Right, wrong? In a group, it’s harder to tell

In his classic tale “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Robert Louis Stevenson writes of what he considered a discomforting fact of human nature: Evil dwells inside every man.

If he’s right, it would appear that peers, not potions, are all that’s needed to free that evil.

In Iraq, five current or former American soldiers have been charged with raping an Iraqi teenager and killing her and three members of her family. Another has been charged with failing to report the attack.

Closer to home, Fresno police have charged two college-age men -- and are investigating at least six others -- in the alleged gang rape of an 11-year-old.

Murder, rape and other acts of horrifying violence are, of course, as old as humanity. But as a society, we like to think such deeds are the work of vicious, morally bankrupt -- and isolated -- individuals. The recent incidents are shocking precisely because they didn’t happen in isolation. They appear to be not the actions of a single madman, but rather groups of people who either participated in the wrongdoing -- or were present and did nothing to stop it.

Though a single perpetrator or ringleader can be dismissed as a psychopath, understanding the bad behavior of a group is considerably more perplexing. It may be difficult to believe that so many people, at one time and in one place, could misplace their ethical compasses, could lose their sense of right and wrong.

But most people are similarly capable of abandoning their principles, say behavior experts and psychologists who study group dynamics. The actions of a group, particularly a group in which members share strong feelings of loyalty, simply overwhelm the individual.

“The research is pretty clear: You put people in a group situation and they tend to do what the group decides,” says Donelson Ross Forsyth, an expert in group dynamics and ethical leadership at the University of Richmond in Virginia.

History and psychological studies both bear this out. Germany wasn’t chock-full of evil people during the Holocaust. Instead, mostly ordinary, law-abiding Germans followed their leaders in the torture and killing of millions of Jews.

In Rwanda in 1994, once-peaceful neighbors who had never acted with violence turned on each other in horrific acts of brutality.

Even the famous case of Kitty Genovese illustrates the point, Forsyth says. Genovese’s 1964 rape and murder was heard or witnessed, to varying degrees, by dozens of New York City neighbors. But the majority neither tried to stop the attack nor called for help.

Psychologists say that most people are unable to act unilaterally -- even when they know a situation is wrong -- if their actions will separate them from the group. The concept is hardly popular, but it helps to explain repeated examples of wrongdoing among groups of people who should know better.

“It’s easy to say evil happens because the people who did it are evil rather than asking what made ordinary people evil,” says Christopher Browning, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who has studied the role of ordinary people in committing atrocities during the Holocaust. “People don’t want to look in the mirror and think, ‘I could have done that.’ But you’re not going to explain these things by saying we had an unusual cluster of criminal or evil people.”

Ultimate peer pressure

Group dynamics are on especially forceful display in military units, urban police departments, youth gangs, even among sports teams engaged in high-stakes competition. Members of such units are taught to obey authority, protect each other and remain loyal to the group.

But this type of indoctrination can have disastrous consequences when even one member transgresses.

“The need to feel connected to people is very intense” in such groups, says Ervin Staub, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts and author of “The Psychology of Good and Evil.” “Even when people think ‘this is wrong,’ to step forward and oppose the whole group -- the people you’ve been fighting with, the people whose support you depend on for your very own security -- is extremely difficult.”

If the group leader is involved, it is even harder for individual members to object, experts say. In a well-known experiment conducted in 1961 by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram, study volunteers were asked to administer electric shocks to another study participant in the laboratory. Even though the victim shrieked in pain (the “victim” was not actually receiving a shock, but was an actor told to fake pain and fear) the majority of the volunteers, although distressed, obeyed the study supervisor and administered the shocks as ordered.

“Everyone obeyed in that study. Everyone gave some electrical shocks,” Forsyth says. “People say, ‘Why didn’t they stop and think?’ Well, they didn’t have a chance to stop and think. They didn’t think about what is right and wrong.”

Misdeeds by groups of people also tend to occur when the victim is very different from the group. In the investigation following the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, in which dozens of U.S. soldiers abused and tortured Iraqi prisoners, Staub says, “the soldiers who were interviewed really did describe the Iraqis as different -- people they didn’t understand. There was a devaluation of these people, not identifying them as human beings.”

But negative group influence can be found in simpler, more innocuous situations. The entire spectrum of social cliques can ignore bullying in a high school cafeteria. Employees, whether the chief executive or a temporary worker, can shrug off obvious accounting or ethical irregularities. Even bystanders on a public street can stand immobile and gawk in the wake of a car accident although it’s clear the occupants need medical assistance or some other kind of help.

“It’s easy to say in advance, ‘I would object. I would leave. I would intervene,’ ” says James Waller, author of the book “Becoming Evil” and a psychology professor at Whitworth College in Spokane, Wash. “But there is a moral paralysis that comes with the situation. People think, ‘There are other people standing by me not doing [anything]. Why is it incumbent upon me to act when other people aren’t?’ ”

Studies on this so-called bystander effect show that the chances that someone will intervene decline as the number of inactive people increases.

People caught up in these situations often look around to other bystanders for clues on how to behave, Waller says. If no one responds, everyone assumes it’s OK to do nothing. In the Genovese case, for example, the lack of reaction apparently convinced most people that there was no emergency.

“If it’s just me, there is a much stronger chance of me intervening,” Waller says. “The more people you add, the more room there is for diffusing responsibility.”

What bystanders say to each other in such settings can make a big difference, Staub says. If they confer, bystanders may collaborate to form a proper response. Saying to the person next to you, “Should we stop this person?” or “Should we get help?” might, for instance, elicit action.

An ivory tower concept

Although the corrupting influence of group behavior is well-established, that knowledge -- and how to use it -- has been primarily confined to the academic world.

The training of future soldiers, police officers, chief executives and others usually does not prepare them to counter it. And, aside from parents and teachers who warn teenagers that peer pressure can lead them astray, there is little acknowledgment in American culture of the potentially immoral forces of groups.

“Given that this is well-understood in the psychological literature, it’s shocking, and a failure on the part of psychologists, how poorly understood this is,” Staub says.

Americans’ values of individual autonomy and feelings of moral superiority may further prevent them from acknowledging the uncomfortable reality of group dynamics. They simply can refuse to believe that prized personal characteristics such as maturity, religious beliefs or inherent goodness are often not equal to the power of a group, Waller says.

“It’s easy for us to say, ‘I could never do that.’ But most of this evil we see is done by ordinary people who might have said, ‘I could never do anything like that,’ ” Waller says. “The truth of history is it’s people like you and I who do most of this behavior.”

Schools, military and police should have policies about what to do should someone violate official, or unofficial, codes of conduct, says James E. Shaw, a Los Angeles educator and expert on gang violence who is writing a book on youth terrorism.

“We think most of society is good. So we won’t tell you what to do when the good part of society goes sour,” he says.

Teaching people about group dynamics may help them to thwart wrongdoers or to simply provide aid when the circumstances warrant, experts say.

“Making people aware of this vulnerability in human nature allows them to react and play it the right way from the start,” Browning says.

Training programs that involve role-playing can prepare people, including children, to protest against injustice even when others around them are acquiescing, Staub says.

And individuals should know that being in a group doesn’t excuse them from personal responsibility and accountability, says Philip G. Zimbardo, a Stanford University psychologist, in the 2004 collection of essays “The Social Psychology of Good and Evil.” People should be discouraged from living on automatic pilot but should instead learn to reflect on the situation and think critically before acting, he writes. It’s also important to distinguish between authorities for whom obedience is warranted and those who are unjust, he adds.

And too, experts say, society should reward people, such as whistle-blowers, who stand up to a wayward group.

“We have to learn to cultivate moral courage,” Staub says. “Moral courage means to act according to your values, even in the face of potential harm to yourself, so your values will not be subverted.”