The Darkness Within

How evil are humans?

1 Introduction

One of the more unsettling findings from psychology is that people are terrifyingly evil in all sorts of circumstances. And not “a bit rude to their neighbor,” level evil. No, I’m talking “hacking their neighbors to death with machetes,” or “electrocuting people to death,” level evil.

In general, people are nice and helpful. But that is because social norms direct people to be nice and helpful. You feel bad being rude. You feel the reproachful eyes of the people around you, boring into your back. People hate that feeling. So most of the time, they behave pretty well. Social norms constrain our most vicious impulses.

But what happens when bad behavior and social norms come apart? The answer, for which there is abundant empirical evidence, is that people start behaving very badly. If doing the right thing is a bit costly and socially disapproved of, most people just won’t do it. We are just a few social norms away from barbarism.

Note: many of the points I make here are similar to the ones Michael Huemer makes in this piece.

2 Doing what is predictably wrong

One bit of evidence for this thesis is that humans do things all the time that they believe to be wrong. If what people believe to be wrong carries no social stigma, and is a bit costly to avoid, people generally do the thing they think is wrong.

I’ve had a lot of discussions about veganism with people over the years. Oftentimes, people grow convinced that eating meat is egregiously evil. Even that factory farming is the worst thing we do as a society. Nonetheless, they mostly keep eating meat. And not for sophisticated consequentialist offsetting reasons—most of them don’t offset. They just don’t care enough about avoiding evil to stop eating meat.

Similarly, of the people who are convinced that failing to give to effective charities is like walking past drowning children, almost none of them give all their excess wealth to effective charities. Most of them give basically none of their excess wealth to effective charities. A non-trivial number of people who think abortion is murder nonetheless get one—ideally secretly—if the alternative would be costly and embarrassing. It’s hard to know exact numbers, but a non-trivial share of the population seems willing to carry out an action that they believe to be murdering the innocent, absent social stigma.

People mostly think you can save lives for about $100 by donating overseas. 40% think it costs less than $10. But despite this, only about 6% of charitable donations go overseas. So most people aren’t willing to save lives for 10 or 100 dollars. It is possible that they’re not aware of the obvious fact that you ought to save lives if you can do so for the cost of two Starbucks drinks, but the more likely explanation is that they don’t care much.

Most people, despite apparently thinking that you can save lives for just a few dollars, spend ~0 time thinking about how to best spend their charitable dollars. This shows a callous disregard for human life. Taking morality seriously involves trying to do what saves the most people’s lives, rather than just giving to some random charity that gives you a warm fuzzy feeling.

This supports the theory that it’s mostly social norms guiding moral behavior, combined with occasional emotional reactions. People rarely do things that are even a bit bad provided they’re embarrassing. Almost everyone takes great pains not to be rude to waiters. Yet not saving someone’s life for $10 is a lot worse than being rude to a waiter.

Now, you might think: people don’t donate because they reason that they can’t be expected to give away all their wealth. Perhaps they indeed have that moral view. But if you can save lives for $10 it seems like an obvious moral datum that you should do that at some point. Maybe not with all your money, but never at any point giving $10 to save someone’s life seems obviously wrong.

This is the behavior of most people.

3 Milgram

The Milgram experiment found that people were, in general, willing to deliver powerful and potentially lethal electric shocks because an authoritative man in a white lab coat said so. This was despite hearing the person in question screaming, begging to be released, and describing heart troubles from the powerful electric shocks. The screaming began at 150 volts. 65% of people continued all the way to 450 volts. At 330 volts, the participant became despondent and stopped making any sound.

In the original experiment, people could hear the screams. What about when they couldn’t hear or see the man? Basically 100% of people went along with it then. So people feeling disturbed by hearing screams weighs on people’s conscience way more than the abstract knowledge that they’re torturing someone, which basically never weighs on a person’s conscience enough to get them to awkwardly disobey a guy in a lab coat.

Now you might wonder: did the Milgram experiment replicate? A lot of the psychology experiments like the Stanford Prison experiment didn’t. Unfortunately, it replicated repeatedly (though I haven’t seen replication of the 100% statistic).

Now, some people have been suspicious that people in the experiment really knew what was happening. Often, when questioned after the fact, they gave inconsistent answers. But given how much distress they displayed, it seems very likely that they thought the experiment being genuine was at least a real possibility. So people were willing to seriously risk torturing someone because they were instructed to by authority. Also, the best explanation of the inconsistent results is that people were trying to rationalize bad behavior. You can’t really describe your own behavior as “I tortured someone, because it would have been awkward to stop.” So you have to say you knew it was a ruse.

Some people try to give reasonable explanations of why people acted that way. Rutger Bregman (who is great, in general) in his book Humankind notes that when people were asked why they kept up the shocks, they gave prosocial explanations. One of them explained that he wanted to advance science to help out his daughter who had cerebral palsy. Similarly, many displayed serious distress that they were hurting the man, even as they continued.

I don’t find this a very impressive response. Of course, if you ask people why they did something bad, they will try to give nice-sounding reasons for it. They can’t very well say “I did it because I felt social pressure to continue hurting the screaming man.” The fact that they displayed distress shows just how strongly our moral judgments are influenced by social norms; even when we feel considerable distress, we keep doing the thing we know to be evil. Think about how little moral motivation we have when we don’t feel distress from hearing a tortured man screaming.

Bregman also noted that people almost all stopped when instructed to do so in an overly bossy way. This is strong evidence for the social norms explanation. If people had moral motivation, the bossiness of the experimenter wouldn’t have affected their behavior more than the screams of the person ostensibly being tortured. In contrast, it isn’t surprising that people care less about impressing the scientist in a lab coat if he behaves boorishly.

The reasonable takeaway from Milgram is that people are willing to do obviously horrible things if told to by someone authoritative, especially when stopping would be very awkward. This is also supported by the rest of the evidence.

4 The dictator game

In the dictator game, people are instructed to divide up $10 between themselves and others. Ordinarily, when people know how the money was split, they divide it up pretty evenly. However, when they’re anonymous, so no one will find how they divided it, most people take all the money for themselves. Of the people who don’t, they generally leave the other people with just a dollar. This illustrates that a lot of nice behavior is driven by social pressure. In the dictator game, nearly all of people’s generosity comes from social pressure.

5 Historical crimes

One bit of evidence that people have little moral motivation is that the historical record is full of people doing obviously evil things. For most of history, people have been okay with murder and conquest. They’ve felt little concern about owning slaves. Many of the Nazis were psychologically normal.

The most grisly contemporary example is the Rwandan genocide. More than half a million people were killed. Between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped. Most of those killed were hacked to death with machetes. Neighbor hacked to death neighbor. Former acquaintances murdered each other in cold blood. The takeaway from history: a pretty big slice of people will do obviously horrendous things—like hacking their neighbors to death with machetes—if the right situations arise. Descriptions from the killers read as follows:

The crowd had grown. I seized the machete, I struck a first blow. When I saw the blood bubble up, I jumped back a step. Someone blocked me from behind and shoved me forward by both elbows. I closed my eyes in the brouhaha and I delivered a second blow like the first. It was done, people approved, they were satisfied and moved away. I drew back. I went off to sit on the bench of a small cabaret, I picked up a drink, I never looked back in that unhappy direction. Afterward I learned that the man had kept moving for two long hours before finishing.

Later on we got used to killing without so much dodging around.

…

A boy with enough strength in his arms to hold the machete firmly, if his brother or his father brought him along in the group, he imitated and grew used to killing. Youth no longer hampered him. He became accustomed to blood. Killing became an ordinary activity, since our elders and everyone did it.

It is easy to think you are different. That in the right circumstances, you would have behaved differently. You wouldn’t have been a Nazi, or genocidaire—you’d have resisted. Of course, most people who think that are wrong. Fortunately, there’s a reasonable way of testing how you would behave if there was a conflict between what was personally easy and what morality demanded. You can save a bunch of lives fairly cheaply. You can, at some cost, stop torturing animals, or prevent animals from being tortured in large numbers.

You don’t have to guess what you would do if there was a conflict between expedience and human life. You can just see what you in fact do in such circumstances. Whether, for example, you give any money to charities that save people’s lives. If you go along with the things you believe to be wrong, because it’s easy, then you should have no confidence that you would stop doing so if the wrong things in question were particularly grisly. I take it more seriously when a vegan—or someone else who makes sacrifices for what they believe in, despite social disapproval—says they’d have resisted the Nazis than when an ordinary person does.

I don’t want to act like I’m above this. I do things all the time that I think are wrong. I give far less than I ought to. I often fail to do what I have strong moral reason to do if it would be a bit awkward or embarrassing. My guess is I make more sacrifices for what I think is morally right than most people, but even so, in a society of angels, I would be rightly regarded as equivalent to Jeffrey Dahmer. Probably so would you.

6 Conclusion

People routinely ask whether human nature is good or evil. Often those who think human nature is evil think that people always act in their own self-interest. This, of course, is not right, as any parent knows. But the correct accounting would put human nature disturbingly far towards the evil end of the spectrum. Most people will do horrible things in the right settings. Heck, most people are doing horrible things. Monsters aren’t confined to fairy-tales—they live inside us all.

What if you’re not sure what moral errors your society is making? Probably, then, a good start is to give some money to save a bunch of lives at little personal cost. Another reasonable step is to stop eating products from animals who went through hell so that you could have a sandwich. There might be others, but those seem like reasonable places to begin. C.S. Lewis once said:

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.

I think this is precisely right. It is easy to think it is not very hard to be good if you have not tried very hard at it. It is easier for those who do not believe morality is very demanding to think that they would follow morality’s demands if it was demanding. If you would like to figure out what grotesque abominations your society is going along with, you had better start with the low-hanging fruit. You will know evil better if you have tried harder to resist it.

The more you cultivate in yourself genuine concern about doing what is right, rather than faux concern as an excuse to judge your enemies, the more truly you will know how rotten you really are and the less rotten you will become. You will end up less the benighted fool who does not believe yourself capable of going along with past atrocities, and more the kind of person who really would not go along with such atrocities.