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.

"Luella Miller" - Narcissism in a Velvet Gown

I first read this story as a teen, and it has haunted me ever since. The older I get, the more I see in it; it's not just a ghost story, it's not just a horror story, it's a case study, and one of the most psychologically literate things I've read since Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper".

I'm not sure how widely known this short story is, or the author, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman; but it and she both deserve to be very widely known indeed. Especially by those who have been subjected to covert emotional abuse, and the kind of manipulation that poses as helplessness even as it takes total control of the helper. There is a cautionary tale here for Rescuers and Enablers; not even the most perceptive person in the story manages to escape, in the end.

Here, then, is a link to the Literary Gothic web site's page on "Luella Miller". Read. Enjoy. See what you find in it. And please respect the site owner's wishes; don't copy the text online.

Is there, was there, a Luella in your life? I know there was in mine... Luella Miller is a psychic vampire. Ms. Freeman had clearly known and observed at least one of these creatures in her own life. Luella Miller epitomizes them - their affectations of helplessness, their entitlement, their total self-centeredness. One after another, she uses people, and uses them up, until they literally die - not quickly, either, and certainly not painlessly. Their suffering doesn't register with her at all; their deaths leave her absolutely unmoved, except for concerns that she won't get her coffee in the morning if her current victim is too busy dying to make it for her.

This is a classic portrait of narcissism - the sugar-coated kind; the kind that dresses in velvet, wears lace gloves, stamps its dainty foot and puts its little nose in the air when facing someone who sees its essential evil. But the tantrums Luella throws when she thinks a victim is about to get out of her clutches show an amazing degree of 'strength' for such a helpless li'l ol' thing.

Reading this now, I see both my mother and myself, our lives and our fates.

In her youth, my mother had the Luella act down pat. Strikingly beautiful, she knew exactly how to bat her eyelashes and croon, and people fell for it - over and over. She fooled them, she used them, and they came running back for more. It wasn't until she was long past middle age that she began to lose the knack of fooling people; partly because she no longer cared so much about fooling them - she wasn't willing to work at it anymore. But there were quite a few people she fooled until the very end.

At least some of those people, I think, took over from her at some point, and generously took on the burden of fooling themselves on her behalf. This was doubtless less painful for them than facing and truly admitting the kind of person she actually was: malicious, vindictive, calculating, deliberately distorting and withholding information to demonize anyone who refused to worship her - including her own child. Better to stay soothingly unaware...

After her death, there were some waves of awareness / revulsion among her few remaining friends and acquaintances; some even contacted me, embarrassed, remorseful, to make amends for wrongs I had never known about. There were so many lies she had told, so much she had confabulated, to keep these people from ever wanting to know me - so that they would never be able to see through the confabulations and lies. It was almost unbelievable. I thought I had seen through her years ago, but at the end of her life, I found myself amazed at the things she had done to me almost from the minute I was born.

Luella Miller's fictitiously fantastic indifference to the condition of those who served her, even as they were dying, is also neither fantastic nor fictitious. I saw it in my mother during my father's final illness. Not merely indifference; absolute, blind, infantile rage, that he would dare to get sick when that was - and always had been - HER privilege.

She was similarly self-centered when her own daughter needed surgery for a life-threatening condition. I carefully scheduled myself into a hospital that was far enough away for her to be unable to visit me. She had pulled Munchausen's by Proxy stunts on my sick and dying father, and she wasn't going to pull any on me. The nurses though it odd that she never even called... knowing what I know about enabling, I never even tried to explain to them.

For my part, I see all too much of myself in Lydia. I remember how hard I fought to get free. How determined my mother was to fasten on to me, financially and emotionally, and drain and destroy me just as she drained and destroyed my father. And I know very well that although I escaped alive, I did not escape unharmed.

I am very grateful, and will always be grateful, to the therapist - and the elder law attorneys - who supported me through the last two years of my mother's life, and after her death; they had seen enough similar cases to know just how destructive these people are, and they were able not only to believe me, but to understand. Yet I still find myself drawn into helping those who give in return only indifference, further demands, or outright harm. Like Lydia, I find myself all too often confronting and denouncing narcissists in velvet gowns, while trapped in the cottage next door.

Lately I've wished that when I first read this story as a teen, I had understood it then as I understand it now - that I had seen through my mother much earlier, and escaped emotionally when I first escaped physically, thirty years ago. But that's not what happened, and we all have to play the cards we're dealt. I can be grateful, at least, that now I see what was.

And that, almost a decade after her death, I have finally written her eulogy.

May she rest in peace... and may peace rest in me.

The Sociopath Next Door: A Review

I've just bought Martha Stout's book "The Sociopath Next Door", and in it she talks about one career choice made by sociopaths who aren't quite aggressive enough for criminality, and are reasonably bright, but not brilliant...

She says: "... As this sort of person, you ensconce yourself in a niche, or maybe a series of niches, in which you can have some amount of control over small numbers of people. These situations satisfy a little of your desire for power, although you are chronically aggravated at not having more. ... Sometimes you fall into sulky, rageful moods caused by a frustration that no one but you understands.

"But you do enjoy jobs that afford you a certain unsupervised control over a few individuals or small groups, preferably people and groups who are relatively helpless or in some way vulnerable. You are a teacher or a psychotherapist, a divorce lawyer or ... a consultant of some kind, or ... a human services director.

"Whatever your job, you manipulate and bully the people who are under your thumb, as often and as outrageously as you can without getting fired or held accountable. You do this for its own sake, even when it serves no purpose except to give you a thrill. Making people jump means you have power - or this is the way you see it - and bullying provides you with an adrenaline rush. It is fun.

"... Most invigorating of all is to bring down people who are smarter or more accomplished than you, or perhaps classier, more attractive or popular or morally admirable. This is not only good fun; it is existential vengeance. And without a conscience, it is amazingly easy to do. You quietly lie to the boss or to the boss's boss, cry some crocodile tears, or sabotage a coworker's project; or gaslight a patient (or a child), bait people with promises, or provide a little misinformation that will never be traced back to you."

So many of us have had this experience... when I read this passage today, I felt literally dizzy with exoneration and relief.

Dr. Stout begins from the premise that sociopaths are devoid of conscience, but builds on this to demonstrate that, being devoid of conscience, they are also utterly devoid of emotion, and especially impoverished in that they are utterly incapable of love. Their lives are boring, lacking any emotional texture or richness, and as a result they often resort to drugs or extreme risktaking behavior to fill the void. Thus, although their lack of scruples may lead to some degree of material success, they do not 'live well' and they tend not to die well... their old age is usually horrible beyond belief.

She describes several common subtypes of noncriminal psychopath, but most importantly, she describes the 'tell' - the set of behaviors that are a highly reliable indicator that someone is psychopathic. This 'tell' is something that many people have difficulty in perceiving clearly, tend to be 'sucked in' by. It is, in fact, something that many of us have been trained to comply with by abusers in our families of origin, or elsewhere: PITY for our abusers.

"Pity ... should be reserved for innocent people who are in genuine pain or who have fallen on misfortune. If, instead, you find yourself often pitying someone who consistently hurts you or other people, and who actively campaigns for your sympathy, the chances are close to 100 percent that you are dealing with a sociopath."

That's it, in a nutshell. Beware the person who wounds and betrays you, and then portrays themselves as the greater victim, and expects you to comfort THEM for having harmed YOU. They are inviting you to join forces with them against yourself, and laughing all the way.

And she does not simply describe and deplore the problem - which is the frustrating reality of so many self-help books - she actually offers thirteen specific points for action. I won't summarize all of them here, but I do want to touch upon three of them.

Her eighth point is... NO CONTACT. She makes the point that "Sociopaths live completely outside of the social contract, and therefore to include them in relationships ... is perilous."

Her ninth point is a strong recommendation to pity with care... not to give away pity easily, and not to be manipulated into pitying our abusers.

Her tenth point is... let go. GIVE UP. Or, as she puts it, "Do not try to redeem the unredeemable." ... "If you ... want to help people, then help only those who truly want to be helped. I think you will find this does not include the person who has no conscience."

I will leave points one to seven and eleven to thirteen for people to discover during their own exploration, and will discuss only one more aspect of this incredible book.

Dr. Stout makes an interesting differentiation between narcissists and sociopaths. She considers a narcissist to be halfway to sociopathy, but does not perceive all narcissists as wholly sociopathic. In her view, narcissists have a full range of emotions, but only as they apply to themselves; they are devoid of empathy, and cannot envision others experiencing the same emotions, on their own behalfs, with equal validity or even an equal right to these feelings. Sociopaths, on the other hand, are devoid not only of empathy, but of conscience, and are essentially dead emotionally, except for primitive rage and 'the excitement of the kill' [which, for noncriminals, equates to abuse, theft, sabotage of someone's career, soiling of someone's relationship by seducing their husband or wife, etc. - essentially, an addiction to cruelty].

I have reached the conclusion, for myself, that this distinction is actually fairly minor; as far as I am concerned, a narcissist is basically a sociopath who happens to have feelings for themselves. But that is my conclusion, not hers.

This is a truly remarkable book. It is well written, well organized, eminently readable, and eminently sane. Dr. Stout clearly cares deeply about the impact of unrecognized sociopathy on our society and on individual people within that society... and has laid out the heart of her own life's work in these pages, as a gift, that others might learn and find ways to protect and heal themselves.