Violence-prone individuals are selectively recruited into destructive organizations

Evidence

In his landmark simulated-prison experiment, Philip Zimbardo randomly assigned healthy, normal college students to be prisoners or prison guards (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973; Zimbardo, 2007). The roleplaying quickly turned into a harsh reality. The guards began to harass and humiliate the prisoners and punish them severely for the slightest disobedience. As further testimony to the transformative power of the simulated prison environment, Zimbardo recounted how he found himself crossing the line from observant researcher to authoritarian prison warden. With guards escalating their abuse and inmates exhibiting increasing physical and emotional distress and a growing sense of helplessness, the simulated prison had spun out of control and had to be terminated prematurely. In his book The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo provides an insightful analysis of the social forces that were at play in turning American military prison guards into callous perpetrators who humiliated, debased, and physically abused detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison (Zimbardo, 2007). Demonstrating that local situations have their basis in higher-level social systems, Zimbardo deepens the causal analysis by embedding the influences operating at the local prison situation within higher-level pressure from governmental officials to use physically painful methods of interrogation to extract information from the detainees. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 681 (#complicates, via linked claim)

We do not have much difficulty seeing how those organizations can shift toward becoming illicitly destructive machines; they are destructive machines to begin with. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3989 (#complicates, via linked claim)

My argument thus far is simple. Most evildoers are produced by a process of socialization into doing evil, a process that makes them capable of doing evil autonomously and independently in the future. If this argument is correct, then we come face-to-face with a question that we now recognize as urgent. How are the organizations that socialize an individual into doing harm created and sustained? If they are an important source of harmdoers, then how do they themselves come about? — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3969 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Organizational screening, not just disposition, filters out mentally ill recruits — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 4090; Ordinary people become destructive agents through duty, not hostility — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 606; Demonstrating destructive power attracts recruits to terrorist organizations (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Ordinary healthy people become cruel perpetrators under conducive social roles. #complicates (0.82) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 681
• Violence-prone hierarchies are already destructive machines by design #complicates (0.75) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3989
• Evildoing is learned through socialization into harmful organizations #complicates (0.74) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 3969