THE SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY OF EVIL: CAN THE LAW PREVENT GROUPS FROM MAKING GOOD PEOPLE GO BAD?

David Crump, University of Houston Law Center

Abstract

In the year 2000, widespread official perjury by members of the Los Angeles Police Department led to investigations of nearly seventy officers and tainted hundreds of criminal convictions. A few years earlier, managers at Enron Corporation had tolerated and committed pervasive acts of fraud that lost billions of dollars for shareholders. And a few years later, jailers at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq photographed each other abusing detainees in ways that subjected themselves to prosecution and the United States to severe loss of international credibility. In each instance, citizens reading their newspapers must have wondered, “How could these things happen?”

The answers are elusive. But some rough explanations for these situations, and for wide varieties of other institutionalized misconduct, are sketched in the experiments and theories of social psychologists. For example, the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance, which roughly corresponds to the lay person’s understanding that individuals sometimes “rationalize” their bad behavior, is actually a far greater facilitator of evil than most people would guess. It starts with “small steps,” becomes aggravated when the individual takes on a role in an institution, and can entrap the actor in an escalating pattern of violations. In groups, the normative influence and the conformity effect can become powerful motivators toward misconduct, and the experiments demonstrating the influence of authority toward evil are downright scary.

This article explores these theories as a means of considering not only how good people go bad, but also, as a guide toward shaping the law to prevent that result. The author’s conclusion is that whenever informal group norms are likely to produce bad behavior, the law must take special account of the need for prompt and thorough enforcement of legally imposed norms. Instead of wondering why jailers at Abu Ghraib misbehaved so badly, the inference should be stood on its head, and we rather should expect this kind of conduct to develop. Enforcement must be so pervasive that, rather than waiting to respond to significant violations, it “nips them in the bud,” because it is important to prevent small steps toward perverse informal norms. The writing of standards so that they are readily enforceable becomes important, and if there are means for creating automatic enforcement, they should be invoked. So that the authority influence can be harnessed to promote violation-free conduct, the law should impose responsibility upon managers at least to undertake reasonable countermeasures against bad behavior even when they cannot completely prevent them. The social psychology of evil even suggests that a lower moral standard than we might wish, but one that is subject to effective enforcement, is actually preferable to a higher standard that is difficult to enforce.