Rotten Apples & Bad Barrels

When it comes to social psychology, everyone seems to know two names: Milgram and Zimbardo. It’s funny, because they both studied essentially the same thing - under what circumstances otherwise normal, compassionate people will act to hurt others.

I happen to prefer Milgram’s experiments. They’re a lot sounder, experimentally and ethically. Zimbardo sort of threw a bunch of undergraduates into a prison and waited to see what would happen. Milgram tested subjects one by one, systematically changing variables such as the immediacy of the victim, the presence of the experimenter, the presence of peers, even the gender of the subjects. Also, while many people have problems with the psychological harm caused to subjects (would you want to know that you were capable of shocking a person to near death, just because you were ordered to?), there was nowhere near the risk of physical harm to the subjects in Zimbardo’s experiment (which had to be stopped after only 6 days).

Anyway, those of you who aren’t familiar with the Stanford Prison Experiment can now see it whenever you’d like… on YouTube.

SciAm Blog has links to the videos as well as an excellent summary of the experiment itself.

What I want to talk is this quote from Zimbardo:

“It’s not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches.”

This quote very clearly delinates between two modes of thought. There’s the contention that people are inherently either bad or good, and that determines their behavior. This is called dispositional attribution of behavior. Then there’s the claim, which Zimbardo makes, that ones actions are a matter of circumstance. That would be situational attribution of behavior.

Obviously, it doesn’t have to be either/or. A bad situation can bias the behavior patterns of an individual. To go back to the Milgram experiment, about 60% of people were willing to shock the victim when he was in another room, but only 30% of people shocked the victim when they had to hold his arm to a “shock plate”. On the one hand, you can see how changing the situation drastically decreased compliance. On the other hand, you can see that 30% of people were still willing to shock the victim even when they had to see the consequences and physically apply the shocks themselves. (Or, on the bright side, you can see that 40% of people still refused to shock the victim even when doing so would be relatively easy.)

You can even see this happening with the Stanford Prison Experiment. Some of the guards were quite cruel, attacking prisoners with fire extinguishers and imposing long periods of solitary confinement and forced exercise, but others were kinder to the prisoners and even did favors for them. Of course, none tried to end the experiment. But the point is that while the situation can change the likelihood of particular behaviors in groups of people, the chances of any two people exhibiting the behavior can be drastically different. There’s something in the disposition.

This is the kind of discussion that has no clean ending. I’ll leave you with part of a diary entry I wrote this summer, when I was at the Yerkes Primate Center. The capuchins I was working with were house in groups of fifteen, and in one of the two groups, an intense hierarchy had developed where one family, the G-family, was consistently attacked. One day a particularly intense fight broke out, and it happened to be the same day that Israel began bombing Lebanon.

I went to my desk and checked my e-mail and clicked on BBCnews. When a conflict has existed since before you were born, sometimes it seems almost natural. And I can’t bring myself to blame anybody, because who do you blame? The individuals on both sides who escalate the conflict - the suicide bombers, the settlers - they’re just individuals. As long as the situation exists, there will always be someone who will react that way to it. Colleen, a grad student in my lab, told me that capuchins in the wild don’t act like ours do. The low-ranking capuchins don’t get beat up, they just run away. But Goya has nowhere to run to. We do all we can to protect her, shouting at the other monkeys when they go after her, threatening them with the hose, distracting them with peanuts and froot loops. We’re her greatest defenders. But we put her in that situation. And we’re putting the new G baby into that situation. But at the same time, right next door you have another colony, existing peacefully. We put them in that situation, too.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that you can’t change bad human behavior without changing the bad situation. But at the same time, a bad situation is not an excuse for bad behavior. Humans, like monkeys, can be good apples too.

Originally posted in January, 2007.