Part 31 (1/2)

The experiment had to be interrupted after six days, mainly because the remaining prisoners were unacceptably close to mental breakdown.

There are of course many other contexts in which the role and the self become contiguous. As James Waller says in his book ent.i.tled Becoming Evil (parts of this account are based on his a.n.a.lysis of the existing evidence): Evil acts not only reflect the self, they shape the self.

GROUPS FORMED FOR ALMOST NO REASON.

The English social psychologist Henri Tajfel and a few of his colleagues set out to study how many features people must have in common in order to see themselves as part of a group and, as a next step, set up a system of prejudices against other groups.

His first plan was to recruit people without any regard to common features, allocate them at random to groups, and then gradually introduce similarities, negative prejudices, and conflicts between the groups. He expected that this process would allow him to observe how and when group ident.i.ty is formed.

In his best-known minimal group experiment, he asked the subjects to express their opinions of a few abstract paintings and separated them afterward into two groups. One lot were told that they had all expressed a preference for paintings similar to those by Paul Klee, while the others preferred the style of Wa.s.sily Kandinsky. None of this was true, as group allocation was entirely random.

The subjects did not know one another and had had no prior contact. Given the opportunity to evaluate photographs of all the subjects, partic.i.p.ants ranked those in their own group as better at their jobs and more pleasant to be with. When individuals were asked to distribute money, group members were always favored.

In a similar experiment, some of the subjects were so biased against the other group that they were happier for their own people to receive two dollars rather than three, on condition that the others received one dollar instead of four. In other words, they were more interested in beating the others than getting the highest possible payment for their own members.

Until this series of experiments, most social psychologists had a.s.sumed that group ident.i.ty was created gradually in response to shared experiences. n.o.body expected prejudice and hostility to emerge between people without any knowledge of their own group or of the others.

Relations.h.i.+ps within a group, or between groups, const.i.tute cla.s.sical fields of research in social psychology. Many different experiments show that our thoughts operate according to an Us-and-Them model. The basis for this is straightforward. Everyone is forced to work out how to deal with a world that is endlessly complex. In order to simplify existence and sort out irrelevant information quickly, we divide ourselves into categories.

Categorization is a human way of thinking, as essential as it is unavoidable. Types of category vary between individuals and cultures, but the process is common to us all. It shapes how we understand our environment and our relations.h.i.+p to it.

Social psychology has demonstrated some of the consistent distortions caused by the Us-and-Them model. We tend to exaggerate the similarities of those who belong to our group, just as we exaggerate the h.o.m.ogeneity in other groups and the differences among them. And normally we care more for members of our own group than for others.

In crises or open conflicts, these att.i.tudes become extreme. All mankind has the potential for believing the propaganda machine when it repeats endlessly: Kill, or be killed!

THE VICTIM ASKS FOR IT.

We are all aware that good people are not immune to bad experiences, but a large majority of us nonetheless try to hold on to the hope of a fundamentally just world, a good place to bring your children into.

As numerous studies demonstrate, this hope, combined with the barely conscious human need for meaning and for coherence in the information we receive, makes us twist reality until it fits into our vision of order.

It is not only those who carry out terrible acts who are deluded by their distorted thought patterns, memories, and sensory input into believing that their world is still just and meaningful. Those who witness the tragedies and, indeed, the victims themselves also collaborate in this fiction.

People struck down by a serious illness, as well as those close to the patient, are often determined to find the cause. They feel a strong need to establish exactly what they have done wrong to deserve the affliction. Again, it is common for victims of violence to wonder about the root cause. Maybe I asked for it; maybe I shouldnt have walked down that lane so late at night; maybe I shouldnt have worn that dress. Such anxieties become the focus of their thoughts, regardless of the fact that they have the right to walk down any lane and wear any kind of clothes.

Sometimes it seems that victims actively prefer to carry the burden of blame rather than recognize that mere chance can intervene to ruin a life. A wealth of experimental data supports this in every detail.

In one such experiment, Melvin Lerner and Carolyn Simmons asked seventy-two students to watch the punishment, in the form of severe electrical shocks, given every time a victim gave a wrong answer to a question. The victim was an actress, mimicking the pain.

Some of the observers were told that they would be allowed to stop the shocks later in the process. Asked to describe how they felt about the victim, those who believed she would continue to be in pain viewed her more negatively than those who thought that they would be able to control the shocks.

This way of construing the position of the victim is sharpened when we ourselves are inflicting the suffering. Cognitive dissonance makes us like those whom we have helped and dislike those we have hurt.

In the context of his experiment on obedience to authority, Stanley Milgram noted that many of the subjects later said things like: He (the pupil) was so stupid that he really deserved to be shocked. Another, similar argument was that since the pupil had agreed to join the experiment he was asking for trouble. This was despite the fact that those who expressed such a view had also joined the experiment and it had apparently been the luck of the draw that decided who was teacher and who was pupil.

It seems that powerful psychological impulses drive perpetrators to think and feel that their victims deserve whats happening to them. The more appallingly brutal the acts a perpetrator commits, the more strongly he comes to believe that they are only right and proper.

We all have a tendency to construe reality in the same way as the German civilian who commented, when forced by British soldiers to walk through a newly liberated concentration camp: What awful crimes these people must have committed to be condemned to this kind of punishment.

If you want to read about genocide in the context of social psychology, there are three major works: Becoming Evil, James Wallers highly recommended 2002 overview; the cla.s.sic The Roots of Evil by Ervin Staub; and Understanding Genocide, a compilation of articles edited by Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber.

chapter 32.

it is late and Iben trudges heavily to her apartment on the sixth floor. She has spent the evening in Malenes place, discussing Anne-Lise. She feels worn out, and the only thing on her mind is sleep.

At the last turn of the stair she senses someone on the landing outside her door. She looks up. The man is tall, with a ma.s.s of tightly curled black hair, graying at the temples. She takes in his black leather jacket and the dead look in his eyes. In an instant she knows that he has been waiting for her, and why.

She flies down the stairs. He goes after her with long strides and soon catches up. He grabs her throat before she has time to scream or, at least, that is how Anne-Lise usually imagines it. Then he grips her around her waist. Ibens legs, much shorter than his, kick out wildly. She knows what will happen next. So does Anne-Lise.

The reel runs and reruns inside Anne-Lises head, showing every detail as Ibens face changes. The bleak lamplight picks out the shadows under her eyes. Anne-Lise watches as Ibens expression becomes remorseful. At last she has insight into what she has done, how she lied to herself and convinced herself that she was good oh, so good at the same time that she did all she could to ruin another human being.

In Anne-Lises imagination the knife is large, with broad teeth cut deep into the steel. Iben will die now. Soon, reflex spasms will make her body twitch. She will weaken fast as life drains from her.

Anne-Lises tired mind steers in and around the fantasies that coalesce and then fade in her mind, while she tries to concentrate on other things. The familiar images, the rapist in the red tracksuit murdering Malene, the man lying in wait for Iben, can start up even when she is in the Winter Garden, talking with one of the other women.

She would like to make an appointment to see Yngve and be rea.s.sured by him. On the other hand, she knows he will insist that she confront Iben and Malene. Anne-Lise would also like to tell Nicola what the last few weeks have been like, yet cant bring herself to answer when her phone indicates that Nicola is on the line. She will keep insisting that Anne-Lise should hand in her notice.

Instead Anne-Lise tries to suppress her fantasies and think about something peaceful. Driving along the motorway in the morning, she speculates about the merger. She is still thinking about it when she turns left onto the Jagt Road exit and when she parks her car and when she rides up in the groaning old elevator with the three p.o.r.nographic cartoons scratched in the corner. Everything will change when the DCIG becomes part of the DIHR. New colleagues and a new boss.

Anne-Lise thinks about the takeover while she fills her mug with coffee until it spills over the sides. She is still thinking about it later on, when she sends off an e-mail to the wrong address.

Her first task is to a.s.sign keywords to cla.s.sified reports on the genocide carried out by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. She compares scans from three different books to look for patterns and possible correlations.

She reads about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 and the attempts to change the ethnic composition of Afghan tribes. The army chiefs were especially keen to reduce the number of Pashtuns in the northern Afghan provinces, because it would facilitate their incorporation into the Soviet Union. Reliable figures are scarce, but the UN estimates that between 1978 and 1992, 1.5 to 2 million Afghans were killed. They were subjected to bombs and chemical weapons, but also to air drops of childrens toys filled with deadly toxins, ma.s.sacres, and destruction of crops and wells.

Approximately 6 million inhabitants fled. To prevent them from ever returning, the occupying army destroyed the irrigation systems on which Afghan agriculture depended, turning the refugees homeland into a desert.

The s.p.a.ce bar on Anne-Lises keyboard isnt working properly; sometimes it adds two or three s.p.a.ces, sometimes none. Unless she proofreads everything with particular care, the users wont find what they are looking for. She is checking the phrase torture and murder of foreign journalists, doctors, and aid workers when Paul steps into the Winter Garden to make an announcement.

Gunnar is going to drop in sometime this afternoon. I have promised him a tour of the Center and a talk about the funding of our operations. He insists he wants an idea about these things before he agrees to join the board.

Anne-Lise listens through the open door. She cant see the others but senses that the atmosphere has changed. The keyboards have fallen silent and now drawers are being opened and there is the sound of paper being shuffled.

When Iben speaks to Malene, does her voice somehow have an edge?

Anne-Lises desk is awash with papers, but theyre in order. In case the many Post-it notes make it look as if shes behind with a lot of jobs, she puts some of them away. She also decides to get rid of three large sacks of waste paper piled up close to her desk. The sacks, which are stuffed with wrappings of foreign books and magazine packages, actually demonstrate how efficient she is. All the same, they look too messy. She knows the spots the cleaners miss, especially with all the electrical equipment and the leads and sockets, so she does a quick spring clean.

She is almost ready when she hears the others calling out to one another.

What am I supposed to do with this?

Dont know. But what about this, then?

Anne-Lise cant hear the reply, but they start laughing. Then Iben comes running into the library, holding an empty bottle of rum. Anne-Lise has no idea where the bottle has come from but a.s.sumes that Iben brought it to drop it in the gla.s.s-recycling bin. Its the kind of thing she would do.

Iben is still laughing. Youve got plenty of room for this kind of thing! She puts the bottle in one of Anne-Lises cupboards and turns the key.