Situational Forces Dominate Human Cruelty

In modern society, faced with the reality where human race’s cruelty causes different degrees of harms to the surviving condition of their fellows and the world, many psychologists and other scientists focusing on human behaviors constitute an interpretative community aimed at providing convincing explanations over the nature of the act that leads to destructive results. Cruelty, observed by Simon Baron-Cohen as particular events related to individuals whose brains’ “empathy circuits (Simon Baron-Cohen, 2011)” go down while practicing it, generally involves occurrences that inflict sufferings. Today, as an increasing number of people pay significant attentions to the notion, intense discussions concerning individuals’ capacity for creating the distressful situation are primarily functioning at both legal and moral spheres. Of all theoretical interpretations, one analysis tackling the inhuman side contends that there exists a high level of aggressiveness that is biologically and spontaneously contained by all human animals, who are programmed to express their instincts through giving harmful conducts. Addressing the analysis as flawed and unsupported, this essay argues for far more complex forces that reveal the belief’s apparent lack of consideration of the stimulation from the external world. It illustrates that, instead of innately aggressive instincts, human cruelty is triggered by situational tensions out of specific circumstances, one primary reason being that the decision-making procedure of individuals is inseparable from environmental contexts defined by varying restraints capable of shaping their final actions.

The essence of human beings’ cruel behaviors lies in their role as instruments in implementing required or pressured tasks. During the process of expounding on the essential meaning of outside factors, Stanley Milgram offered the most insightful answer in his carefully conducted experiment. As one renowned social psychologist, Milgram’s series of experiments on human obedience, one fundamental aspect in the construction of social life, makes it an absolute necessity for an overwhelming majority’s submissiveness to authority, except for those isolated social citizens whose responses are not demanded. To demonstrate the stark authority’s forces penetrating the minds of social subjects, Milgram carried out one teacher-student study that featured effects of punishment. Situated in psychology laboratory rooms, when the people who played the part as “students” make mistakes during remembering the second words of groups of word pairs, “teachers” were ordered to administer shocks ranging from 15 to 450 volts as punishments. With the major investigating focus on the reactions of “teachers” in terms of inflicting pains on victims, the experiment’s designation concealed the fact that the learners actually received no shocks. In other words, Milgram’s purpose was to examine teacher subjects’ behaviors under measurable conditions characterized by firm orders and instructions. One striking result showed that about 60% of subjects, who were students from Yale University, fully followed experimenters’ orders in using shocks of different intensities. The same experiment, when employed on ordinary people from different occupational or social backgrounds, made clear the same tendency marked by 85% of obedience in Munich.

Another experiment adopting the same rule, except that “teachers” were given the freedom to choose shock levels, contributed a shapr contrast where the average shock was less than 60 volts, an indication of lowness that caused harmless effects. Milgram’s results add values to the groundless nature of the conception that leans towards the sadistic traits deeply ingrained in men who are seen as impulsive and easy to cause destructions. Rather than dominating aggression or hostile attitudes, ordinary people’s behaviors are solidly based on their senses of responsibilities regarding implementing tasks and conforming to rules. The general public’s adherence to obligation, explained by Milgram as the principle of “simply doing their jobs (Stanley Milgram, 1974),” is so consistent that a full consciousness of the immorality of their actions in injuring other social members cannot drive them to resist and completely break from authority. In a persuasive manner, Milgram’s examination shows a shift of moral focus of the public: during submitting to rules, self-justifications and satisfactions stem from the level of adequacy in terms of fulfilling the goals stressed by authorities. It could be concluded that individuals constituting a social or political body are devices for completing the wishes of their regulators or rule makers. Performances of varying extents of cruel deeds, therefore, could be seen as consequences of their understanding over the strictness of carrying out orders sent by external sources.

Diffusion of responsibility, one common phenomenon where individuals display unwillingnesses to take responsibilities due to the presence of others within one group, is another deeply rooted force that gives rise to inhumane treatments (Saundra K. Ciccarelli, J. Noland White, 2009). As one American psychologist and writer, Lauren Slater’s idea over the nature of folly in human beings during giving cruel conducts mirrors what has been pointed out by Milgram. In the fifth chapter of her book, in order to stress her position, Slater introduced the famous Kitty Genovese case and illuminating results from Darley and Latane’s experiments. In the shocking crime occurred in Queens, New York, in 1964, Kitty, as the victim murdered by a man named Winston Mosley during three separate attacks, was witnessed by thirty-eight witnesses who lived in the same area and saw the killing scene. The bizarreness of the crime, seen by Slater as initiating a “moral overdrive (Lauren Slater, 2005)”, consisted in the fact that thirty-seven neighbors remained indifferent by playing as bystanders throughout the crime time when Kitty’s screams and moans were clearly heard, with only one person having called the police after the killing. With a faith on the principal function of situations, instead of innate apathy, Darley and Latane, as two followers of the horrible crime, replicated a seizure through using student subjects from New York University. Arranged in a separate room, each student was asked to express his worries about challenging issues of life at NYU. Unaware of the fact voices were pre-recorded, subjects were convinced they were accompanied by real neighbors and could talk about troubles only when it was their turn. The climax occurred when an epileptic actor spoke in an increasingly weak voice, choked, and ended his speech with complete silence. Though deprived of opportunities of seeing or interacting with “others,” few subjects, believing that they were in a group of four or five persons, acted to help. When the subjects were told they were in a dyad with the epileptic student, eighty-five percent reported the emergency.

Kitty’s case combined by Darley and Latane’s simulation experiment contributed a most significant result that deals with the commonness of human stupidity: confronting the risks of human death, people weaken their moral manipulation through counting on the actions of others. A hopeless collective phenomenon where priorities are placed on lower levels of intervention over resolving the human emergency is remarkably demonstrated. The notable factor determined by the size of witnesses or bystanders in terms of decreasing the severity of crisis, especially revealed by Darley and Latane’s seizures, is a further demonstration that overly dependent attitudes towards the responding ability of other individuals are the primary reason for the eventual moral failure. Largely because of the ambiguity in terms of distribution of responsibilities, the interpreting situation of every single bystander, hence, gives chances for removals of moral obligations and loose self-censures, both of which lead to cruel conducts.

Explicit messages from the outcomes of the Kitty Genovese case as well as the experiments conducted by Milgram and two psychologists, Darley and Latane, serve as evident grounds supporting the predominance of inducing effects of particular circumstances in the dehumanization process. From Milgram’s experimental efforts, the result of subordinates’ high compliance and small violation of authority’s restraining power is suggestive of reliance on different social or political background in conducting personal behaviors of cruelty. Similarly, Slater’s mention of the seizure experiment and cowardice of witnesses in the prospect of Kitty’s death is another proof for the major operation of environmental pressures that lead to escape from moral engagement. These aspects, as well as the inarguable fact that good deeds out of human kindness ubiquitously exist, makes invalid of the argument regarding human’s innately aggressive behaviors.