"In life three out of ten people are followers of life. Three out of ten are followers of death. Three out of ten are passing into life or death. One is a follower of Tao." --Tao te Ching In the Book of Genesis, Jacob is visited one night by a creature, with whom he wrestles with throughout the night. It is never clear whither this creature is an angel or a demon. All we know is that the patriarch is struggling with himself. Eventually he resolves the struggle where on the angel reveals to him a ladder to heaven. This is a wonderful little story which is full of uses in the study of morale. Each one of us, for some unknown reason has a conscience. Often times it gets in our way, but we can not get rid of it. Shakespeare was right when he wrote "conscience doth make cowards of us all." But it also allows us to triumph. Remember that after his struggle, Jacob realized the truth about his opponent and was able to see a stairway to heaven! Maybe there is a point to having a conscience after all! Up to this point this series on morale has shown that humans are not "born killers", as some people would lead one to believe. Quite the contrary, humans are in fact notoriously ill equipped to kill. We have no claws or fangs to speak of. Our eyesight is good, but our sense of smell is poor. We can run for long distances but our sprint speed is abysmal. We are not overly strong and we are vulnerable to almost every predator out there. At best we are omnivors. our teeth are suited for eating fruits as well as meats, in fact we can survive with very little protein (unlike carnivores that require a very high intake of protein). Human's become violent when their space is threatened. This is more characteristic of cow psychology that of hunting cats. So one can see that humans have a lot to over come before they can go to war. This article looks at how character affects this. CHARACTER The world is full of good men and bad men. Everyone says this. The "good" men are almost always on our side while the "bad" men are one of "them". So maybe this good/bad dichotomy is not very useful. It pulls in too many religious ideas that cloud what the discussion is really about. Yet the idea of good and bad is very compelling, since it makes telling what is right and wrong so easy! There must be a way of salvaging the concept. I think the way to do this is to look at human behavior and watch what people do. Actions speak louder than words anyway. There is also good consensus in how to analyze what certain behavior means. If a person does a "wrong" thing he is "bad". If a person refuses to do a wrong thing he is "good". Sometimes good people do bad things. In these cases one looks at whither a person feels guilty about what they have done. Guilty feelings show that a person is "good". It is just such cases that mimic Jacob's wrestling match with the angel. So, based on the above definitions, what is the break down of good and bad people in our society? Experts have been claiming for years that modern society Is falling apart. This may be true, but for all its loosening of old ties it still functions pretty well. In fact there is reason to believe that there are no more "bad" people today than there were 2500 years ago. It has been noted for years that 5 to 10 per cent of the population commit as much as 90 per cent of the crimes. (Or at least the crimes that people get arrested for! White collar crime, and environmental crimes are seldom prosecuted). Consequently, criminal statistics suggest that 90 to 95 per cent of the population are "law abiding". If one assumes that there is a portion of the community that do quasi legal activities (like white collar crime, domestic violence, or waste dumping (a favorite pass: time here in Indiana) then the percentage of "good" people might drop as low as 70 per cent. Two psychological studies, done in the last 30 years, back up this assessment of the "goodness" of the community. Stanley Milgram did a "Behavioral Study of obedience" in 1963. He found that 1/3rd of his subjects refused to administer electric shocks to a "test subject" when ordered to by the researcher. Another 1/3rd did administer the shocks, but showed great psychological distress. Only the last 1/3rd showed no distress at being ordered to be cruel. obviously they had a tanker truck full of toxic waste ready to bring to Indiana parked out front! In 1972, P.G. Zimbardo found similar results in his study of prison guard behavior. 1/3rd of the guards were friendly with the prisoners. 1/3rd of the guards were "tough but fair", and 1/3rd were actively sadistic (ie "quite inventive in their techniques of breaking the spirit of the prisoners"). The 1/3rd rule, first noted by Lao Tzu 2500 years ago, appears to hold true today. 1/3rd of the population are good people. Another 1/3rd will do bad actions but suffer emotional distress from it. While a remaining 1/3rd of the population feel no regret in doing evil. This is encouraging since it means that 2/3rds of us are not killing babies, or cheating at cards. But it is scary since 1/3rd of us are! There is reason to believe that urban society (even urban society 2500 years ago!) creates human monsters. This is based on studies of hunter gatherer societies, where murder is unknown and crime is non existent (the trade off is that they live in abject poverty in roving groups of 5 or 10 people!) Given this insight into the character of our people what happens when people are asked to go to war? CONSCIENCE DOTH MAKE COWARDS OF US ALL Soldiers are asked to cross one of the biggest boundaries civilized society has: "Thou shalt not kill." So obviously this is going to cause stress to those "good" people called on to do this. The Milgram and Zimbardo experiments are wonderful analogies for what happens when people are asked to "cross the line." The best way to present the analogy is to give detailed descriptions of each experiment, and what the results were. MILGRAM: The purpose of this study was to explore what would happen if a person were told to do something cruel. 40 men between the ages of 20 to 50 were asked to administer an electric shock to a test subject sitting behind a partition. The men were paid 4.50 per hour to do this, but they would forfeit the money if the chose to quit the study. The situation was simple. The men were shown the "test subject" being wired up to the shock device. The "subject" was to answer questions. If they missed a question, a shock was given. The real subject's job was to set the shock voltage and push the button. The voltage meter had on it a red zone to show when dangerous level were being reached. Of course the shock device was really not attached to the "victim" but the real subject had no way of knowing this. The study started with the men giving only very low voltage shocks. At each turn thought, the researcher would tell the men to increase the voltage. The men could not see or hear the "victim" but could see the answer he produced to the questions. When the volt meter reached 300 the "victim" would pound on the wall and stop responding to future questions or shocks! If the subject refused to administer more "shocks" after the 300 level, then they were prodded to do so. "Please continue." "The experimenter requires that you continue." "It is absolutely essential that you continue." "You have no other choice, you must go on." Only 5 of the 90 refused to go on after the 300 level. 1/3rd had refused by the 375 level. The other 2/3rds obeyed the order to go on administering shocks right up to the red level! 1/3rd of those who went on showed great nervousness. 1/3rd "of the 90 subjects showed definite signs of nervous laughter and smiling. The laughter seemed entirely out of place, even bizarre. Full blown, uncontrollable seizures were observed for 3 subjects ...In post-experiment interviews subjects took pains to point out that they were not sadistic types and that the laughter did not mean they enjoyed shocking the victim." The ones who stopped also felt the stress of guilt at their actions, as did the 1/3rd who went on. The remaining 1/3rd of the men showed no signs of stress during the experiment. They were normal men just like the other test subjects but the showed no signs of conscious. Milgram noted "I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident. Within 20, minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse." So doing "wrong" can have devastating effects on good men. ZIMBARDO: 9 years later, Dr Zimbardo conducted his 2 week study to look at how prisoners and prison guards would behave in a controlled study. Male volunteer college students were obtained by advertising in a newspaper. They were all given standard psychological tests and the blatantly sadistic and masochistic were set away. They settled on "24 subjects who were Judged to be most stable (physically and mentally), most mature, and least involved in anti-social behaviors". They were randomly assigned to be either prisoners or guards. The prisoners were then picked up by the local police and run through the booking procedure. They were then taken to a "prison" constructed in the basement of the psychology building. The guards were assigned to a shift system, and told to "maintain the reasonable degree of order in the prison necessary for its effective functioning." The prison was a rough mock up of a real prisons in the US. They had rules comparable to prisons as well. Basically the same as we all learned in Grammar school, only more so. 1/3rd of the prisoners began to show signs of stress on the second day of being jailed. They were released from the experiment when they displayed "extreme emotional depression, crying, rage and acute anxiety." Another prisoner was released when he got a "psychosomatic rash." So being a prisoner is very taxing, but the effect on the guards is more telling. Zimbardo pitted the guards off against the prisoners. There were "feelings of power and powerlessness, of control and oppression, of satisfaction and frustration, of arbitrary rule and resistance to authority, of status and anonymity, of machismo and emasculation." 1/3rd of the guards responded to this by becoming "quite inventive in their techniques of breaking the spirit of the prisoners." They appeared to enjoy doing so, and even stayed on without pay to get to do more of it! 2/3rds of the guards did not do sadistic acts "Just for kicks". But 1/3rd of the total were "tough but fair." Since the rule of the "prison" were written to be unfair, this put them in the role of enforcing unfair rules. Only 1/3rd of the guards were "friendly" with the prisoners. None of the guards suffered any psychological problems from their role. In fact most of them were upset when the experiment was called off after only 6 days! RESULTS: So what does this all mean? Well, for one, the stress displayed by the prisoners and Mllgrarn's shockers looks remarkably like the stress symptoms men show in battle. In addition to this, both experiments showed that even "good" people will do "bad" things when they are told to by authority figures. Social structures clearly encourage or discourage "wrong" behavior. And that power can corrupt. I add the last point in because both of these experiments were unethical! Their wide spread acclaim resulted in the institution of human subject committees to review experiments on all US college campuses. Zimbardo stopped his experiment before it was half over so he may be a follower of life. Milgram on the other hand continued his study, coolly reducing grown men to "twitching, stuttering wreck(s)" without any thought to the long term effects to his subjects. He didn't even provide any follow up counseling to them (which should be standard practice). All this relates to soldiers in the following ways. l. Soldiers small groups not only support one another emotionally, they also give the green light to breaking societal rules (like shooting the enemy). 2. 2/3rds of soldiers will do their duty and suffer psychological consequences of doing so. 1/3rd will enjoy being cruel and run a great risk of running amuck if discipline breaks down. 3. Doing "wrong" behavior produces clear predictable consequences mentally. That last point is perhaps the most critical of all the observations since it shows the mechanism by which men are broken. Psychologists noted it back in 1957. They called it cognitive dissonance. COGNITIVE DISSONANCE Huh? What's that? The best answer for what this is is an analogy. Imagine that you are watching a horror movie on TV (say, for instance "Psycho"). The movie reaches one of its scary sequences (the infamous shower scene). The music in the background swells up in a dissonant cord (the screeching violins providing a counter beat to Norman Bates' knife coming down again and again). The music grates on one's nerves. It is meant to. Certain cords just sound "wrong" together to the human ear. If listened to long enough they give one a headache! Cognitive dissonance works in the same way. If a man knows that it is wrong to steal, and he picks up someone else's newspaper from their front porch, there is a dissonance between his thoughts and his actions. He will experience a guilty feeling. The greater the transgression, the greater the emotional consequences. But if a person thinks that it is not wrong for him to do something, then tie will feel no guilt in doing it. So cognitive dissonance is based on what a person sees as being right and wrong. This is one definition of what character is. So a person's character predisposes him to feel guilty or not for transgressing societal norms. Now a days societal sex norms are being transformed. Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill highlighted this in her accusation of sexual harassment. 20 years ago, the subject would not even have been raised. At that time only the most blatant acts (basically rapes) were identified. Now even off colored jokes can get one in trouble. I work in an office with 8 women and only 2 men, most of the women are very strong radical feminists. S8 I get to feel the cognitive dissonance of this ambiguous situation all the time. Being "good" and avoiding "wrong" behavior in such situations becomes difficult at best. Soldiers fighting in wars face similar dilemmas. They know that fighting is "bad" but the situation demands it! It seems to me that feeling a little uncomfortable in ambiguous situations is important since it heightens one's awareness of what is going on. People without such awareness run a great risk in walking off moral or legal cliffs. Cognitive dissonance then refocuses this discussion back on the role of character in morale. Some people's characters make them monsters, while most of us are just people. Fortunately there is a wonderful way to study this. CHARACTER: A MATRIX OF PERSONALITY TRAITS Imagine that a persons character was made up of a matrix of all of their learning. This would mean each person could be described by a matrix of world views, skills, goals, ambitions, myths, mistaken impressions and emotions. For example... Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal Thou shalt not bear false witness Thou shalt not commit adultery Lie if no one saw you Don't get even escalate Maximize your profits Don't give a sucker a chance etc. One could fill up books describing all the elements that would go into even one person's matrix. But you would notice quickly that most of the matrix is shared by most people. Our culture teaches us most of what we see and think. Creativity is actually the exception rather than the norm. 2/3rds of the people learn the rules and generally live by them. 1/2 of these people gain enough personal strength to take the chance to say no, when wrong presents itself. The other half are wide open to peer pressure. The remaining 1/3rd of the people may learn the rules of society, but they do not think they apply to them! So come the wife beaters, burglars, drug pushers, and toxic waste disposal vendors. In normal times, when society keeps them in check, they function well and look normal. But when order breaks down, they are ready to exploit it in order to screw their neighbors. One might get the idea that the 1/3rd of our people without conscience would be the best soldiers, since they see nothing wrong with killing. This could not be further from the truth. Consider the mental matrix of one such monster... Me first!!! My pleasure is more important than you. If it doesn't effect me then I don't care! You are all just hunks of meat anyway. You are here for me to use and abuse. Destroying things is fun! Power feels good. Etc. Does this sound like a person who would risk their life to save you? I don't think so. In fact such people feel cognitive dissonance when they do actions to help people! They are dangerous to be around since they feel no attachment to their mates. Gandhi pointed out that such men tend to do poorly in conflict since conflict is really about willingness to sacrifice. Maybe the best way to view this is to ask one question: Would you really want your daughter to marry someone like this? A CASE IN POINT At this time the US government is exploring the possibility of legalizing gays in the military. It is an excellent place to test out these ideas, since one of the arguments put forward is that official okay of gays will hurt unit morale. The first question is whither gays fit into the 1/3rd of the population that are conscienceless? Christian theology says that they are, but is this true? Prison populations do experience a high degree of homosexual rape, so maybe there are a greater degree of gays in the prison system. This is contradicted though by these men's behavior outside of prison. Once outside, the vast majority are primarily heterosexual. So it is quite likely that the increase of homosexual behavior has to do with the environment (a bunch of men with no access to women, who are lock up together in close proximity for years) than with sexual preference. Maybe gays are disproportionately amongst white collar criminals and toxic waste jobbers. But that doesn't seem to be the case, as best I can tell. The next question that always comes up is: Are gays more likely to be child molesters than heterosexuals are? The answer to this one is simply no. Molestation is unfortunately more linked to pedophilia than it is to homosexuality - they are two different sexual issues. It would seem then that gays are no more likely to be part of the 1/3rd of conscienceless men than heterosexuals are. So on this stand they should not be excluded as a matter of course. Could gays presence make their fellow soldiers feel uncomfortable? Sure it would! If gays were openly in the military then it would force soldiers to deal with a new area of ambiguity. The cognitive dissonance would be humongous. It would require a change in some time honored ways of training men. For instance... Drill Sgt.: "Well ladies! Have you had enough yet? Are you ready quit? Or am I going to have to kick your pansy ass back to base for some more?" The move is clear. The Sgt. is insulting the soldiers by implying they are feminine and homosexual to mobilize their anger to work harder. It is an effective technique, but it also mobilizes a lot of anger towards anyone who shows even a hint that they might be gay. So opening up the legal issue of gays in the army would require a change in the whole approach of training. Could it be done? Sure it could. But the direction would have to come from the top (and by this I mean the colonels and majors, not just from the civilian administration). It would take time to institute, but it could be done. If it was though, what would be the long term effect on the military institution? At first there would be a period of disruption. Some violence would likely occur. The colonels and majors would resist it for a while. A good deal of political capital would be used by the political leaders. Then the change would be accepted and worked around. In businesses where gays can be more open there seems to be no problem with productivity or criminality so there should be no long term damage to the military. So is it the right thing to do? Beats me. I'm just glad I'm not one of the people who has to decide this'. This issue highlights the role of leadership in determining what their soldiers cognitions will be. If the major says it is okay for GI Joe to be gay, then I guess it's okay (even if I don't like it). Life is full of dissonances like this. In the next article I will look more closely at how leadership effects morale. Back to Experimental Games Group # 25 Table of Contents Back to Experimental Games Group List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 by Chris Engle This article appears in MagWeb.com (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com