A Reader Writes: Can the Milgram Experiment Be Applied to Cyberbullying?

Since I blogged earlier today about my need to look for those shining threads that pull my mind and heart forward by providing me with new moral insight, and since I have stinted readers of this blog throughout the week by not posting here, I'd like to upload an email discussion I've just had with someone who read one of my previous postings and recently contacted me about it. The posting in question is my posting on connections between the Milgram experiment and school bullying.

The person who emailed me about that posting is beginning a doctoral dissertation that will focus on cyberbullying. She wonders if it's possible to make connections between the Milgram experiment and cyberbullying. In the view of this correspondent, it's possible that the Milgram experiment demonstrates a human tendency not only to practice cruelty simply because an authority figure commands us to do so, but a tendency as well to ramp up our cruelty when we feel at a remove from the object of our cruelty.

And so my correspondent wants to investigate whether students who engage in online bullying feel a sense of removal from their victim that enables them to ignore their responsibility for the pain they inflict. It's possible, this researcher thinks, that online technology invites cruelty in some young people who would otherwise not bully, by providing those young people a sense of distancing from the person they are bullying online.

And here's what I wrote in response:

I can't claim to have done much research on cyberbullying, but what you say makes intuitive sense to me. When people feel that their identities are shielded, and that they can function at a remove from those they intimidate, it strikes me that they may well be inclined to enhance their tactics of intimidation.

I know the impulse myself. When I post on a blog under a username, there is always a temptation to say things I probably would not say in my own persona, under my own name. I try not to succumb to that temptation. But I still know it's there, tugging at me.

And I wonder if that tug accounts for the raucous nature of many blog discussions. I recently read a blog discussion that became downright ugly, and very quickly. One of the posters who uses the blog name Mean Girl was gratuitously insulting--well, mean, actually--to other posters. The whole discussion quickly got out of hand, with insults flying in all directions.

I'm not sure that would have happened, had all those bloggers been talking face to face. I imagine they would still have had their strong opinions and animosities. But I also suspect that they would probably have been inclined to express them more judiciously and with more civility than they did when their identities were shielded by usernames.

There is something about being at a remove from the object of our cruelty (whether that cruelty is intentional or not) that does permit us to be more cruel, I think. The German theologian Dorothee Sölle wrote about this following the Vietnam War, in her book Of War and Love (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1983). She argues (convincingly, I think) that technologies for warfare invented in the 20th century (e.g., the atomic bomb, napalm in the Vietnam War, etc.) brings warfare to an even more dehumanizing level than any we've seen in the past.

As she notes, prior to the development of such modern technologies for waging war, people at least saw the human faces of those they killed with swords, bows and arrows, and even cannons and rifles. Now we can fly over a place, drop bombs or canisters of gel designed to set people afire, and never seen any human faces at all, though millions may die.

Cruelty is perhaps always easier to practice when we do not have to face the object of our cruelty, and when we can, in various ways, convince ourselves that it is not another human being like ourselves we are tormenting, but someone whose humanity is distant from our own, and not at the same level as ours.

Update on Arkansas Anti-Gay Adoption Signatory Database: Threats from Family Council of Arkansas

An update to my posting yesterday (here) about the database that Know Thy Neighbor has placed online--names of those who signed a petition to place an anti-gay adoption act on the ballot in Arkansas during our last statewide election.

Our statewide free paper Arkansas Times is now reporting (here) that the Family Council of Arkansas, which sponsored this bill that has made it much harder for adoptive children in Arkansas to find homes, is protesting. Family Council wants to block the public's access to this database of names, and is (dishonestly) suggesting that Know Thy Neighbor may have broken unspecified laws in placing the database online.

These names are, of course, a matter of public record. No laws have been broken in placing them online. Family Council is well aware of that, and its talk of laws that may possibly have been broken is disingenuous. Family Council also threatens to have the legislature pass a law that prohibits the public from access to the names of signatories to any petitions to place acts on the ballot.

A reminder, by the way, that Family Council of Arkansas is an umbrella of Focus on the Family. This group and its activities in Arkansas are part of a well-orchestrated nationwide campaign of the political and religious right to use gay human beings as cannon fodder in political battles designed to garner Republican votes. This is a cynical game that counts on ill-informed and prejudiced people in states like Arkansas to vote "right" when the rainbow flag is waved in front of them.

Interestingly enough, one of the threads of discussion that has emerged at Arkansas Times about this petition centers on the claim of some signatories that they didn't really intend to sign the act, or didn't sign it, though their name is right there on the list for the world to see. One reason that laws protect public disclosure of the names of signatories to such petitions public is precisely to permit the public to verify that people actually did sign the petitions, and that no hanky-panky has gone on in getting a petition onto the ballot. It is strangely inconsistent to argue both that many names on such a petition are incorrect signatures, and that the public should not have access to the names.

The discussion of this matter on the Arkansas Times blog is fascinating and full of such ludicrous inconsistencies and lapses in logic. A strong contingent of folks posting want to depict those who signed the anti-gay adoption petition as victims.

Though their intent was to victimize gay citizens (and though they've ended up victimizing children in need of foster and adoptive homes), they're the victims all of a sudden. They didn't know what they were signing. Some mean person made them do it. Their church told them to do it. They just wanted to see democracy in action, to give everyone a chance to vote on this petition.

Please. It is absurd and not morally admirable to try to disclaim responsibility for our ugly acts only when they've come to light. A huge percentage of those supporting this gay-bashing bill are bible-believing Christians. Have they never read the gospel passage in which Jesus tells his followers that what they whisper in the dark will one day be shouted from the rooftops?

Why the shame, the disclaimers, and the dissembling? I had thought that the point of the moral crusade against gay brothers and sisters was precisely to be defiantly proud of one's fidelity to the scriptures, and of one's countercultural stance. And I had thought that those who take these defiant countercultural but oh-so-moral stands were also defiantly happy to pay a price for taking the moral high road.

The argument that I've done something ugly because my church told me to do so, and I now regret the ugliness because it's been made public: that argument is just pitiful. People who victimize others seek to claim victim status for themselves, when they've been exposed, with very ill grace.

The Milgram Experiment and School Bullying

Thinking, as the day goes on, about what the Milgram experiment shows us about human nature, and the connection of that experiment to school bullying. Researcher Stanley Milgram of Yale University demonstrated in the 1960s that an overwhelming majority of human beings—that is, of us—are willing to inflict pain on others at the behest of an authority figure, even when the pain they/we are inflicting is evident to those/us causing the pain.

Milgram’s experiment had research subjects shock other subjects with electric shocks, ratcheting up the current when told to do so. Unbeknownst to those doing the shocking, no electric current was transmitted in these experiments.

But the recipients of the shocks were actors hired to demonstrate pain when shocked. Even when the amount of electricity commanded by the authority figure appeared to cause increasing levels of pain, even severe pain, as exhibited in the actions of those receiving the shocks, the vast majority of those commanded to inflict pain continued to do so when instructed to do so.

The conclusion Milgram reached is rather bleak: the majority of human beings will not second-guess an authority figure when they are instructed to inflict pain on others, even when that pain is evident to them. Milgram states,

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority (“The Perils of Obedience,” Harper’s Magazine [1974]).

I see all kinds of links to school bullying. In every case of school bullying I’ve ever examined, there is a tacit assumption on the part of those doing and justifying the bullying that an unidentified authority figure commands and approves the bullying. School bullying is thus, in the minds of those doing the bullying, a kind of socially-approved punishment of someone who is seen as refusing to conform to socially mandated norms of behavior.

We live in a society whose outlook is overwhelmingly heterosexist. Because the majority of us take for granted that heterosexuality (and heterosexism) are normative, many of us see anyone who transgresses the norms of heterosexuality as deliberately refusing to obey widely accepted social (and/or ethical) norms. Because the majority of us think and feel this way, we are hesitant to conclude that someone who is bullied—particularly a boy viewed as gender-inappropriate—does not somehow "cause" and merit his bullying.

When no authority figure stands up to those who think this way, who deliver lumps on the basis of their heterosexist assumptions, it is even easier to conclude that the bullied boy has elicited and deserves his punishment. School officials, teachers, and parents are always a part of the matrix from which bullying arises, insofar as they do not speak out authoritatively, immediately, and strongly to stop the bullying process. Any silence at all on their part, any hesitancy, any suggestion that the person being bullied is not innocent, feeds the insidious assumptions that justify and enable bullying.

What bullies have going for them is the tacit approval of a silent majority. When the majority remain silent in the face of obvious pain inflicted on someone who has clearly not merited such pain, except by being different and behaving differently, the circle of authority justifying the bullying appears complete: authority figures do not speak up; peers remain silent; those delivering the punishment have a social warrant for engaging in violence.

In this way, the groundwork is laid for bullying that can become so often repeated that it is well-nigh habitual, for escalating violence against the person bullied, and for strong backlash when anyone raises questions about this circle of violence. It is shocking—but entirely predictable—that when news breaks of a person who has been bullied in a school system for year after year, the majority of people in the community and the school, including a majority of the peers of the person bullied, clamor loudly about how the person bullied deserves his torment.

Hidden inside the nexus of social assumptions by which bullying is justified and perpetuated is a nasty moral warrant: namely, that the majority of people cannot be wrong.

The Milgram experiment suggests otherwise. Indeed, the Milgram experiment (and what happened in Nazi Germany) suggest that, when pain is being inflicted on others for no reason than who the person being beaten and humiliated is, the majority of people are always wrong.

Steve’s reflections on moral education are right. Something is awry in societies that somehow manage to teach people that it is nobler to inflict pain on convenient social targets, than to stand up to those who behave this way.

Something is not happening in our educational process when a majority of students in a school and town where an incident of longstanding bullying has been exposed leap to the defense of those doing the bullying and vilify the person bullied. Something is very wrong with the unchallenged assumption that simply because one has a penis, is bellicose, physically commanding, and capable of inflicting pain on a “weaker” person, one is justified in doing so. Something is morally awry in societies in which such breathtaking entitlement on the part of macho men goes not only unquestioned but bolstered by the majority of citizens.

Something is rotten at the very core of societies who allow some boys to think of themselves as swaggering little lords of creation, of whom little is expected (intellectually, interpersonally) than to become the watchdogs of social orthodoxy who are willing to beat others into submission. Something is wrong in societies that place a premium on male swagger and athletic ability, but not on sensitivity, creativity, and the ability to relate constructively to the world around them.

When bullying perdures—and when it is so quickly and easily justified, when it goes on and on with alarming repetitiveness in our society—our schools and churches are clearly not teaching something that is essential to the constitution of a healthy, humane society. We need to find better ways to educate the hearts of our youth, and not merely their bodies and minds.