The Psychology of Good and Evil: Why Children Adults and Groups Help and Harm Others Read online

  likely. In The Roots of Evil I also discuss how violence by groups might be prevented. In the writings in this book I add to that exploration, addressing profoundly important matters such as healing, reconciliation, and even

  forgiveness, specific actions “bystander nations” can and ought to take to

  prevent violence by groups, and democratization as an avenue to culture

  change.

  I wrote opening and concluding chapters for this book and included

  some other new or recent, not previously published pieces. The volume

  contains whole articles or book chapters, and parts of others. In a few

  selections, material that reports the results of research has been rewritten

  to make it easier to read and thus accessible to a wider audience. In putting

  together these selections, my aim has been to describe and interweave all

  the important elements in the understanding I have gained about goodness

  and evil in the course of my life’s work, to represent what I know at this

  time about goodness and evil.

  My life experience, and my lifelong work on good and evil, altruism and

  aggression, and helping and harm-doing, have been deeply intertwined.

  As one of the selections describes, I am what is nowadays called a child

  survivor of the Holocaust. I was a 6-year-old boy in Budapest in the sum-

  mer of 1944 when about 450,000 out of about 600,000 Hungarian Jews were

  transported to Auschwitz and killed. I and members of my nuclear family

  survived because of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swede who heroically saved

  many lives in Hungary, and Maria, a Hungarian woman who worked for

  my family and did all she could to help us. We called Maria “Macs,” an

  abbreviation of the Hungarian word for cat. I don’t know how that came

  about. But Macs was my second mother, and I feel that her courageous

  actions and loving nature taught me, in spite of my experiences during the

  Holocaust and afterward in Hungary under communism, to have faith in

  human beings and in the possibility of our caring about each other, about

  the “other,” and about all “others.”

  I believe that my beginning to work on what leads people to help others

  and what stops them from helping those in need, including my focus on the

  passive and active “bystander,” and my lifelong concern with preventing

  violence, passivity, and promoting goodness, owe a great deal to Macs. On

  one of my visits to her in Hungary, when she was in her late eighties, I told

  Macs that the work I have been doing all my life was inspired by her. With

  her head with its beautiful fine silver hair shaking, as it did constantly in

  those days, she smiled and said, naturally and without pride, “I know.”

  This book is dedicated to her, and to all others who have not and will not

  remain passive bystanders in the face of others’ suffering and need, who

  act on behalf of others and thereby make this a more caring world.

  Acknowledgments

  This book summarizes what I have learned about goodness and evil in

  the course of 35 years. During that time I have done research in academic

  settings and research in the world outside the university on caring, helping,

  altruism, and the reduction of aggression, and I have engaged in efforts

  to raise caring children, prevent violence by individuals and groups, and

  promote healing by victimized groups and reconciliation among groups.

  I want to express my gratitude to the many people who have directly

  contributed to this book, or have been influential in my thinking and work

  over the years, and/or provided support by their friendship, affection, or

  in other ways. I will mention a few of them by name.

  Vachel Miller was an outstanding collaborator in helping to make selec-

  tions for the book. A few of the selections include research findings, and he

  was also extremely helpful in summarizing these in accessible language.

  Phil Laughlin, my editor at Cambridge University Press, was helpful in ev-

  ery possible way, as were others at Cambridge, like Helen Wheeler, who su-

  pervised the production. I am deeply grateful to associates, colleagues, and

  former students who have allowed me to include or reproduce coauthored

  material: Laurie Anne Pearlman, Darren Spielman, and Robert Schatz, as

  well as Daniel Goleman, whose article about my work in the New York

  Times (written when he was the behavioral science writer for the Times) is the only article by another person included in the this volume. Jen Borden

  was helpful in organizing materials for the book.

  The late Perry London, the first person to study heroic rescuers, inspired

  my early work on altruism. Walter Mischel, my advisor and friend over

  the years, Eleanor Maccoby and Al Bandura, as well as Perry London,

  were all my teachers during my graduate school years at Stanford. The

  late Stanley Milgram and Robert Rosenthal were colleagues and friends

  during my years as a young professor at Harvard. Seymour Epstein, who

  I met when he was a visiting professor at Harvard and who has been my

  colleague for many years at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,

  xv

  xvi

  Acknowledgments

  George Levinger, Icek Aizen, James Averill, Robert Feldman, Susan Fiske,

  Linda Isbell, Ronnie Janoff-Bulman, Paula Pietromonico, all colleagues

  at UMASS, have all been supportive of my work. Daniel Bar-Tal, Janusz

  Reykowski, and Nancy Eisenberg were coauthors on various projects and

  intellectual companions. Many other colleagues, many of them members of

  the Society for Peace, Conflict, and Violence, the Peace Psychology Division

  of the American Psychological Association, or the International Society for

  Political Psychology, Psychologists for Social Responsibility, or social or

  child psychology groups, have influenced or inspired me. I am grateful

  to close, supportive friends, especially Jack Rosenblum, Corinne Dugas,

  Michael and Nina Shandler, Alan Hurwitz, Ana Lisano, John Mack, Marc

  Skvirsky, Pál Réti, Agnes Gáti, and Lane and Sarah Conn.

  I am grateful to my sons, Adrian and Daniel, and to their wives, Sheri

  Kurtz and Kristin Brennan, for their love and presence in my life, and I am

  deeply appreciative of the values by which they live their lives.

  And the adage last but not least truly applies in my thanking Laurie

  Anne Pearlman, my life partner and also my work partner in Rwanda,

  who supports with love and generosity of spirit all I do in the world.

  part i

  INTRODUCTION AND CORE CONCEPTS

  1

  Good and Evil

  Themes and Overview

  This book is about understanding the roots of children, adults, and groups

  of people helping and harming others. It is about ways to create more

  caring for others’ welfare and less harmful, aggressive, violent behavior.

  It is about how children, adults, small groups, and nations can become

  “active bystanders” who respond to others’ suffering and help those in

  need, rather than remaining passive observers, even closing their eyes and

  hearts to others’ fate.

  There is much goodness in the world. A mother paying loving attention

  to a child. A father taking time off work to take his child to the first day of


  kindergarten – an act that saved the life of the president of a major bond-

  trading firm at the time of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. A

  grown son taking care of a sick old father. A popular girl spending time with

  a new, somewhat awkward girl in class, saving her from unkind behavior

  by classmates. A young Canadian boy, Craig Kielberger, hearing about

  child labor and with the help of an older brother and parents creating an

  international organization, of children and led by children with the help

  of adults, to eliminate child labor, to protect children, to promote their

  welfare. Another child, seeing homeless people on the streets, organizing a

  movement to bring blankets to homeless people.1 A Hutu man in Rwanda

  coming to the home of a Tutsi woman after her husband is killed, sent

  there by another Hutu who used to work for this woman. He stays there

  protecting her from killers who come to the door to take her away, asking

  for nothing in return.2

  Many people respond to the need of others, whether the need is to

  relieve suffering or to help enhance well-being. Some men and women

  organize their lives to serve others’ welfare – whether by establishing

  the innocence of people in jail for a crime they did not commit, or find-

  ing money to lend to people in poor countries to start small businesses,3

  or by working for positive social change. Most of these people are

  not making sacrifices. The desire to contribute to others’ welfare has

  3

  4

  Introduction and Core Concepts

  become part of them. Helping people provides them with satisfaction and

  fulfillment.

  Countries send food to other countries wracked by famine; give refuge

  to people who are fleeing from political repression; take action against the

  persecution of a minority at home or in other countries; intervene to stop

  violence. These and a million other acts of kindness, ranging from small

  to extreme, requiring little effort and sacrifice or involving great sacrifice

  or extreme danger, are all examples of goodness. When I asked a group of

  students who had expressed pessimism about human kindness to keep a

  diary of kind acts they received or observed, they were surprised by how

  much of it they witnessed.

  On the “evil” side, individuals and groups harm others in small and

  big ways. Even if we encounter little significant violence in our own lives,

  we are surrounded by images on television, reports in newspapers and

  stories people tell us describing violent acts by individuals such as physical

  and sexual abuse of children, adult rape and murder, or youth violence

  ranging from physical attack to drive-by shooting and murder. We also

  hear about violence by groups against members of other groups in the

  course of “ethnopolitical” warfare, persecution and torture of groups of

  people, terrorist attacks on civilians, mass killing and genocide. And just

  about all of us experience, if not great violence, still hurtful, painful acts

  against us – when as children we are attacked by peers who call us names,

  spread rumors about us, hit us or exclude us, or when we are blamed or

  in other ways treated badly by adults, or as adults experience aggression

  against us.

  A third very important part of this picture is the bystander, the indi-

  vidual or collection of individuals, including nations, who witness what is

  happening. While bystanders can be heroic in their efforts to help, they of-

  ten remain passive. This passivity encourages perpetrators. When children

  in school intimidate, harass, or bully other children, peers who witness this

  usually remain passive – and some even join the perpetrators. Adults also

  often remain passive. When one group turns against another group, na-

  tions often remain passive. They may try hard to avoid both the feeling and

  the appearance of an obligation to act. For example, in Rwanda about seven

  hundred thousand Tutsis were killed in 1994, in the course of an attempt

  to eliminate all Tutsis. This was a genocide, since it aimed to eliminate a

  whole group of people. But the governments of the United States and other

  countries avoided the use of the term genocide.4 By acknowledging that

  the killings were genocide, given the UN genocide convention, they would

  have had a moral obligation to act.

  Bystanders have great potential power to do good. When two people

  hear sounds of distress from another room, what one person says can

  greatly influence whether the other witness helps or not. As a number

  of selections will show, individuals and groups can limit, stop, and even

  Good and Evil: Themes and Overview

  5

  prevent violence, and encourage helpful actions by their words, actions,

  and example.

  what is goodness, what is evil?

  To me, evil means human destructiveness. This can come in an obvious

  form, as great violence against others, such as a genocide. Or it can come

  in smaller acts of persistent harm-doing, the effects of which accumulate,

  like parents being hostile and punitive, or peers picking on a child day by

  day for a long time. Such actions can destroy a child’s spirit, his or her

  dignity, self-worth, and ability to trust people.

  At times, intense violence, destructive as it is, is not evil, but justified

  self-defense in response to unjustified attack – on oneself, one’s family,

  one’s group. The Nazi attacks on Czechs, Poles, Jews, and many others

  gave rise to violent but justified and necessary response by the Allies in

  World War II. The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the

  Pentagon on September 11, 2001, are further examples of destructiveness

  that requires self-defense.

  However, determining when violent acts are justified self-defense is not

  a simple matter. Perpetrators of evil acts often claim that they are defending

  themselves. Or they claim moral reasons or higher values for their actions,

  such as total social equality, which the Cambodian communists, the Khmer

  Rouge, claimed was their goal, or the purity of the group, which is often the

  “higher” purpose of nationalists who turn against minorities. In addition,

  the form of self-defense that is justified is also an issue. The actions of a

  teenager who is bullied day by day by peers and then takes a gun and

  shoots people, as in the case of some of the school shootings in the United

  States, seems unjustified, evil. It may be understandable – and this book is

  about both understanding and preventing evil – especially if bystanders

  are passive and uncaring and the child feels he or she has no one to turn

  to, even though it is still wrong and evil.

  The view of evil inherent in this discussion is different from colloquial or

  theological views of evil. After my book The Roots of Evil was published, I was invited to be on a TV talk show by Ron Reagan, our former president’s

  son, on evil. Others on the show were the author of a Time magazine cover

  story on evil, a priest who was known for conducting exorcisms (to drive

  the evil spirit out of people), the daughter of the leader of a Satanic cult

  (a group that worship
s Satan), a psychiatrist, and a professor of religion.

  The selection of these participants says a great deal about popular views

  of evil.

  My definition of and concern with evil has to do with human actions that

  harm others (see also Chapter 4, on Evil). The focus is on evil actions. But

  individuals, as well as groups or societies, can develop characteristics that

  make it likely that they will repeatedly engage in such actions. Whether

  6

  Introduction and Core Concepts

  we do or do not want to call such individuals or groups evil, we must

  recognize their inclination for harm-doing. We must come to understand

  its roots and develop the knowledge required and the will to use this

  knowledge to prevent destructive behavior.

  Especially when faced with great evil, such as genocide or seemingly

  senseless acts of great individual violence, there is a tendency in public

  discussion to regard them as incomprehensible. Perhaps we do not want

  to understand them because we want to keep them outside the common

  human realm that we are part of. But destructive actions are the outcome

  of certain basic, ordinary psychological and social processes and their evo-

  lution into extreme forms. Understanding their roots enables us to prevent

  them, and to prevent individuals and groups from developing the charac-

  teristics that make these acts likely.

  Understanding itself can be of great value. In working in Rwanda in the

  aftermath of the genocide, we found that healing by both survivors and

  members of the perpetrator group who were not themselves perpetrators

  was furthered by understanding the circumstances, societal processes, and

  psychology of individuals and groups that created the genocide. Seeing

  the violence against them as understandable human acts and seeing the

  perpetrators not as embodiments of pure evil but as human beings whose

  evolution led them to their horrible acts helped survivors feel more human

  themselves (see Chapters 36 and 37).

  Goodness is the opposite of evil. It refers to actions that bring benefit

  to individuals or whole groups: the greater the benefit and the more effort

  and/or sacrifice it requires, the greater the goodness. Goodness, like evil,