The Lucifer Effect - How Groups Go Bad [and How to Avoid It]

CZBZ, at her site Web of Narcissism , has shared an extremely valuable post regarding The Lucifer Effect.

This term was coined by Professor Philip Zimbardo, of Stanford, to describe the psychological de-evolution of human character, the shockingly swift conversion of previously normal, decent people into brutal abusers, that can occur in group settings - small or large, on any scale from chat rooms to nations - under the right conditions.

He first studied this dynamic in the well-known "Stanford Prison Experiment". Now Professor Emeritus, he has written a book about this process, exploring in detail both how normal human beings can come to behave like monsters, and how we can learn to recognize, and resist, the pressure to become less-than-fully-human beings.

There is a particularly trenchant exposition on Dr. Zimbardo's website regarding the incredible power of group norms to influence human behavior. The authors [Dr. Zimbardo and Cindy X. Wang] advise [bold italics mine]:

In our daily decisions, we should also examine whether our reasons justify our actions. In an unfamiliar situation, first ask yourself whether the actions you observe others performing [are] rational, warranted, and consistent with your own principles before thoughtlessly and automatically adopting them.

Similarly, in a situation in which you want to impress and be accepted by others, ask yourself whether the action conflicts with your moral code, and consider whether you would be willing to compromise your own opinion of yourself just so others would have a higher one of you. Ultimately, you are the only one who has to live with your actions. Also take a time out to find out the correct information.

To resist the powers of group conformity: know what you stand for; determine how really important it is that these other people like you, especially when they are strangers; recognize that there are other groups who would be delighted to have you as a member; take a future perspective to imagine what you will think of your current conforming action at some time in the future.

I am planning to spend a great deal of time reading Dr. Zimbardo's work... and being thankful, in this season, for the Internet, for people like CZBZ and Dr. Zimbardo, and for all the valuable websites such as theirs that shed light and offer validation to people who would otherwise be isolated and lost.

Without further ado, let me cede the floor to CZBZ and Dr. Zimbardo.

Dysfunctional Dyads

In the rich tapestry of human relations, some pairings seem to be a recurring pattern.

Someone abusive pairs with someone unassertive and vulnerable to abuse.
Someone irresponsible pairs with someone hyperresponsible and vulnerable to exploitation.
Someone controlling pairs with someone passive and indecisive.
Someone sadistic pairs with someone masochistic.
Someone with an addiction pairs with someone enabling.
Someone selfish pairs with someone generous.

These pairings are often nothing more than 'predator-prey' relationships... but only the predator knows it.

Then there are 'tag teams':

A bully pairs with a provocateur, to mug third parties: the provocateur provokes the target, and the bully attacks when the target responds to the provocation.

Con men team up like this; one plays the victim needing rescue and one plays the 'detached observer' so that the mark will loan the 'victim' money, or whatever is involved in the con game.

When multiple players are involved, you may find yourself dealing with a clique, which, when dysfunctional and destructive enough, becomes a gang. You'll find gangs in factories, schools, universities, hospitals, and offices all over the world, and people of all ages from 8 to 80 may belong to them.

It's a clique when they're just not interested in getting to know Mabel, because she isn't from the same neighborhood/has red hair/goes to a different church/weighs more [or less] and dresses less well [or more classily] than the rest of them... it's a gang when they use these minuscule differences as reasons to bully and hound and torment Mabel until she quits her job or attempts suicide.

The forces that draw people together, sadly, are often destructive. It's wise and protective to know this.

Especially because, if your Family Of Origin was set up around one of these pairings or groupings - and all too often, they were - then something very similar will feel just like home.

Getting Well, Part 1: Getting Out

"Someone's got to be unafraid to lead the freak parade."

That's pretty much what it boils down to, once someone realizes they're living in a reality created by abusers, for abusers.

That reality is inverted; it's toxic. It devalues, uses and exploits, destroys emotional and physical health, and will ultimately kill.

It is also extremely secretive, extremely invested in maintaining appearances at the expense of group and individual health. There is a powerful sense of shame associated with looking 'too closely' at the values and assumptions of any dysfunctional group - as though it isn't nice to see clearly.

The very thought that Mother might resent Daughter and regard her as competition, that Father might regard Son as an appliance to be used to compete with the neighbors or his own siblings or parents, that parents might use their children as puppets to act out their own hostility... that Boss might favor Secretary while scapegoating Paralegal... these thoughts are rejected as 'morbid' or worse; the myth of the Happy Family [at home, work, or elsewhere] must be protected and preserved at all costs. "Lookin' good" is paramount; nothing else, not even one's own sanity, matters by comparison.

But as AA, Al-Anon, and other recovery groups put it, we are 'as sick as our secrets'. Groups - whether they are families, church committees, or workplace cliques, can be every bit as sick as individuals.

In the words of C.S. Lewis ["The Problem of Pain", 1962]:

“We must guard against the feeling that there is "safety in numbers". ... many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human society - some particular school, college, regiment, or profession - where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal ("Everyone does it") and certain others as impracticably virtuous and quixotic. But when we emerged from that bad society we made the horrible discovery that in the outer world our "normal" was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our "quixotic" was taken for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the "pocket" turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed."

To 'emerge from that bad society', requires the breaking of denial, and takes a great deal of courage and determination. It is not easy, and it is not quick. There may be very intense 'change-back' reactions from family, friends, co-workers, church members. There may be immediate ostracism, breathtaking in its cruelty. There will almost certainly be invalidation, whether directly [targeted at the escaping member] or indirectly [use of the escaping member as a Horrible Example, to keep other members in line]. The would-be escapee will be made to feel wrong; bad; crazy. And very, very much alone.

Yes, this does sound like escaping a cult, doesn't it? That, in many ways, is exactly what it is. Cult members are rejected and vilified when they challenge the assumptions of the cult, and place their own emotional welfare ahead of preserving the cult's image; so, too, the child of an alcoholic parent who refuses to play his or her assigned 'role' in the alcoholic family drama and suppport the family myth will be vilified and rejected. As will the 'problem employee' who refuses to engage in the shaming and blaming cycles at an abusive workplace. Or the 'difficult patient' in a stalled therapy group, who persists in seeing and challenging unhealthy processes that are preventing growth.

It is sad but true - in this, as in every other stage of growth, we almost always must make the transition alone. But also true, and much less sad, is that when one person finds the door, others, watching, may eventually make their own escapes.

After all, "Someone's got to be unafraid to lead the freak parade." It may very well be the most important public service you ever perform.

Displacement

When I was growing up, my family had an extremely gentle tomcat whose patience with children was simply amazing. He would let us dress him up and put him into our doll-sized toy baby carriage; he would let us wear him around our necks like a live fur stole; he would let us tickle him by touching just the tips of his guard hairs - his coat would shiver, and we would hug him and kiss the top of his head and laugh and laugh.

When he had finally had enough, he would escape with as much dignity as he could preserve, never showing a single tooth or baring a single claw. And as soon as he was out of our reach, he would begin to groom his fur, much more rapidly and intensely than usual.

As a father cat, his patience with kittens was similarly amazing. And again, when he finally had enough, he would betake himself elsewhere, and groom furiously.

I didn't understand it then, but I'm glad I was paying attention, because now I know that our sweet good cat was modeling a very important coping mechanism: constructive displacement.

Displacement is usually subconscious and not always constructive. It is often used by people when they cannot deal directly with some source of stress or distress; if it seems dangerous, or simply too difficult, to address a problem at its source, a substitute target is found and attention is redirected.

My cat's displacement was constructive because he was avoiding expressing his annoyance at his human and feline kittens, and instead directed his nervous energy into intensive grooming. This is a soothing behavior, and hygienic, and since none of the 'cubs' were allowed to play with him any longer than he was willing to be played with [we were sternly instructed to let him go when he wanted to leave], it never became compulsive.

Not all displacement is as benign. Consider the young girl expelled from middle school for giving Midol to a friend who was suffering cramps; or her contemporaries similarly expelled for taking Advil, aspirin, Aleve...

What is happening there? How can supposedly rational adults prattle about 'zero tolerance' when the discipline being imposed is absurd on its face at the moment it is being imposed?

Simple: displacement.

These adults feel powerless to deal with the real threats that drive 'zero tolerance' policies. Crack dealers are nasty people. They carry guns. They will use them with little or no provocation. It is dangerous to stand up to them, as opposed to talking about standing up to them. How much easier and more comfortable it is to announce a 'zero tolerance' policy regarding drugs in school, and then act out against a Dean's List student for taking an aspirin! This is someone who is clearly not armed or dangerous, someone younger, vulnerable, relatively powerless. They are also likely to be so shocked by the overreaction that they won't resist the punishment.

It doesn't matter that the child with an aspirin is a ridiculous target for enforcement action. What matters, all that matters, is that Something Was Done; the Law was Laid Down; and By God, We Showed Them, Didn't We.

James Joyce, in his short story Counterparts [from Dubliners], describes the cascading effect of another form of displacement, starting with the abuse of an employee by his boss, and ending with that employee battering his son in an alcoholic rage. Standing up to the boss is not to be thought of; there are, after all, real and immediate consequences to speaking truth to power, especially to abusive and vindictive power that is free to act unchecked. So the rage is displaced onto a helpless target...

It is sad to contemplate just how often children are targets for displaced adult frustration and rage.

Joyce's example also illustrates how displacement leads to scapegoating. This is not merely the provenance of domestic hell; under the right circumstances a gang, a clique, an office, a school, an entire nation may displace their collective rage onto a selected helpless target - the awkward girl at school, the chubby fellow at work, the members of a rival gang, or students at a rival school; people of a different race, or an entire religious tradition. This displacement may be solemnly ritualized, as in the making of a sacrifice, or Homecoming Weekend; or it may be totally spontaneous. It may be overt and even defiant, like turf wars between gangs, or hidden, as in the scapegoating of a new child by his middle school class - when the teachers aren't around.

Never underestimate the power of displacement. It doesn't have to be rational.

Name Calling

We live in an abusive culture.

In our society, it is acceptable for a grown man, speaking on the air, to publicly insult a former First Lady of the United States - repeatedly - for laughs. It is acceptable for other men to publicly insult veterans and impugn the good faith of heroes who have lost limbs in combat. It is acceptable for women to insult and demean other women who have lost children in combat, or spouses and other family members in catastrophic acts of terrorism.

In our culture, such people are lavishly rewarded, with air time, publicity, admiration, money, and various other forms of power. So of course, such a person would expect to be admired and rewarded for insulting and demeaning a team of beautiful, graceful, intelligent young women, women whose ancestry differs from theirs, as though that fact of being were somehow a shameful thing.

When directly confronted, these individuals often claim that they are 'only joking' and that those who object should 'lighten up' and 'take things less seriously'. They insist that they are actually good people, that they should be judged by their actions and not by their words, when they - and all their witnesses - know perfectly well that, in their profession, their words are their actions.

No, these people are not joking, and there is nothing amusing about this behavior. They are practicing emotional and social abuse, whether consciously or unconsciously; and as they model this behavior, they train us, as a society, to accept abusiveness as the normal form of human interaction.

Emotional abuse often begins with mean, childish jokes at the expense of the person being targeted [in social abuse, it's at the expense of either a prominent person, or a group]. Disparagement of the person's objections [or of the group's protestation] comes next [consider the familiar lines, "You're too serious", "You take everything personally", "You have no sense of humor", "You can't take a joke"]. Blaming the person or group for the abuse, as though they compelled the abuser to act out against them by virtue of some hideous, fascinating flaw, comes next; and when the victim - and the audience - are sufficiently beaten down and desensitized, name-calling begins.

Name-calling is the antagonistic form of labeling. It is pejorative and its purpose is straightforward. This rhetorical device invites a simplistic emotional response; it is a method of 'enemy creation'. Name-callers create or exploit enmity, divisiveness, revulsion, contempt, a sense that it's 'us' against 'them'. The targets of this vitriol, if it is accepted, are not seen as human beings, but as categories or objects.

Once the targets are perceived as non-human, some form of hostile acting out may be incited, even actually practiced. This may be covert social violence, such as shunning, exclusion, refusal to hire or promote those who belong to any of the negatively labeled groups; but it has also been, all too often, actual physical harm, even murder.

Given the prevalence and popularity of name-calling in our public space in recent years [in print, on radio, on television], it is encouraging when people take a stand against it and other forms of social abusiveness. It is especially encouraging when members of the group that is being encouraged to practice abuse - overtly or covertly - instead take a stand to support the group being demeaned and abused. And it is most encouraging of all when those who abuse others, and by their public behavior advocate abusiveness as a way of life, are exposed, and deposed, and prevented from doing further harm.

It will be more encouraging still if, instead of an isolated incident, such a principled stand against abuse and prejudice is the beginning of a trend.