The power of the situation

Even educated, experienced professionals make life altering decisions, based on extraneous environmental variables.

In my previous article published on May 13, I made a case for the relevance of human biology to our moral behaviour. In this article, I turn my focus towards the relevance of the environment.

The brilliant psychologist Stanley Milgram was perplexed by a similar problem. Seeing the Holocaust unfold in front of his eyes, he could not understand how man could inflict so much pain and misery on his fellow man? Were the Nazis inherently evil?

The answer lies (partially) in what is now known famously as the Milgram experiment. The experiment went something like this: participants were told that the experimenter wanted to measure learning in the face of punishments. A draw was to divide the subjects into ‘learners’ and ‘teachers’. But the draw was rigged. The volunteers were always allocated the teacher’s role while the hired actors the learners’. As the test was to progress, the subjects were supposed to administer electric ‘shocks’ of increasing magnitude for each wrong answer by the confederate (there were no actual shocks administered although the subjects were not privy to this).

As you might have guessed, that was not what the experiment was really about. The experiment was about obedience to authority. What Professor Milgram wanted to know was how far would the ordinary, moral, law-abiding residents of New Haven go in administering the shocks.

The results shocked everyone. Even though nobody held a gun at any of the subjects’ heads, almost everyone went on to administer deadly shocks. In fact, a whopping 65 per cent of the participants were administered the final and deadly 450 volt shock even in the face of feigned screaming and begging (of actors). All the experimenter did was to pose as an authority figure, in a white lab coat and gave verbal prods (such as “please continue”, “the experiment requires that you must continue”). The experiment has been replicated in many cultures with the central finding intact: people in large numbers obey authority figures and even perform acts that conflict with their personal conscience.

The experiment has powerful implications. It underscores the power of the situation. How ordinary, moral, law abiding citizens could even kill a person if the circumstances dictated it.

Inspired by Milgram and his critics, many studies followed. The goal was to study the power of situation in more ‘real world’ settings. A prominent study by Shai Danzigera and colleagues of Ben Gurion University investigates factors influencing parole decisions by experienced judges. Many people hold that judges, particularly experienced ones, apply legal theory to make decisions in a rational, mechanical and deliberative manner. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The study showed legal merit played minimal role in the judgments.

If before the experiment, anyone of us had asked these judges the motivation behind a particular decision, they would give lengthy jargon-laden rationalisation of the specific case. How deliberate and rational their decisions were. Not only that, they would believe in their story with all their heart; completely oblivious to the role their food break played in the decision. This shows that even educated, experienced professionals make life altering decisions for many, based on extraneous environmental variables that are irrelevant to the case.

There are many other studies that demonstrate the role environmental factors plays in peoples’ decisions. For instance, in one study people display twice as much helpfulness and charitability towards anonymous strangers if they just ‘found’ a rigged small gift (nickel in a telephone booth) or if the smell of the place was pleasant.

Taking this article in conjunction with the previous article on human biology influencing our moral behaviour, it strengthens the case for us to develop moral humility; even people who have committed unspeakable atrocities, mind you, did not commit them in isolation. Additionally, one can make more informed public policy, for example, create institutions and situations that prevents agents from being biased by extraneous factors.

All this points towards the power of the situation. How people are not only determined by their biology but also their environment. As the psychologist Ian Parker put it: “people tend to do things because of where they are not who they are…”

Published in The Express Tribune, August 29^th, 2014.

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