The Exception Page 31

  Iben keeps stepping from one foot to the other. ‘We were wondering about Frederik’s role on the board once his senior post in Human Rights is announced. Now that it’s no longer in his interest to keep this place independent, it could be problematic, couldn’t it?’

  Anne-Lise doesn’t think they should be discussing this with another member of the board, but Iben is so much more knowledgeable about the rules and what’s acceptable, in terms of the politics of the organisation.

  Tatiana, however, sounds surprised. ‘Iben, it’s not problematic in the slightest. Frederik can easily put on different hats at different times. We all do, you know. And he’s very professional.’

  Malene looks intently at Tatiana and edges forward until she is in front of Anne-Lise. ‘So you don’t think there will be a conflict of interests?’

  ‘No, I don’t. Absolutely not.’ Tatiana picks up her coat, ready to get on with library business. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that. Truly. Trust me. But have you spoken to Paul about it?’

  Anne-Lise can’t think what the correct way of dealing with this straight question about the Centre’s director might be.

  But Malene doesn’t hesitate. ‘No, we haven’t raised it with him. You’re right, we should.’

  ‘Yes, you really ought to. Paul attends the board meetings and can tell you how everything works. I’m sure he will confirm that there’s no problem.’

  Then, at last, Anne-Lise gets to escort Tatiana into the library. She shows her the results of her search, a collection of reports from the Portuguese Foreign Office staff, written in Portuguese and full of details about the Indonesian genocide of 200,000 civilians, roughly a third of the population of occupied East Timor.

  Looking through books with someone else brings a special sense of intimacy, like having your hair washed by the hairdresser.

  Later Anne-Lise and Tatiana sit at Anne-Lise’s computer and search for references to East Timor in international on-line magazines. The library also holds French investigations that are not yet entered into the database and Tatiana wanders off in search of archive material. Anne-Lise sends an overview of the articles they have selected to the small printer in the Winter Garden.

  When she goes to collect the printouts, Iben and Malene are talking. They clearly know that Tatiana can no longer hear them and Iben’s voice is low and relaxed.

  ‘Malene, we simply haven’t had time to finalise the texts you need for the exhibition posters. So much has been going on these last few weeks, since Anne-Lise sent us those emails.’ Her tone is so matter-of-fact.

  Anne-Lise would prefer to say nothing and retreat to her own space, but she realises that the remark will be left hanging in the air, ready to hurt her later. Once more they have forced her to join their little game.

  She sighs, because she knows what will come next, and speaks quietly. ‘I didn’t send the emails.’

  The anticipation of the hunt makes their eyes shine. Malene takes over. ‘Oh yes you did.’

  ‘You know it wasn’t me. It was that Serb. The one the CIA arrested.’

  Iben sounds amused. ‘You’ve sent lots of emails, to us and other people.’

  Anne-Lise tries to be firm. ‘Of course I’ve sent emails, but not threatening ones.’

  ‘But I wasn’t talking about them.’

  Malene sides with Iben. ‘That’s not the point at all. We didn’t even mention any threats.’

  She pauses and looks at Anne-Lise, her expression now registering amazement. ‘Why on earth would you assume that we were talking about those emails?’

  Anne-Lise feels her insides cramp up. ‘That’s ridiculous! What was I supposed to think? Which emails do you mean?’

  ‘Different ones.’

  ‘Which ones?’

  Malene’s voice changes, as if it had all been a playful chat but now Anne-Lise has crossed the line. ‘Just drop it, Anne-Lise. And do try to stay calm.’

  Iben chips in: ‘You mustn’t be so paranoid.’

  Anne-Lise is about to say that she isn’t paranoid. But the situation is simply impossible. Every single day something like this occurs. What’s the point of protesting yet again? Every day she loses another point in the game.

  Anne-Lise goes to the toilets to pull herself together. She checks her face in the mirror. Nothing shows. No tears moistening her face. Have her features become harsher over the last few weeks?

  What was the meaning of Tatiana’s glance earlier? She seemed concerned. Why? And hadn’t they mentioned being drunk at work? How should she interpret that? Could it be that the others are spreading rumours that Anne-Lise drinks during working hours? It would explain Tatiana’s reaction.

  She feels calmer now and walks back to the library. While she and Tatiana work together, Tatiana asks Anne-Lise about her response to the emails. Does she feel safer now that the sender has been arrested?

  Anne-Lise is pleased at the thought that she could easily have given away more than she does. And if she had, Tatiana would have listened.

  It takes them almost an hour to finish their work in the library. Afterwards Tatiana has to get back to the Council for Torture Victims. Anne-Lise escorts her through the Winter Garden to the front door. Malene gets up to say goodbye and in no time at all makes Tatiana laugh. Once more, Tatiana lingers in the central room.

  Then Iben exclaims, her voice still full of laughter, ‘Oh, Tatiana, we haven’t had time to talk for ages! It’s a shame, but there’s been so much going on ever since we all – sorry, everyone except Anne-Lise – were sent those threats.’

  Tatiana doesn’t quite understand the tone of Iben’s remark. Her mouth opens in surprise. ‘How do you …?’

  Malene helps her out. ‘Oh, sorry! You couldn’t have known! It’s a running office gag that Anne-Lise sent those emails.’

  Tatiana looks around and speaks slowly, searching for words. ‘Oka-ay.’

  In that instant Anne-Lise feels she has spotted a new side to Tatiana. The older woman is always trying to make an effort to act ‘young’ in front of Malene and Iben. After all, she is almost thirty years older than they are, yet she tries hard to sound just as youthful and energetic.

  ‘Aha! Of course Anne-Lise must’ve sent the emails!’

  They are all supposed to laugh or smile now, but the irony sounds awkward coming from Tatiana, and somehow her comment seems out of place.

  The Psychology of Evil II

  Social psychology contributes a myriad of surprising and uncomfortable insights into studies of perpetrator behaviour.

  By Iben Højgaard

  In his book On Killing, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman states that, in a war situation, men and women who kill at a sufficiently great distance from the victims are, to the best of his personal knowledge, not traumatised later in life. The closer the soldier gets to the victim, the harder it is to kill. Yet no government has ever had to cancel plans for genocide for lack of people willing to carry out their orders.

  How to resolve this contradiction?

  In the previous issue of Genocide News, the article ‘The Psychology of Evil I’ referred to Stanley Milgram’s experimental work on the parameters of ‘obedience to authority’. There are dozens of other approaches in social psychology that also illuminate the psychology of the perpetrator. This article presents a small selection.

  Actions shape attitudes

  Generally we believe that it is our attitudes that determine our behaviour. The reverse is also true: what we do affects our way of thinking, our feelings and opinions.

  It is unsettling for us when we realise that our actions are in conflict with our beliefs. To distance ourselves from this we unconsciously tend to adjust our attitudes and feelings, rather than change our behaviour. Social psychologists have carried out hundreds of experiments, attempting to pin down exactly how this change in attitude is accomplished.

  Festinger and Carlsmith devised an experiment in which the subjects were given tedious tasks taking many hours to complete, such as moving tin
y four-sided sticks about, forwards and back and from side to side. When the leader of the experiment finally told the subjects that the experiment was finished, they were also told that the leader’s assistant, who was to instruct the next subject in line and stress how exciting the task was, would be arriving late. The current subjects were then asked if they could possibly take over the assistant’s role, meet the new subjects and tell them about the procedure. One group was asked to lie about what a joy it had been to participate in the experiment. The other group was not asked to feign enthusiasm.

  The first group was divided into two sections and offered either $1 or $20 for their trouble. It is worth noting that in 1959 the value of the dollar was relatively much higher than it is today.

  The results showed that those who had been paid $ I and had lied to the new subjects felt that the experiment had actually been a good experience. Both those who had been paid $20 and those who weren’t asked to lie admitted afterwards that they had found the experience dull. The larger sum of money provided a strong, external incentive to lie to the new subjects, and hence they felt no subconscious need to change their original opinion of the experiment in order to explain their action to themselves. Only those who had received a small reward needed to change their views in order to establish a link between their thoughts and their action. This instinct is driven by lack of internal cogency, an uncomfortable state that is a key concept in social psychology and described by the term ‘cognitive dissonance’.

  There are real-life decisions that lead to cognitive dissonance and thus to a switch in attitude. Consider a research officer with moral, liberal views who is offered a job with an advertising agency and accepts it. This means that she will begin to suffer from a discrepancy between her ideals and her actions and, unless she rejects the job offer, she must try to readjust her convictions to justify her new situation. After a few months she might argue, with genuine passion, that advertising is an essential aspect of democratic societies with a free-market economy. Also, she will probably maintain this opinion for the rest of her life, even if she spends only a relatively brief period in advertising.

  Another example is the Jehovah’s Witnesses who soon learn that handing out pamphlets in the street serves a dual purpose. It will help to recruit new adherents to the faith, but it will also reinforce the bonds between the faithful and the sect. The first time they might well have been hesitant about going out pamphleteering, but afterwards they will come home with a stronger light of faith in their eyes.

  The process can lead to increasingly charitable – or increasingly maleficent – behaviour. It can also create profound changes in outlook, much more so than would have been possible through words alone.

  The Nazis relied heavily on this mechanism to ensure conformity among German citizens. The incalculable risks of refusing to make symbolic signs of support for the regime, e.g. the ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting, must have led to individuals asking themselves: ‘What’s the harm in just lifting my right arm?’ But every time someone conforms, their way of thinking will have changed.

  The conclusion must be that simple acts, which in themselves appear to cause only limited damage, can lead to psychological changes that in turn make possible even greater and more destructive acts.

  Roles shape people

  In 1971 the social psychologist Phillip G. Zimbardo and some of his colleagues at Stanford University decided to investigate the psychological consequences of the relationship between a prisoner and a prison guard.

  They advertised for student subjects, stating that they needed twenty-one males, who would be paid for the two-week experiment. All applicants were interviewed, but only those who seemed reasonably stable, mature and responsible were picked. They were then randomly divided into two groups: prisoners and guards.

  On day one, real policemen came to the homes of ten of the participants and ‘arrested’ them ‘on suspicion’ of break-ins and armed robbery. They were taken to a university basement corridor that had been made to look like a prison and were ordered to undress, be deloused and put on prison overalls. The designated ‘guards’ were dressed in uniforms, complete with mirrored sunglasses and truncheons.

  The guards were called to a meeting and told to keep the prisoners under surveillance, but not to hurt them physically. The prisoners stayed in the prison round the clock, while the guards went home to their normal lives after an eight-hour working day.

  In the beginning of what became known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, there were no significant personality differences between randomly picked guards and prisoners. Later, both groups were to change remarkably quickly.

  The absolute power given to the guards made the prisoners helpless and submissive, enabling the guards to extend their powers still further. This mutual interaction was the start of a self-reinforcing, damaging process.

  A third of the guards behaved with increasing callousness and in an arbitrary manner, initiating punishments for no reason and devising inventive means of humiliating the prisoners. In their ordinary lives they had shown no tendencies to aggressive or tyrannical behaviour.

  Two of the guards went out of their way to support the prisoners, but never came close to publicly confronting the hostile guards. The rest of the guards were tough, but did not initiate any unofficial punishments.

  The prisoners became depressed, despairing and passive. Three of them had to be ‘freed’ only four days into the experiment, because they wept hysterically, lost the ability to think coherently and became deeply depressed. A fourth prisoner was released after getting a rash that covered his entire body.

  All but three of the prisoners were willing to forgo payment for the days they had spent on the experiment if they could be let out. When they were told that their pleas for ‘parole’ had been turned down, they passively and obediently plodded along back to their cells.

  The Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrates that prisoners and guards acted according to the roles given to them by an external agent, gradually changing their thought patterns, values and emotional responses to fit in. Most of the participants seemed unable to make a distinction between their real selves and their role in the experiment. Prison brutality escalated with each successive day. Ordinary moral values vanished, despite the fact that each group was determined indiscriminately.

  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 entitled Becoming Evil (parts of this account are based on his analysis 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 identity 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 afterwards 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 Wassily Kandinsky. None of this was true, as group allocation was entirely random.

  The subjects did not know each other and had had no prior contact. Given the opportunity to evaluate photographs of all the subjects, participants 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 favoured.

&nb
sp; 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 $2 rather than three, on condition that the others received $1 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 assumed that group identity was created gradually in response to shared experiences. Nobody expected prejudice and hostility to emerge between people without any knowledge of their own group or of the others.

  Relationships within a group, or between groups, constitute classical 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.

  Categorisation 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 relationship 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 homogeneity 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 attitudes 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 from 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.