At My Most Evil

I was a parking enforcement officer in college.

Woah, woah, that's not why I was at my most evil, hold the judgment just a little bit longer...

It was my first full day on the job. I was wearing my uniform polo shirt, jean shorts, and I had my super cool radio (complete with the speaker/mic extension) clipped to my Boy Scout web belt. I had somehow landed the coolest job ever. I loaded up my shoulder bag with a packet of parking ticket sleeves, signed into the handheld ticketing device, and strapped on the mini-printer to the other side of my belt. I was ready to go prove that I could do the job; I could just feel the wariness of the previously all-male team.

At 7 a.m., I got into the GMC pickup truck's passenger seat, my "training" partner taking the wheel. There wasn't a lot that we could do that early in the morning, since parking lot enforcement generally didn't open until 7:30 or 8 a.m. depending on the location. I offered no suggestions since I was still learning the code names for each area of the campus and trying to memorize the NATO phonetic alphabet for radio communication.

We can't patrol the lots, but the meters are always going, he said confidently.

We drove around a bit until he spotted a car that was parked in front of a meter just outside of a large building, so we pulled into a stall next to it.

Let's get it, he said, turning off the truck and jumping to the ground. I followed him over to the car. There was someone inside. I looked at him, confused at what to do. He approached the vehicle and signaled the driver to roll down her window. Then he nodded at me. Fear gripped my introverted brain and I said something like:

You can't park here if you haven't paid the meter.

What do you mean? I'm waiting until it's open, she said, very confused. It says you only have to pay after 7:30.

I was stunned. Was she lying to get out of talking with us? Would I get in trouble for not doing my job if we left her alone? If we did leave her, doesn't that encourage her delinquent behavior in the future?!

I looked at my partner for help and he shrugged and started laughing. I mimicked him and started laughing, too.

You can't park here. You need to leave, I said, sniggering in her face as I leaned on her car window. She was not happy and told us she was going to call the Parking Office.

I can't remember exactly what happened after that because I was so disgusted at my behavior that that's all I ever focused on, but suffice it to say that we got into trouble for how we handled the situation. The driver was well within the rules to be parked there waiting for the meter to activate—she didn't even need to be in her car, it was just more convenient to stick around until she could pay. I blamed my partner for making me say stupid things, since I didn't know the rules yet (although I learned that he had only 2 weeks of experience on me).

We all make mistakes—that doesn't make us evil—but something about that interaction shook me to my core and has bothered me for 15 years. It was that laughter. I felt something in it. I was in the wrong, but I laughed in the face of someone I didn't know, who was in the right, and I felt powerful as I laughed.

Uniforms

In the aftermath of last week's horrendous news of the killing of Renee Good, I'm reminded of the two most potent and intriguing experiments I learned about in my Intro to Psychology class in college. I'm not saying these two experiments explain what happened at that event specifically. I do believe that they are relevant to a discussion of systemic concern and how we can suppress humanity and pro-social values.

Phillip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment and Stanley Milgram's Behavioral Study of Obedience are both controversial experiments due to their impact on participants. Both, however, offer insights into the complex and dangerous circumstances we find ourselves in with authority, compliance, and obedience.

The Stanford Prison Experiment involved student volunteers who were randomly assigned the role of either a prisoner or a guard. After only a few days into the experiment, the students became so engrossed in their roles that they began to act in harmful ways. Guards exerted their authority over prisoners, making them do exercises or say whatever they demanded. Things got to the breaking point and Zimbardo stopped the experiment early so that the inappropriate behavior wouldn't escalate even more than it already had.

A key point here is that the roles were randomly assigned. That suggests that the role itself was enough to influence the actions of the people assuming that role. Zimbardo notes in his book about the experiment, The Lucifer Effect, that since these participants were students and didn't have experience with prisons, their behavior was influenced by their idea of the roles, likely from the news, movies, or books. We bring expectations to the roles we take on and that's before any training or experience. Situations will draw out those ideas or expectations (both real and imagined) and sometimes they are exacerbated.

Milgram's experiment deals with obedience to authority. Participants were put in front of a machine with switches labelled with increasing voltage (15 volts to 450 volts). They were told they had been assigned the role of "teacher" and another person was assigned the "learner." Unbeknownst to the participant, the learner was always a part of the research team and not another participant. The experiment begins and the participant is supposed to teach the learner a list of word pairs. Every time the learner makes a mistake, the teacher must punish the learner with the next-voltage shock. Prior to starting, the learner says they have a mild heart condition, but the researcher running the experiment reassures that the shocks will be painful but not damaging.

Even though the learner is an actor and not actually receiving any shocks at all, the experiment gets dark very quickly as participants continue to administer increasingly powerful shocks. Despite screams of pain from the learner, the teacher receives instructions or encouragement to continue on deploying shocks from the researcher—the guy in the lab coat. According to Social Psychology, Fifth Edition by Stephen L. Franzoi, every single participant obeyed up to 300 volts.

There were variations of the experiment done in which the learner was in a separate room (the initial version of the experiment) and even having the learner sitting right next to the teacher. When the learner was in the same room, obedience dropped to 40%.

Both of these experiments have compelling criticisms whether for ethics, experimental design flaws, or for not having direct application to real-world events like the Holocaust (which was largely the inspiration for the Milgram experiment). However, I find these to be instructive even in anecdotal form. What I take away from these two experiments is how much power people in authority have; how much influence; and how easy it can be to abandon values and beliefs under the influence of authority and emergent situational factors.

There is no excuse for the behavior, because our agency is still accessible, but even more important than assigning blame might be in designing and preparing for these factors. For example, after I recognized how wrong I was on my first day of parking enforcement and how I couldn't rely on my teammates to make important decisions, I became extra sensitive to my work. I doubled-down on learning the rules deeply so that I wouldn't make the same mistake twice. I also took stock whenever I put on any uniform, not just as parking enforcement, I would notice the power and behavioral shift from role-playing a Zombies vs. Humans conflict to putting on a name tag as a missionary. I feel the power of the positions I've inhabited, and I've wielded that power over people to varying degrees of misalignment with my own values.

We can see how authority plays a huge role in the outcome of these studies. Whether it is in the simple label assigned to someone (guard or prisoner) or in the clothes someone is wearing (the lab-coated researcher), power and authority can be transferred to or from a person immediately—even in constructed situations where people know it's an experiment and not real. The authority changes behavior: both for the one with the authority and the one interacting with the person in power.

To be clear, authority doesn't remove our agency, nor does it force people to become evil. It does raise the stakes of any situation and if unchecked can encourage anti-social behavior from either the person in power or the people they are interacting with. It is a dangerous aspect of psychology that we need to consider more often than I think we do as citizens or lay people.

Cyborg

While I see the shooting of Renee Good as a murder and I have considerable criticisms of ICE as an entire organization, I'm not here to make the case for or against the shooter—that's for the law (assuming that the law is allowed to freely take its course). My point here is that people do have a relation to authority and that can create terrible situations. Technically, authority isn't real, it's an agreement, and yet it does have real consequences, real influence, and it feels real.

Although my experience laughing at someone when I felt like I was in control isn't even close to the upper forms of evil, I recognized it as a part of the path to get there. I'm not an exemplar, but I do wish we could all take a close look at ourselves and our power in whatever position we may currently hold in society or at work—and it doesn't take much to get some power. I wish we could all take seriously what harms we could cause and also what good we could do or inspire.

As for the experiments we've looked at briefly and the shooting incident, I think it is of the highest importance to look at how we are designing the teams and organizations in power. Things as simple as uniforms confer power to people. That gets exponentially increased when a firearm is given to a person, when they wear masks that increase anonymity, when they are given quotas to fill. The more unchecked power markers, the more likely we will see inhumanity.

Please be careful out there. Call your reps. Check your power.