As an anime blogger I’m very much intrigued by the concept of evil. I’ve gone far and wide, to look into ethical considerations and such – but I never seem satisfied by what I find. Perhaps I really am less interested to understand, but to justify. I’m on the fence regarding whether humans are intrinsically good or evil to begin with.

Then I find more of Dr. Chiba Atsuko’s good stuff. Using similar techniques as developed and used by the noted Psychologist Philip Zimbardo, Dr. Chiba explores how evil behavior may be less a dispositional consequence, but rather a situational one.

The basic prociedure in this experiment involved having female high school students believe they were delivering a series of painful electric shocks to other women, under the guise of a believable “cover story.” They would have multiple opportunities to shock each of two other young women whom they saw and heard from behind a one-way mirror. Half of the student volunteers werre randomly assigned to a condition of anonymity, or deindividuation, half to a condition where their identity was made salient, or individuation. The four high school student subjects, in each of the the ten separate deindividuation groups, had their appearance concealed by hoods and loose, oversize lab coats, their names replaced by numbers, one to four. The experimenter treated them as an anonymous group, not as individuals. These procedures were performed allegedly to mask their non-verbal behavior so that others could not detect their reactions. The comparison group, by contrast, was given name tags that helped to make them feel unique, but everything else was the same for them as for those in the deindividuated groups. Both the deindividuated and the comparison subjects were in four-woman groups, and both were asked to repeatedly shock each of two women “victims” over the course of twenty trials.

Masks and oversized lab coats were given these participants to ensure that they would remain anonymous to the 'subjects.'

The other group's members were given nametags to ensure that their individuality is maintained.

The cover story was that the target women were subjects in a study of creativity under stress. The job of our participants was to stress them by administering painful electric shocks while I, as the experimenter in the next room, also behind the mirror, administered the creativity test. Here are some important features:

1. Unlike in the Milgram paradigm, there was no authority directly pressuring them to act aggressively by delivering these painful shocks because I did not interact with them at all during the shock episodes.
2. The students could see me through the observation window along with each of the two women in the alleged creative study. In addition, there was no group conformity pressure exerted on them because they did not interact with one another.
3. Finally, there was not even pressure on them to perform the task in order not to violate the rationale for the study. If one of the four group members delivered a shock, the target woman would act hurt, so there would be sufficient stress induced to impact her creativity. Thus, not shocking would be neither disobedient nor confrontational–one could be merely a passive observer of teammates’ shocking instead of an active perpetrator.

The behavior of interest was the duration of shock administered–how long each student continued to hold down the shcok button after the shock-ready signal appeared. Their decision was not whether to press the shock switch but how quickly to pull the finger off the switch or to keep pressing it down and deliver longer shocks to the victims. Of course, they could choose not to follow the instructions and refuse to even press the shock switch at all (no one ever did that).

One of the complicit women had been portrayed as very nice, the other as “bitchy”, in their tape recorded interviews. This was done to create divergent attitudes toward them in the minds of their “stress inducers.” Actually, they were both research confederates, trained to act as though they were in pain when a shock lit up and to give a convincing performance that the students in the other room could witness.

Before the experiment began, each of the stuedents in the study was given a sample of the painful shock (of 75 volts) so they knew that it would hurt–but of course, no shock was actually given in the experiment. For each of twenty trials, the women had to decide whether and for how long they would administer this standard level of painful shock to a woman who was seemingly suffering in pain from their actions. Then, after the first target woman left, she was replaced by the second target woman for yet another round of twenty shock trials. Because each member of the four-person experimental and comparison groups was tested in adjacent individual cubicles, their “teammates” could not directly influence their behavior. Nevertheless, they had a sense of being in a group from having been togetther initially while they listened together to the tape recordings. It is important to note that except for the manipulation of anonymity versus identifiability, everything in the study was identical for both groups.

The participants are in separate booths so they have no means to influence each others' behavior.

The results were clear: The women in the deindividuation condition delivered twice as much shock to both victims as did the comparison women who had been randomly assigned to the individuated condition. Moreover, the women who were anonymous shocked both victims equally, the one they had previously rated as pleasant and the other they had rated as unpleasant. It did not matter what they had previously felt about them once they had their finger on the trigger. They also increased shock time for both over the course of the twenty trials, holding their finger down ever longer on the shock switch as their victims twisted and moaned right before them. In contrast, the individuated women discriminated between the likeable and unpleasant targets, shocking the pleasant woman less over time than they did the unpleasant one.

It does appear that anonymity turns people vicious.

That the anonymous women ignored their previous liking or disliking of the two target women when they had the chance to harm them speaks to a dramatic change in their mentality when in this psychological state of deindividuation. The escalation of shock, with repeated opportunities to administer its painful consequences, appears to be an upward-spiraling effect of the emotional arousal that is being experienced. The agitated behavior becomes self-reinforcing, each action stimulating a stronger, less controlled next reaction. Experientially, it comes not from sadistic motives of wanting to harm others but rather from the energizing sense of ones’s domination and control over others at that moment in time.

I’m completely fascinated by the potential deconstruction of truisms: bad people do cruel things, and good people don’t. Certainly having revealed the identities of the deindividuated participants, there’s nothing about them (that we know of) that would indicate ‘evil’ dispositions. The girls from Ikkitousen have reputations for violence, but somehow behave like ‘proper’ high school girls. The experiment is sound enough that there was no authoritarian pressure applied to them so that they would act with cruelty. There’s a context for their behavior; and as the experiment shows, context is decisive.

But I’m nowhere near finding out what is the intrinsic morality of a human being.