Stanley Milgram redux?

Some final thoughts on Kathleen Taylor's Cruelty. The book's key puzzle addresses the "unthinkable" human behavior of human cruelty and our capability to engage in cruel, tortuous, sadistic behavior. Is such behavior really so unthinkable, she asks, or is it part of our very nature, part of our biological make-up? The answer, not surprisingly, is the latter.

Taylor contends that the evolutionary path humans took meant that discriminating between groups ("us" versus "them") became a favored trait for self-protection. Humans are hard-wired to "otherize." Our brains also take short-cuts to minimize reaction time and cognitive dissonance, particularly in times of stress. These two impulses permit people to treat those they deem "not one of us" with incredible cruelty and avoid introspection concerning the real implications and consequences of our actions. The more we think of others as "vermin" or "cockroaches" and the more pressure we get from authority figures who portray these others as dangers to ourselves, our way of life, or our existence, the less likely we are to question them.

This conclusion is not particularly surprising. Stanley Milgram, Yale psychologist and Queens College alumni, found that people would render torturous electroshock to people upon instruction by an authority figure. Philip Zimbardo has a webpage devoted to his all too successful effort to recreate a prison experiment, complete with sadistic guards. But the neuro focus of Taylor's book is useful. She uses a style of noted in recent non-fiction books that deal with scholarly subjects but written for a general audience: a smart literature review without much new evidence or independent empirical testing. It does give me some fodder for adjusting my thoughts on the instrumental versus primordial debate in the social sciences, but I talked about that already.