What Makes People Kill? These Studies Explain it All
How Evil people are created, How Good People Turn Evil, Why People do evil things, and How Hitler got millions to support his genocide.
Would you take an innocent life?
I would hope you’d say no (like most people would).
‘What makes people kill innocents?’
‘How can anyone kill?’
I’ve been thinking about these kinds of questions, and this is what this article is about.
I think it's important to understand the minds of killers and see what got them to do it.
The holocaust is one of the most brutal and horrific genocides in the history of humanity; 6 million Jews were killed.
When we think of the holocaust, We probably think of Hitler.
He is seen as the bad guy behind it.
And when many of us think of bad guys we might say the reason they are the way they are is because of- their ‘traumatic childhood’ or ‘psychopathy’ or some ‘killer gene’ or they were just ‘mentally ill’ and that's why they became murderers.
Sure that might explain why some of the bad guys are bad.
But the killing of Jews included several officers at several levels as well as the thousands if not millions of soldiers; not just one bad guy.
The questions then arise—
Can anyone do evil if put under the right circumstances?
Can a good person turn evil?
Let’s look at what some studies have to say about this.
The Milgram Experiment
The man you see here is Adolf Eichmann. An SS officer at a trial for his crimes against humanity. He wasn’t so much of a psychopath or a monster as we would like to assume. He was just a dude who wanted to please his boss.
He justified his atrocities by saying “he was just following orders”.
This got a Yale professor named Stanley Milgram wondering- could humans do horrible things just because of obedience?
So he decided to conduct a few studies.
They were told they were doing an experiment to test memory, which in reality was a lie.
His studies involved three roles-
A teacher- who was a volunteer
A student- who was in reality an experimenter but the other volunteers thought he was a volunteer as well.
The experimenter- a man wearing a lab coat.
The teacher(volunteer) and the experimenter were in one room, while the student was in another room. They however could still hear each other.
The teacher was made to give the student a list to memorise and then after that had to test the student.
Every time the student got something wrong, the teacher was told to electrocute him.
Of course, at the beginning, it was only 15V(which is barely a shock) and with every mistake, the level of shock increases, going all the way to 400V.
The student (being an experimenter in reality) purposefully made a ton of mistakes.
The teachers (volunteers) kept shocking the participants with every mistake.
Keep in mind that the teachers couldn't see the students. But they could hear their groans and complaints and screams. The student even screamed, “Please stop I have health problems.”
Of course with all of this, the teachers(volunteers) didn’t want to go on. They asked to stop the experiment, they even protested a bit. Their protests increased as the shocks got greater.
However, the experimenter in the room gave the following prods every time the teachers(volunteers) protested. These were:
Prod 1 : Please continue.
Prod 2: The experiment requires you to continue.
Prod 3 : It is absolutely essential that you continue.
Prod 4 : You have no other choice but to continue
Guess how many volunteers went all the way up to 450V(death)?
A surprising two-thirds of volunteers(teachers) went all the way to 450V (death).
This is the conclusion Milgram drew:
The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.” — Stanley Milgram
We all are obedient to authority, and we may even do horrific things because of it.
Milgram also conducted the same experiment with a bunch of variations and this revealed a few more interesting things.
When the experimenter said that he was responsible for whatever happened, volunteers were more likely to go all the way to 450V.
When the experimenter told the participants that they were responsible for their own actions then a lot fewer participants went all the way to 450V.
This shows that we’re likelier to do bad things when we aren’t responsible.
This explains why many soldiers and officers were ready to commit atrocities because their superiors would take responsibility, removing responsibility for their actions from them.
In one variation the experimenter goes out of the room because of “an important phone call” and a regular-looking man(a man without a lab coat) takes his place.
People perceive this man of lesser authority and a far lesser number of people go all the way to 450V.
There were other variations as well.
In one the teacher was made to place the hands of the student on a metal plate before shocking him.
When they did that, a lot fewer volunteers went all the way to 450V.
However in another variation where the teacher actually ordered someone else to do the shocking instead of doing it themselves, a lot more people went all the way to 450V.
This brings us to the next point- Abstraction.
Abstraction
“The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of a million is a statistic.”- Joseph Stalin
When we don’t see the consequences of our actions we’re more likely to do bad things.
A president might be willing to kill hundreds of thousands of innocents by hitting a switch which launches a nuke and kills people who are thousands of miles away.
However, that same president might not even be willing to just kill one person with an axe.
Only the people on the field do the killing, but they do bad things because their superiors take responsibility for it and they remain anonymous while they kill. The superiors themselves live in abstraction and are ready to take the consequences.
Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison
Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment is another and I think more scary experiment than the Milgram one.
Why?
It’s because, in the Milgram Experiment, there’s a possibility that some volunteers went all the way to 450V because they knew there was no way a respected institute like Yale would allow killing people just for an experiment.
The Zimbardo prison experiment, on the other hand, went so out of hand that the experimenter who ran the experiment himself lost control.
Someone else from outside had to come and make Zimbardo(the experimenter) stop the experiment!
This is how the experiment went —
In the experiment, a few volunteers were chosen, who would be randomly made prisoners or guards.
Those who were chosen as prisoners were arrested from their houses by real cops, just to make it more real. They were then blindfolded and put in a dummy prison in Stanford's basement.
The guards were given full power over the prisoners and were permitted to do anything to maintain order except physical violence.
Just within a few hours, they started asserting their dominance, by making the prisoners wake up to their loud whistling at 2:30 a.m.
Soon, they started dehumanizing the prisoners.
The prisoners were given numbers instead of names. They insulted the prisoners and made them do nonsense, boring or painful tasks. They were even forced into pushups.
That was just day one.
After that it got worse, much worse; they made the prisoners clean toilets with their bare hands and even forced them into sodomy.
I was shocked. These were ordinary college dudes, who probably wouldn’t have done such things normally.
Prisoners broke down emotionally.
Some prisoners protested, and complained about the guards to one another, while other prisoners even sided with guards and snitched on other prisoners.
The volunteers began to start thinking fully like they were real prisoners and real guards.
The guards used their power to harass the prisoners mentally and physically. One day there were family meetings scheduled, so the day before the guards began acting nice, so the prisoners(volunteers) wouldn’t complain to their families or want to get removed from the prison.
In fact, one prisoner was being removed from the experiment because of his mental breakdowns, and he even resisted because he was afraid of looking bad in front of other prisoners and guards.
Zimbardo the experimenter himself played the role of superintendent and didn’t intervene to stop several things. This is because he himself began thinking like a superintendent.
Only after someone from outside came and saw these horrendous things going on, did Zimbardo realize how bad things had gotten. He ended the experiment the next day, only after 6 days of the experiment running.
This study revealed that ‘good people’ can turn into ‘evil people’ when in the right circumstances(or wrong circumstances I should say).
It shows how if you put people into roles, they will show a different side of them.
If you let them be anonymous and remove accountability they are more likely to do worse things.
This is why soldiers are made to wear uniforms, it allows their killings to remain anonymous, and they also act differently when put in the role of a soldier.
The study also shows how dehumanizing people — by giving them a number instead of a name, wearing sunglasses to avoid eye contact, and covering faces — can make it easier to torture people. It also shows how power can easily allow such things.
In group out group:
One of the most powerful things in psychology is the in-group vs out-group bias.
Those we see as in-group we favour them and are more likely to connect with and help them.
Those who we see as out-group we judge more harshly, we stereotype more and in some cases even gain pleasure from seeing them in pain.
We’ve developed this bias for our survival.
The funny thing is our in-group or out-group classification can be done on the most random things; not just things like race, ethnicity, religion etc.
A psychologist grouped people by making up some random explanation.
He grouped one set of people saying he thinks that group likes a certain kind of painting and he grouped another set of people saying they might like a different kind of art.
What he found was that when given money people were more likely to share money with those in their in-group; even though these people were grouped with the most arbitrary reason.
Now imagine this on a more extreme level. Hitler grouped the Jews and the Non- Jews with strong propaganda.
He used his propaganda to show that both groups were completely different and that the Jews were oppressors.
This further helped with dehumanizing them and comparing them to vermin. In the concentration camps, they were given numbers as part of the dehumanizing.
When they were seen as sub-human and non-human(out-group) it made it a lot easier to kill them.
That's it for this article- Why do People Kill?
This is one of my darker articles, I still hope you found it interesting.
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I’ll probably write an article on how to survive such conditions and prevent becoming bad sometime soon.
And I’ll see you in the next one.
A while ago I wrote about what made Jeffrey Damher kill if you’d wanna check that out.
