Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [98]
Dissonance theory would therefore predict that when victims are armed and able to strike back, perpetrators will feel less need to reduce dissonance by belittling them than when their victims are helpless. In an experiment by Ellen Berscheid and her associates, participants were led to believe that they would be delivering a painful electric shock to another person as part of a test of learning. Half were told that later they would be reversing roles, so the victim would be in position to retaliate. As predicted, the only participants who denigrated their victims were those who believed the victims were helpless and would not be able to respond in kind.10 This was precisely the situation of the people who took part in Stanley Milgram’s 1963 obedience experiment. Many of those who obeyed the experimenter’s orders to deliver what they thought were dangerous amounts of shock to a “learner” justified their actions by blaming the victim. As Milgram himself put it, “Many subjects harshly devalue the victim as a consequence of acting against him. Such comments as, ‘He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked,’ were common. Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual, whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.”11
The implications of these studies are ominous: Combine perpetrators who have high self-esteem and victims who are helpless, and you have a recipe for the escalation of brutality. This brutality is not confined to brutes—sadists or psychopaths. It can be, and usually is, committed by ordinary individuals, people who have children and lovers, “civilized” people who enjoy music and food and making love and gossiping as much as anyone else. This is one of the most thoroughly documented findings in social psychology, but it is also the most difficult for many people to accept because of the enormous dissonance it produces: “What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?” It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them. 12 We dare not let a glimmer of their humanity in the door, because it might force us to face the haunting truth of Pogo’s great line, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
On the other hand, if the perpetrators are one of us, many people will reduce dissonance by coming to their defense or minimizing the seriousness or illegality of their actions, anything that makes their actions seem fundamentally different from what the enemy does. For example, torture is something that only villains like Idi Amin or Saddam Hussein do. But as John Conroy showed in Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, it is not only interrogators in undemocratic countries who have violated the Geneva Convention’s prohibitions against “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture…[and] outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment.” In his investigation of documented cases of abuse of prisoners, Conroy found that almost every military or police official he interviewed, whether British, South African, Israeli, or American, justified their practices by saying, in effect, our torture is never as severe and deadly as their torture:
Bruce Moore-King [of South Africa] told me that when he administered electrical torture he never attacked the genitals, as torturers elsewhere are wont to do … Hugo Garcia told me the Argentine torturers were far worse than the Uruguayan. Omri Kochva assured me that the men of the Natal battalion had not descended to the level of the Americans in Vietnam…. The British comforted themselves with the rationalization that their methods were nothing compared to the suffering created by the IRA. The Israelis regularly argue that their methods pale in comparison to the torture employed by Arab states. 13
In the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, impartial investigations revealed that American interrogators