Even ordinarily pleasant people can be provoked to meanness. Stanford University researcher Philip Zimbardo demonstrated this in a memorable study. He set up a prison simulation and asked college students to be guards and others to be prisoners. The guards became so cruel in mocking the prisoners that the two-week study had to be stopped after only six days to protect the participants from further harm. The role-players became so absorbed in the realistic experiment that they engaged in behaviors they would have rejected in their real lives.
It doesn’t take conditions like the Zimbardo study to foster meanness and other forms of unethical behavior. According to Michael Josephson, founder of the Josephson Institute of Ethics, questionable behaviors of all sorts can be explained in part by justifications we make for them. Most of us have the capacity to “anesthetize” the conscience with rationalizations and excuses. People can consider themselves superior despite hateful behavior because they perceive that so many around them are worse. This is ethical relativism.
In his book, Hatred: The Psychological Descent into Violence, Willard Gaylin wrote of the “emerging cultures of hatred.” It isn’t that hatred is new but that its reach is so great due to the rapid and extensive reach of technology.
“These innovations add an imperative to the need for containing the emerging cultures of hatred. We must investigate and understand hatred now before it seeps into our civilized world and destroys our way of life.”
So, we have the potential for moral systems to become weakened when people justify their meanness and hateful behavior as not as bad as that of other people. The prevalence of “whataboutism” – justifying an offensive or hateful act by pointing to another perceived similar one – also threatens civil society.
We all need to do our part to prevent the contagion of hatred. The media are a significant part of this prevention as are our decisions about who and what to believe. Being wary of our sources is crucial when hatred is on the march. Otherwise, we contribute to its normalization.
