Punishing empathy and rewarding cruelty converts recruits into competitive torturers
Evidence
During the training, the recruits were punished with beatings for any signs of compassion or empathy and rewarded for skill in forcing confessions. They not only began to take pride in their brutality but also competed among themselves to see who was the best torturer. Some reported that the exercise of complete domination over their prisoners made them feel like “supermen.” — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 674
Categorization
Category: Causal Relationships
- STORYSTEM: A bildungsroman in reverse: a rural farm boy’s moral education via torture training, showing how pride and competition rather than fear drive the transformation.
- DEEPTHINKING: The inversion is the striking part — the same competitive drive that produces excellence in sports and scholarship here produces excellence in cruelty, because the admiration structure has been inverted. This is a paradigm case of how moral disengagement reorients intrinsic motivation.