.
So this is a picture of our guards taking prisoners to parole board -
headed by an ex-convict, with secretaries and, you know, very realistic -
with bags over their heads, legs chained.
And here's Abu Ghraib: bigger bags, bigger guns.
I became an expert witness for one of the guards in Abu Ghraib.
Because when the Bush administration and when the military general said,
"This is the work of a few bad apples,"
I said, "I don't believe that.
I believe American soldiers are good,
and somebody put them in a bad barrel like I did at the Stanford prison study."
Because the parallels, the visual parallels, were dramatic.
In fact, as an expert witness, I got to understand him,
I got access to all the thousands of those ugly pictures
of which we saw a dozen,
and I got access to all the reports.
There was no question:
Abu Ghraib was a Stanford prison study
on steroids.
It was a corrupting situation created by the military
that not only Chip Frederick, the guy I defended,
but all the other soldiers on the night shift were subjected to.
Of course he's guilty: you're accountable for your behavior.
But when nine of nine people on the night shift
did similarly bad things -
and they were not real soldiers, they were military police army reserve -
and no one on the day shift did anything bad,
say, what is the difference?
On the night shift,
this military intelligence tells military police,
"We want your guys to take the gloves off.
We want you to ...
do whatever you have to do
so when we interrogate them, they'll spill the beans."
And in three months,
not a senior officer goes down to the dungeon
to see what they're doing.
The day shift is always surveillance.
So here's a situational difference
which produces the horrific behavior we saw of American men and women,
not only abusing prisoners but smiling, giving high fives.
So why don't ordinary people turn evil?
We have a recipe.
We know in a very short time that we put you in a new situation,
especially one where we can manipulate whether you have a lot of power or none -
and here's 10 variables that can get the majority of people in any situation
to do almost anything that we would all agree is evil.
But now we want to flip the table.
We want to know what's involved in getting people to become heroic.
And there's a whole list of possibilities,
including mindfulness, compassion, empathy.
We don't have a clue!
There's almost no research on heroism.
It's an incredible phenomenon.
The word does not exist in psychology texts.
It doesn't exist in positive psychology's human strengths and virtues,
because heroism is an action that's not a virtue, according to them.
I recently had a dialogue with the Dalai Lama at Stanford,
and I said,
"Is compassion enough in a world filled with evil?
Doesn't compassion have to be socially engaged?
Doesn't compassion have to lead to heroic action?"
And he reluctantly agreed
because he thinks once everybody in the world is compassionate,
evil will cease to exist.
But that for me is a fantasy.
And so while waiting for that, we want to create heroes.
So heroism is a behavior that is voluntary.
It's coming to the aid of others in need
or in defense of a moral principle or an ethical cause
and involves a risk -
the risk to life and limb, a risk to your career, and that's -
altruism is heroism light.
No real risk.
And you can't do it expecting a reward.
You can get a reward afterwards, but that can't be the motivation.
The other thing is we believe heroism is coachable, trainable, modelled,
and not inborn.
So what does it take to be a hero?
We used to think heroes were special people,
and this comes from Joseph Campbell and others
for whom heroes were male warriors -
Achilles, Agamemnon, Odysseus.
But it turns out, no.
Most heroes are ordinary people;
it's the act of heroism that transcends them
into something special and not ordinary.
So one of the people on my team interviewed President Obama to say,
"What does it take to be a hero? Do you have to be a special person?"
And here's the really eloquent, concise statement that Obama makes:
[Stand up, speak out!]
(Video) Barack Obama: You know, what's remarkable about history
is ordinary people doing extraordinary things.
You know, last year, Rosa Parks passed away.
And, you know, I remember sitting on this stage
with world leaders, Bill Clinton, and senators and governors
and thinking we were all paying homage to a seamstress
who had transformed the country and helped transform the world.
You know, we never know
sort of how our actions are going to ripple over time.
But each of us can take some responsibility
for making sure that we are pushing a little bit in the direction of justice
and in the direction of equality and in the direction of tolerance.
When we do that,
we may surprise ourselves with the amount of influence that in fact we have
just by standing up or speaking up.
(On stage) Phil Zimbardo: Standing up, speaking out,
and be aware that we have a powerful influence.
When you do something positive,
without your awareness, people notice,
and you become a model for good things.
When you do something bad, you become a model for the negative.
So here's Rosa Parks, first lady of civil rights.
Here's Rosa Parks as a prisoner because she refused to give up her seat.
She is 7053, sent to jail in 1955.
People said, "Did you not get up because you were tired?"
She says, "No, no. The only tired I was, I was tired of giving in."
Giving in to racism, giving in to the system.
Here's the guy who stopped Abu Ghraib.
Joe Darby, the most ordinary guy in the world, a low-level private.
He did the right thing.
He took the CD that his friends showed him with these hundreds of pictures,
and he brought it to a senior investigating officer.
"Sir, you have to stop this."
He did it knowing he was going to get in trouble
because his buddies were all going to get dishonorably discharged.
Here's a little kid -
heroes come in all sizes -
nine-year-old Lin Hao.
There was an earthquake just before the Olympics,
and the school collapsed.
He survived, he's running out,
and he notices two of his buddies trying to escape.
He runs over, helps them get out.
People said, "Why did you risk your life?"
He said, "Why? I was the hall monitor.
It was my job to look after my classmates."
So this is what I call putting the heroic imagination into action,
and it's what we are proposing.
And Cuba - we have the communal heroes in Cuba that we all saw,
some of this stimulated by Václav Havel's dramatic heroism in the Czech Republic.
Libya's political unrest was produced by a single lawyer.
And we know now in Japan,
50 engineers are sacrificing their lives to stay on duty all this time
to try to stop the nuclear meltdown.
[What can You Do?...]
The question is what can you do?
When one person stops to help in an emergency,
many others join in.
The bystander effect is when there's a number of people -
the more people around, the less likely anybody is to help.
But when the first person helps, immediately there's a crowd.
So what do you do?
Be that person.
That's the power of one.
Be that first person
because when you do, suddenly everybody, all the other citizens, join you.
Dare to be different,
because what that means is in any situation,
the group says, "Don't get involved; mind your own business."
You cannot be a hero unless you're willing to be different -
different from the others.
Flex your moral courage.
Act wisely, well, and often.
Practice being a hero.
Be an ally.
Be an ally - we tell this to -
we're going to talk to high school kids tomorrow -
be an ally to gay, lesbian, shy kids.
Those are the ones who are going to get bullied the most.
Stand up for them.
Simply, that's the power of two.
Start with small steps, everyday deeds.
[Start with small steps, everyday...]
Focus on others - just give a compliment a day.
Ask questions; don't blindly obey.
Have courageous conversations before the situation gets out of control.
And discover what is your ripple effect.
What action or inaction -
whether you act or don't, it doesn't really matter,
because you have a ripple effect - again, positive or negative.
So Superman's father is telling Superman,
"Flying around all day just won't cut it.
Sooner or later, you'll have to take action."
And my Heroic Imagination Project is providing the tool kits
so that they can be wise and effective heroes.
So the heroic imagination is learning to be courageous.
Imagination is teaching people to imagine themselves acting heroically
in everyday situations.
And heroic imagination is a mindset
that enhances people's effectiveness in becoming social change agents.
[www.HeroicImagination.org]
[4 domains of HIP:]
So the four domains of my Heroic Imagination Project
are education -
we have programs in high school, middle school, and now college.
We want to have these in summer camps and clubs and online
and ultimately mobile apps.
We are doing research, and we want to get funding
so we can sponsor research of graduate students everywhere.
We have a wonderful corporate program creating cultures of integrity,
heroic leadership, and internal whistleblowing,
and we'd love to do our magic in your company -
we just finished a pilot at Google.
Lastly, we're going to have a public engagement website,
where we can send our message around the world
with interactive exercises.
So the world needs more heroes.
What the world really needs is you.
Because Yoda tells us,
"Do or do not. There is no try."
And heroes don't try; they just do.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)