The Sociopath Next Door (10 page)

The many-times-replicated outcome of his obedience study led Milgram to make the famous pronouncement that has haunted, and also motivated, so many students of human nature: “A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.” Milgram believed that authority could put conscience to sleep mainly because the obedient person makes an “adjustment of thought,” which is to see himself as
not responsible for his own actions.
In his mind, he is no longer a person who must act in a morally accountable way, but the agent of an external authority to whom he attributes all responsibility and all initiative. This “adjustment of thought” makes it much easier for benign leadership to establish order and control, but by the same psychological mechanism, it has countless times rolled out the red carpet for self-serving, malevolent, and sociopathic “authorities.”

Where Conscience Draws the Line

The extent to which authority dulls conscience is affected by the perceived legitimacy of that authority. If the person giving the orders is seen as a subordinate, or even as an equal, the same “adjustment of thought” may never occur. In Milgram's initial study, one of the minority of people who eventually refused to continue with the experiment was a thirty-two-year-old engineer who apparently regarded the scientist in the lab coat as, at most, his intellectual peer. This subject pushed his chair away from the shock generator and in an indignant tone said to Milgram, “I'm an electrical engineer, and I have had shocks . . . I think I've gone too far already, probably.” In an interview later, when Milgram asked him who was accountable for shocking the man in the other room, he did not assign any responsibility to the experimenter. Instead, he replied, “I would put it on myself entirely.” He was a professional person with an advanced education, and education must be acknowledged as one of the factors that determine whether or not conscience stays alert. It would be a grave and arrogant mistake to imagine that an academic degree directly increases the strength of conscience in the human psyche. On the other hand, education can sometimes level the perceived legitimacy of an authority figure, and thereby limit unquestioning obedience. With education and knowledge, the individual may be able to hold on to the perception of him- or herself as a legitimate authority.

Relatedly, in another permutation of his experiment, Milgram posed an “ordinary man,” rather than a scientist, as the person who ordered the subjects to administer shocks. When an “ordinary man” was in charge, instead of a man in a white lab coat, obedience on the part of the subjects dropped from 62.5 percent to 20 percent. Packaging and perceptions are not everything, but evidently they get pretty close. Some of us may resist a person who looks like we do, but most of us will obey someone who
looks like
an authority. This finding is of particular concern in an age when our leaders and experts come to us via the magic of television, where nearly anyone can be made to appear patrician and commandingly larger than life.

In addition to being larger than life, images on television are up close and personal—they are in our living rooms—and another factor that affects authority's power to overwhelm individual conscience is the proximity of the person giving the commands. When Milgram varied his experiment such that he was not in the room, obedience dropped by two-thirds, to about the same level as when an “ordinary man” was in charge. And when authority was not close by, subjects tended to “cheat” by using only the lower shock levels on the machine.

The nearness of authority is especially relevant to the real-life obedience requirements of combat and war. As it turns out, individual conscience draws a surprisingly firm line at killing—surprising for those who think of human beings as natural war makers. This aspect of conscience is so resilient in normal people that military psychologists have needed to devise ways around it. For example, military experts now know that to make men kill with any kind of reliability, commands must be given by authorities who are present with the troops. Otherwise, the men in the field will tend to “cheat” on their orders to kill, will intentionally misaim or simply fail to fire, to keep from violating this mightiest proscription of conscience.

Brig. Gen. S. L. A Marshall was a United States combat historian in the Pacific theater during World War II and later became the official historian of the European theater of operations. He wrote of many World War II incidents in which almost all soldiers obeyed and fired their weapons while their leaders were present to command them, but when the leaders left, the firing rate dropped immediately to between 15 and 20 percent. Marshall believed that the great relief displayed by soldiers in a sector where they were not being directly ordered to fire “was due not so much to the realization that things were safer there as to the blessed knowledge that for a time they were
not under the compulsion to take life.
”

In his book
On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society,
former U.S. Army Ranger and paratrooper Lt. Col. Dave Grossman reviews Marshall's observations, along with the FBI's studies of nonfiring rates among law-enforcement officers in the 1950s and 1960s, and observations of nonfiring from a long list of wars, including the American Civil War, World Wars I and II, the Vietnam War, and the Falklands War. He concludes that “the vast majority of combatants throughout history, at the moment of truth when they could and should kill the enemy, have found themselves to be ‘conscientious objectors.'” After weighing the considerable historical evidence that ground soldiers often resist and quietly sabotage opportunities to kill, Grossman comes to a “novel and reassuring conclusion about the nature of man: despite an unbroken tradition of violence and war, man is not by nature a killer.” To subvert the bottom line of conscience, to be able to thrust a bayonet or pull a trigger to kill a stranger, normal human beings must be carefully taught, psychologically conditioned, and commanded by authorities on the battlefield.

Also, it helps to encourage moral exclusion, to remind the troops that the enemy soldiers are nothing but
its,
Krauts, slants, gooks. As Peter Watson writes in
War on the Mind: The Military Uses and Abuses of Psychology,
“the stupidity of local customs is ridiculed,” and “local personalities are presented as evil demigods.”

On and off the battlefield, for both the troops and the people back home, the particular war being fought must be portrayed as a crucial or even a sacred struggle between good and evil, which is exactly the message that authorities—on all sides of the conflict—have tried to convey during every major war in history. For example, though it is now difficult to remember anything but the moral outrage that exploded during the final phases of the Vietnam War, as that war began, Americans were repeatedly assured that they and only they could save the South Vietnamese people from a future of terror and enslavement. Speeches by leaders during wartime, in modern times broadcasted into our living rooms, have always pushed hard on this theme of an absolutely necessary mission, the high calling that justifies the killing. And paradoxically, authority can more readily project this take on reality for the very reason that conscience cherishes a high calling and a sense of membership in the right-minded group. In other words, conscience can be tricked, and when it comes to killing strangers, trickery is usually required.

That psychology can provide the military with techniques to make killers out of nonkillers, and that the military is using these procedures, is dispiriting news. But behind the bad news is a particle of hope that glints like a diamond in a sea of darkness. We are beginning to learn that human beings are not the natural killing machines we have at times believed ourselves to be. Even under the desperate pressures of combat, we have often left our weapons unfired, or taken poor aim, for when it was not silenced under the bell jar of authority, there was always an outcry from our human connectedness—there has always been the voice of conscience—reminding us that we must not kill.

Because its essence is killing, war is the ultimate contest between conscience and authority. Our seventh sense demands that we not take life, and when authority overrules conscience and a soldier is induced to kill in combat, he is very likely to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder immediately and for the remainder of his life, along with the depression, divorces, addictions, ulcers, and heart disease that attend traumatic memory. In contrast, research involving Vietnam veterans has shown that soldiers who are not placed in situations where they are forced to kill are no more likely to develop the symptoms of PTSD than are those who spend their entire enlistment at home.

This crippling competition between our moral sense and our authority figures has gone on almost unceasingly since human beings began to live in hierarchical societies, for the past five thousand years during which a king or a land-hungry nobleman, or the leader of a state or a nation could order less powerful individuals to enter a battle and kill. And apparently it is a struggle of conscience that will not be resolved in our children's or our grandchildren's lifetimes.

Obedience 6, Conscience 4

Stanley Milgram, who demonstrated that at least six out of ten people will tend to obey to the bitter end an official-looking authority who is physically present, pointed out that people who disobey destructive authority suffer psychologically, too. Often a person who disobeys finds himself at odds with the social order, and may find it hard to shake the feeling that he has been faithless to someone or something to whom he pledged allegiance. Obedience is passive, and it is only the disobedient one who must bear the “burden of his action,” to use Milgram's words. If courage is acting according to one's conscience despite pain or fear, then strength is the ability to keep conscience awake and in force despite the demands of authorities to do otherwise.

And strength is important, because in championing the various causes of conscience, the odds are against us.

To illustrate, I propose an imaginary society of exactly one hundred adults, in a group that conforms precisely to known statistics. This means that of the one hundred people in my hypothetical society, four are sociopathic—they have no conscience. Of the remaining ninety-six decent citizens, all of whom do have consciences, 62.5 percent will obey authority more or less without question, quite possibly the authority of one of the more aggressive and controlling sociopaths in the crowd. This leaves thirty-six people who have both conscience and the strength to bear the burdens of their actions, a little more than a third of the group. These are not impossible odds, but they are not easy ones, either.

And there is yet another challenge for the conscience-bound, which is that, strange as it seems, most of the sociopaths are invisible. Let us turn to that dilemma now, and the remarkable case of Doreen Littlefield.

FOUR

the nicest person in the world

I saw a werewolf drinking a piña colada at Trader Vic's
His hair was perfect

—Warren Zevon

D
oreen glances in the rearview mirror and wishes for the billionth time that she were beautiful. Life would be so much easier. She appears pretty in the mirror this morning, rested and with all of her makeup on, but she knows that if she were not so skilled with the cosmetics, or if she were tired, she would look quite plain. She would look plain like the unsophisticated girl from the sticks that she was, more as if she belonged milking a cow than in the driver's seat of this black BMW. She is only thirty-four, and her skin still looks good, no lines yet, a little pale maybe. But her nose is slightly pointed, enough to be noticeable, and her straw-colored hair, her most problematic feature, stays dry and frizzled no matter what she does to it. Luckily, her body is excellent. She looks away from the mirror and down at her light gray silk suit, conservative but formfitting. Doreen's body is good, and even better, she knows just how to move. For a woman with a plain face, she is incredibly seductive. When she walks across a room, all the men in it watch. Remembering this, she smiles and starts the car.

About a mile from her apartment, she realizes that she forgot to feed the damn Maltese. Oh well. The stupid froufrou dog will manage to survive until she gets home from work tonight. At this point, a month after the impulse purchase, she cannot believe she ever bought it anyway. She had thought she would look elegant when she walked it, but walking it turned out to be tedious. When she can find the time, she will have to get it put to sleep, or maybe she can sell it to someone. It was expensive, after all.

In her parking area on the sprawling grounds of the psychiatric hospital, she makes sure to park her car beside Jenna's rusted-out Escort, a convenient visual comparison to remind Jenna of their relative places in the world. One more glance in the mirror and then Doreen picks up her briefcase, stuffed to overflowing to make it clear how hard she works, and walks up the stairs to the suite of offices above the ward. As she passes through the waiting room, she flashes a “We're good buddies” smile at Ivy, the frumpy secretary-receptionist for the unit, and Ivy immediately brightens.

“Good morning, Dr. Littlefield. Oh my goodness, I love your suit! It's just gorgeous!”

“Why, thank you, Ivy. I can always count on you to put me in a good mood,” Doreen replies with another big smile. “Buzz me when my patient gets here, would you?”

Doreen disappears into her office, and Ivy shakes her head and says out loud to an empty waiting room, “That has got to be the nicest person in the world.”

It is early, not quite eight o'clock, and in her office Doreen goes to the window to watch her colleagues arrive. She sees Jackie Rubenstein walking toward the building, with her long legs and her effortless posture. Jackie is from Los Angeles, even-tempered and funny, and her beautiful olive skin makes her look, always, as if she just got back from a wonderful vacation. She is brilliant as well, a great deal smarter than Doreen, and for this reason even more than the others, Doreen secretly despises her. In fact, she hates her so much that she would kill her if she thought she could get away with it, but she knows she would eventually get caught. Doreen and Jackie were postdocs together at the hospital eight years ago, became friends, at least in Jackie's eyes, and now Doreen is hearing rumors that Jackie may receive the Mentor of the Year Award. They are the same age. How can Jackie possibly win an award for being a “mentor” at the age of thirty-four?