Rebecca Saxe on Situationism

by: Paul Rosenberg

Mon Jul 05, 2010 at 09:00


I intend to present some diaries about situationism next weekend, and to help set the stage for them, here's a brief video from the National Science Foundation (via the Situationist blog)dealing with situationism, and social cognition, with special attention to authoritarianism, stressing a point that Robert Altemeyer made that is often overlooked: that Milgrim's experiments with obedience are but one source of evidence among many that situational influences are far more powerful in generating authoritarian compliance than any of the internal factors he studied.  This doesn't mean that authoritarian traits are irrelevant.  But it does mean that intelligent social engineering can help prevent situations like developed at Abu Grhaib.  And as such, it's also an appropriate 4th of July weekend reflection on the nature of freedom, and the role of social architecture in protecting and preserving it.

Rebecca Saxe is the Carole Middleton Career Development Professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT:

Paul Rosenberg :: Rebecca Saxe on Situationism

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Rebecca Saxe on Situationism | 18 comments
That video is completely NSF! (4.00 / 1)
And fascinating, too. How many of us, watching it, thought: "Well, _I_ wouldn't allowed myself to be so easily led by authority?" I know I did, despite all lack of evidence.  
self-denied prophesy (4.00 / 3)
I bet many, perhaps most, who actually watched that video and read a little on this issue would not follow orders in these situations.  Not because we're better than others but because we've thought about it, can better recognize the situation and have already made up our minds what we'd do.

In other words, people who say "I wouldn't do that" might actually be correct, but only because they've gone through the process of deciding not to do it.  It becomes a self-denied prophesy.

On the other hand, real life never gives you exactly what you expected.  Any real situation you find yourself in will be different than those you thought about.  Also, it won't start with the dial on XXX.  Each step will seem reasonable and you might not ever notice crossing the line.  Still, knowledge is power and you improve the odds you'll make the right choice.

[ Parent ]
Great point (4.00 / 2)
about the self-denied prophesy, but I still agree more with your last paragraph, and think a large percentage who had read about the Milgrim Experiment would follow authority in a different scenario.
[ Parent ]
There's another side to the situation (0.00 / 0)
Take Abu Grhaib which Prof Saxe mentioned.  Those soldiers are the product of a great deal of socially engineered training in obedience to authority. It's built into basic training, advanced individual training and in every group exercise and trianing activity a soldier is part of. It was reasonably effective in WW II and since Vietnam it has had decades of intensive experimentation and study to make it a lot more effective.

That's a lot more than the average subject used by Dr. Milgram in his experiments. No one who has successfully completed the military training is immune to it, and those who do not successfully complete that training are removed under stigma. They are failures.

What do you think has happened to the child of religious or anti-war parents who a year after entering the military is sitting around wearing a T-shirt that says "Death from above" (being airborne is high status) and joking with his buddies that he is one of Uncle Sam's hired killers? And the last thing any of us ever wanted was to let our buddies down.

The idea that you are anyone else is immune to the social pressures the military - by intense design - applies to its members is a pipe dream. I'd guess that a cult or a small band of guerrillas like the IRA or ETA also undergo similar intense  socialization. Consider the story of Patty Hearst - kidnapped and six months later taking part with her kidnappers in a bank robbery.  

[ Parent ]
How much for the right to say no? (4.00 / 3)
To avoid being one of those bad apples in a situation which seems to require them takes a lifetime of training, and also a lot of luck. I remember when the debate among my peers was whether or not one should go to Viet Nam, and if not, why not -- how would we cope with not going for the rest of our lives, knowing that we'd carry the mark of Cain forever?

For me the answer had little to do with politics. I'd been raised in an authoritarian family. and for reasons which I couldn't really understand, I'd felt it necessary to consciously fight their influence over me since I'd been about twelve years old. (Honestly, I was often less than successful, and the struggle was always a desperate one, but it did teach me how to get by without any allies, and how to live more or less by my own wits.)

I argued that what would happen to anyone who went would essentially destroy everything that he'd spent the past 20 or so years trying to make of himself, and that if the freedom to be in charge of one's own life meant anything at all, it couldn't be subjected to forces which had only one goal, namely to reduce anyone caught in them to a willing accomplice of whatever brutality the reasons of state seemed to require. In other words, Give your soul to Jesus, 'cause your ass belongs to the Army was literally true, and I knew it in my bones.

Now, many years later, I have no regrets. I also have nothing to say to the people who went -- they did what they felt they had to do, and that's enough for me. I do have something to say to everyone else, though, especially those who think that it's a free country bears some resemblance to the truth. We're all of us subjected to carefully organized Milgram experiments every day of our lives. Our Constitution gives us some legal tools to help us resist that fate, but in the end we either use those tools or we lose them, and rarely are they available at a discount price. You want to be free, you've got to pay.

The Most Efficient Cage (4.00 / 2)
is the one that people pick out for themselves.

Under the influence, of course.

But still, the fact that they participate in choosing it convinces them that it can't possibly be a cage.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
It'd be fascinating to see the converse of this studied, i.e. an examination (3.00 / 4)
of what foments defiance. Do we still need authorities in rebellion? Probably. I mean, to an extent that's Rebecca Saxe's function here, huh? And, of course, your invocation of the Constitution is an invocation of authority.

I was raised the converse of you, in a very un-authoritarian household, so I probably my sister and I have a certain confidence instilled in us when going out on our own. But then we're not really on our own, right, because we're precisely where we were trained to be.

So we need moral authorities too, I tend to think, and this is precisely the reason conservative and centrist co-option of figures like King, Ghandi, (Susan B.) Anthony, and Jesus Christ is so hazardous and so dogged. Very, very few people are ever going to go it entirely alone- they need precedents and heroes and good company. Hence, apart from anything else it achieves, the rich value of progressive social media.

[ Parent ]
Excellent Points (4.00 / 1)
Actually, Milgram discovered that it was relatively easy to promote dissent.  If another person is present who objects, for example, the rate of compliance plummets. Obviously, this supports the idea that models of moral autonomy matter.  Which is also why right-wing protests get magnified while left-wing protests get blacked out.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
The Constitution is a frame, not an authority (0.00 / 0)
I'd never deny the need for moral authority, but moral authorities can be as tricky as any other kind -- see Billy Graham, or this or that Pope. In fact, most authorities, legitimate or not, pose as moral authorities at one point or other.

I would say that it's the moral authority of the community as a whole which teaches us what we need to know, but without agency on our part, there's no reliable way to properly interpret that teaching, or to add to it. In the end, there's an arbitration process at work, with the individual querying the community, and vice-versa. All the more reason, I would say, not to attempt to enslave people at the outset, and if we escape slavery ourselves, to do as you imply, i.e., resist attempts to reduce others to that state when we see them in progress.

This, of course, is the ground on which morality becomes democracy, and authority has to be earned. As Paul often takes great pains to point out, the Enlightenment was about far more than strangling kings with the guts of priests.

[ Parent ]
Because I'm guessing (4.00 / 1)
David Kowalski didn't intend... And, you've made a really interesting point.
[ Parent ]
Yeah, it looked like a slip of the mouse to me too (N/T) (0.00 / 0)

[ Parent ]
The influence at Abu Grhaib on soldiers (4.00 / 4)
I was one of those people who joined the military towards the end of the Vietnam war, but was lucky in that the war was winding down already, and I was never in a combat role.

But I can attest to the issue of how strongly you are trained to follow orders.  That was the key, making sure you would follow orders in combat, if you could not be trusted to do that, you were not of use to Uncle Sam, and they usually got rid of you during basic training.

Ever since Lt. Calley and the My Lia massacre, which had Colin Powell doing the coverup, the military has always had low level scapegoats to protect the fact that often, the soldiers on the lower levels are following orders, and let's protect the military and civilian brass from any repercussions of the decisions made during the "fog of war". Notice that no higher ups in the military who actually ordered the torture at Abu Grhaib were ever brought to any accountability whatsoever??

But this time around, the choices made were deliberate, and well signaled, even admitted by the very top decision maker, Dick Cheney, who admitted to try to win the GWOT, that we Americans would have to go to the dark side to win.  Then after Obama was elected, he has admitted to committing "war crimes", and has been let off the hook  freely by Obama, which makes me suspicious that Democrat leadership went along with war crimes and do not want it to come out to see the light of day. Same as it has ever been!

I actually think this same situational issues are present in the US populace right now.  Cheney/Bush crushed dissent so completely by arresting protesters, utilising mass psyops against the citizens by stopping any rational discussion with "either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists", and who wants to be with the terrorists?  

Even when people go out to protest, by controlling the media, we do not see the masses out on the streets protesting due to MSM trying to help the administration, and the laws changed to allow suppression of any real protest ever since Seattle, 1999, the use of Tasers, and mass intimidation of valid peaceful protests.  This includes the use of rubber bullets, special now crowd control audio weapons, water cannon, fencing off protesters where the decision makers do not even have to see the protesters, because they are 6 blocks away in fenced off areas where the police often criminally accept outside DHS advice on how to suppress the rights of the people.

This could be seen as a major contributor as to why we do not see a "tipping point" of people marching on the street as a post over at the great orange Satan's place is discussing at the moment.

Good post, Paul.

 

You Hit All The Bases! (4.00 / 1)
The most overt mass manifestations have worn off since 9/11--see Bush's plunge in popularity for that--but in a vast multitude of ways we're still deeply entrenched in an authoritarian mindset.

And--ironically--as long as that's so, the terrorists win.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Nuremberg, etc. (4.00 / 3)
The moral of the Nuremberg trial and the trial of Japanese leaders is that losing generals and politicians will or at least can be held liable for their actions.  Bush I stretched that tremendously by capturing and convicting Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega as a drug lord.

The sickest part of Abu Ghraib was that the military (up to a one star general)was held responsible but it was the civilian contractors who were giving the orders and went free of any responsibility.  These scum were paid much more than the military.  I read yesterday that Obama has 100,000 of the mercenaries and only 85,000 US military in Afghanistan.

So there you have it.  "Winners" are mostly exempt.  Blame goes to the lower ranking soldiers first, then middle ranking. Foreign military and political leaders are held to different standards if we manage to depose them first. The game has not changed under Obama.  

[ Parent ]
What Saxe Adds Here (4.00 / 1)
that wasn't already readily apparent is both the reason why and the degree to which those scapegoated as "rotten apples" almost certainly aren't rationally to blame.  This is particularly true with respect to those like Lindsay England who were so clearly in over their heads--just the way that BushCo & the military top brass wanted them to be.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Am I the only one here (4.00 / 1)
who saw this title and imagined that Paul would be posting a series about Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, and Paris 1968?

Down with a world where the guarantee that we won't die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom!

Brings back fond memories, this (N/T) (4.00 / 1)

[ Parent ]
There Is A Connection (4.00 / 1)
as Hanson himself has said somewhere or other.  But it's not a really clear-cut one.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Rebecca Saxe on Situationism | 18 comments
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