The Lucifer Effect | Phillip Zimbardo | Talks at Google

My name is Sean Brewick and I'm on the Global Customer Insights team. And I have been given the honor of introducing a man who probably doesn't need an introduction, Professor Philip Zimbardo from Stanford University, or Dr. Z, as he likes to be called. Dr. Z has been a researcher and a teacher in psychology for the last 50 years. And more than that, he's really been the public face of social psychology for, for most of that time, through his tenureship as president of the American Psychological association and his many lectures and books trying to bring psychology to the masses. And really been an advocate for his strong belief that social psychology can provide a lot of the answers that help make this world a better place. And in that light, Phil has just finished a book, the Lucifer Effect, and be happy to chat about that today. So without further ado, Dr. Z.

It's great to be here. I am now officially Googleized, My first visit to your incredible campus. What I want to do today is talk about some research I've been doing for many, many years that was filed away and suddenly got to be relevant with the events happened in Abu Ghraib a few years ago. But I want to set the context for this, what I'm going to present today. The psychology of evil. The question of what makes people go wrong? Why do good people do bad things? This is a question that theologians have faced. Historians, dramatists, poets, psychologists have tended to ignore those big questions. We tend to have really precise answers to really small questions because we have really good techniques of assessment, experimental design. But my training was both as a psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist. So sociologists ask big questions. They never have an answer because they don't have very good methodology. So my whole career has been, how do you ask big questions and use the right methodology for answering them? So this is what I've been tackling of late, tackling how do we understand evil? Back a couple of years ago, all of you saw the same images that I saw on April 28. TV expose of horrific images, inexcusable behavior by anybody. But they were not inexplicable. When I saw those, they were direct visual parallels. This study I did@stanford 35 years ago, very similar to images that I'm going to show you later on. So when the Bush administration and the military immediately said, this is the work of a few bad apples, a few rogue soldiers, it is not systemic, I knew that was probably a lie. Anyway, I entertained the hypothesis, maybe our soldiers were really good to begin with, and maybe they were not bad apples until they Were corrupted by being put in a bad barrel. And if so, then I also wanted to understand who made that bad barrel. How do you go about. How do you get data to answer that kind of hypothesis? Well, you'd have to be an investigative reporter. You have to get access to some of those soldiers, access to that situation in order to answer it. Well, I actually became an expert witness for one of the guards, Sergeant Chip Frederick, who was the guard who was supposed to be in charge of that night shift. And so I got to know everything there is to know about this man, about his family, about the other soldiers. And then because I was an expert witness, I had access to all the images. What we have seen is two dozen that the military has effectively suppressed. Viewing the others, and there are more than 1,000, many of those more horrible than what we've seen. And I'm going to show you some of those. But I also had access to all of the investigative reports. There are a dozen of them, and they run two to 300 pages. I doubt anybody has read them but me. But as a teacher, scholar, and to do a good job as an expert witness, I read all of those reports, and they are enlightening. And so I'm now in a position to answer the question, were these a few bad apples, or was it the barrel that was bad? I want to start with this wonderful image from MC Escher. And if you look at it some, some of you will immediately focus on the black and make the white the background. Some of you will focus on the white and make the black the background. But if you look more closely, what you see is a world either filled with angels, little Tutus, or a world filled with demons or devils. So you make the white the figure and the black the background. It's a world full of goodness. If you focus on the black, make that the figure and the white the background, then it's a world full of devils. So this tells me several things. It tells me the world is, has always been, and probably will always be filled with both good and evil. It reminds me also that God's favorite angel, according to some ancient scripture, was Lucifer. Lucifer, if you remember, became the devil. So this is the most extreme transformation imaginable. And the story goes something like when God created Adam, his perfect creature, he told the angels that they must bow down and honor Adam. And Lucifer and some other angels said, doesn't make sense. He's immortal. We're angels. We were here prior to him. Even though Lucifer was supposedly God's favorite sun, called the Morning star, Favorite angel. God was not into conflict resolution that God of that time. And instead he got Michael the archangel to come and with other angels there was this cosmic battle in heaven and Michael won and Lucifer lost. And paradoxically, it was God who created hell as a place to put the fallen angels. And the reason God was upset is Lucifer committed two sins. The sin of disobedience to the highest authority and the sin of pride. And those continue to be sins that people get punished for. The focus on individuals who are good or bad was really highlighted back in Middle ages in the Inquisition. In 22 Catholic countries throughout the world, people identified as witches by people in the town anywhere, were tortured, made to confess and then killed. It all began with this book which I recommend to you paperback the Malleus Maleficarum. It's called the Witch's hammer, written in 1486 by two German theologians, Heinrich Kramer and James Springer. And they raise an interesting conundrum. How could evil exist in a world governed, created by an all powerful, all loving God? You know, God should say no evil and disappears. Well, they reason in the kind of Jesuitical way that God allows evil to exist to test human soul, you give into the temptation, you go to hell, you resist the temptation, you go to heaven. But because of, because Satan came back and corrupted Adam and Eve, God said the devil can no longer work his evil directly on people. Well, the devil is shrewd. So the devil finds witches, people he sleeps with and so he corrupts them. They corrupt us. So what these authors said was why don't we have a WID program witch identification destruction where we identify the witches, get them to confess and destroy them. And if you do that, you break the link between the devil and people and evil will cease to exist. Interestingly, as you see in this picture, or if I ask you which what's the first gender that comes to mind? We always think witches. You don't take witch as a man. And in fact most of the people who were tortured, most of the people who suffer were witches. There are a number of books that argue that this started the legacy of violence against women which exist through today because it was the church and the state identifying the men in the church and state identifying women as the enemy. So the Lucifer effect is really the most extreme cosmic transformation of God's favorite angel into the devil into Satan. And the reason I focus on that is it sets the context for me for investigating lesser transformation. Just good people, not angelic to do bad things, not devilish things in certain times, in certain situations. So My psychological definition of evil is evil is the exercise of power. And that's going to be the key. To intentionally harm psychologically through prejudice, dehumanization, to hurt physically through torture and. Or to destroy mortally or spirit spiritually destroy a religion through genocide, whole peoples. A simple definition is evil is knowing better and doing worse. But why are we fascinated with evil? And soon, when I finish this, then we'll get into a case study. We'll look at evil in action. I think it's because of the power. It's the power of someone or some agency, some agent or agency, to control and dominate other people, animals or nature. Especially fascinating when it's creative, unique, absolute and raw. We're less interested in the bad consequence that 3,000 people died in 9, 11. What we could not take our eyes off was the planes crashing into the World Trade center, cutting it in half and then having it evaporate. That's something nobody had ever seen. In one sense, it's the most extreme form of power and was creative. Weaponizing a commercial airline and destroying 210 story buildings. And so, yeah, 3,000 people died. Unless one of those people you knew personally. That was not the fascination, it was with the creative, absolute use of power. If you Google evil, a word so empty that it surely should have withered away by now, up come 136 million hits in a third of a second. Tony Blair swore to confront evil where he found it. George W. Bush would be lost without the word. His name is Kogul with it more than 2 million times. Both men, indeed, all politicians, social commenters should read this book, my book. This was an editorial in the London Times back in April. In fact, George Bush recently said, it makes me realize the nature of the enemy we face, which hardens my resolve to protect the American people, people who do that kind of thing. It's not a civil war. It's pure evil. I believe we had an obligation to protect ourselves from that evil. Well, of course, if you identify others as evil, reciprocally, that automatically makes you good. You are the defender. You are the protector of the society, of the nation, of your family against the bad guys. But it's also part of something we all do, is we erect a boundary which we think is impermeable. And bad people are there and we're here. We, our kind, our kin on the good side, and they are on the bad side. And we live with the illusion that they cannot ever become good and we cannot ever become bad. So part of my goal today is to dispel you of that illusion to make you think at the end, maybe I too could go across that boundary at some time, at some place. So the Lucer Effect is really a celebration of the human mind's infinite capacity to make us behave as kind or cruel, caring or indifferent, creative or destructive. And it makes some of us villains, but it also makes others heroes. And I'm going to end with a positive note on how do we create the heroic imagination in our families and our children in the next generation? So the book, if it ever. They're supposed to have books for signing, I hope they come. So I'd be happy to sign them. If not, it's really cheap on Amazon. So the looser effect, the whole focus of the book is, the challenge is it asks you, how well do you really know yourself? How sure are you what you would or would not do in a totally new situation? And I'm going to argue you don't know any. Anything about yourself if you don't put yourself in new situations. Because what you know about yourself today is what you know from yesterday. And all of us arrange our life to always be in the same familiar situations. We rarely are in really new situations. And that's where we get tested. And so in the research I'm going to present to you, we do just that. We take ordinary people and put them in a totally new situation, as Albert Ghraib was, as the Stanford Prison Experiment was. And the question is, how well does anybody really know you? And how well do you know anybody else? Think of the people you know best, your wife, your family, you know, a small slice of life, a few hours a day, if that much. And you know them playing a particular role. And they know you playing a particular role. And so this is one of the challenges to say when, you know, when we hear about the high school shootings, everybody says, how could it be? I knew him really well. He was a Boy Scout. He never said no to his mother. He was a good little kid. And now he chopped up his mother and ate his grandmother. We thought we knew him well, Horatio, but we didn't. So let's begin with a case study of evil. Evil in action. I'm going to show you some pictures. I call this digitally documented depravity. These came from the cameras of United States soldiers stationed Abu Ghraib in a particular place. All the abuses took place in tier 1A. That was the hard site in Abu Ghraib Prison. And it all took place on the night shift. Night shift was 4pm to 4am so what I've done is I've arranged these static images in a kind of dynamic sequence, adding sound and movement. And what you're going to see is the evil begins as all evil begins, with a small first step. They're getting them to do push ups, they're getting them to punished while they're doing push ups. They push them around, they hit them, and then it escalates. And one of the reasons for evil in many prison like situations, one of the motivations is boredom. When you get bored, the way you break through boredom is to think of something to do which is novel, which is fun, which is playful. And if all you have are people as your objects and you don't have other things, then people become the objects that you're going to use to break through your boredom. So let's go down into that dungeon. Sam. Here's Defense Secretary Donna Rumsfeld, Former Defense Secretary Donna Rumsfeld. And this is Brigadier General Janice Karpinski. She was supposed to be in charge of that unit. She never visited it. That's one of the reasons some of those abuses occurred. And they want to know who are the bad apples? Who's responsible for those abuses. The problem is, if you frame the question of who is responsible, there's only one answer, it's people. I want to frame the question a different way. Can we raise the sound? If you ask the question, what is to blame? It could be people, but it could be something more. And obviously something more is what I'm going to present as a social psychologist is what is the blame we're going to see is the situation that corrupted those young men and women, military policemen. So how do psychologists go about trying to understand the psychological dynamics of such transformations of human character? Well, if they were always bad, it's not a transformation. They were bad and they did bad. I'm arguing, let's assume for the sake of argument that they start off as good and suddenly in a short time they're doing these kinds of things. And worse. The traditional way that psychologists explain any human behavior, that most psychologists, all psychiatrists, clinical psychologists, people in assessment, cognitive psychologists, is the same as in religion, is the same as in medicine. We look for pathologies in the person within the person with defective character structures, sadistic personalities, the bad apples. Social psychologists and other social scientists say, of course, individuals are always the actors. But we have to understand the stage, we have to understand the behavioral context, we have to understand who's the stage director. We have to understand whether the behavior is alone or in an ensemble, whether it's improvised or scripted. So here it says maybe there were good men and women corrupted by the behavioral context. And we're going to talk about what that really means by powerful situational forces. And that's where the bad barrel comes in. One of the things I did in going through these investigative reports is I moved beyond. My focus was always just on the situation. I began to ask the question about what is the system that creates those situations. And the system is the legal, historical, cultural, economic forces that maintain such situations. And this is where the real power is. So here's the power. The power creates those and then this is secondary power that that can corrupt good people. So the Lucifer effect involves understanding human character transformation when ordinary good people become perpetrators of evil. And it's through the interplay of these three forces. Things that people bring into the situation, things that the situation brings out of people, how they interact, the person in the situation. And in fact then we have to understand those in dominant situation systems that create and maintain those situations. Here's a wonderful cartoon, recent New Yorker cartoon. I'm neither a good cop nor a bad cop, Jerome. Like yourself, I'm a complex amalgam of positive and negative personality traits that emerge or not, depending on circumstances. So this is really what my talk is going to be all about. Many of you remember Robert Louis Stevenson's famous story parable about Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that the good Dr. Jekyll invents some chemical. When he takes it, he is transformed into the evil Mr. Hyde. And when the drug wears off, he becomes a good guy again. But he can't resist trying it just one more time. Especially since there's no human subjects committee he has to go through. He's his own subject and he goes back and forth. And even as a kid I always wondered, I said wait a minute, I thought that boundary was permeable. But Robert Louis Stevenson's story, the real central the theme is it's permeable like our cells of our body, which are generally impermeable but do allow transfers of chemical. So social psychological research, I think can answer question of how Dr. Jekyll can be transferred into Mr. Hyde without drugs. And I think it also help us answer the question how once good army soldiers playing the role of military police. That's not who they are. It's a role they play in a far off land, in a far off prison, in a very controversial war. How they were transformed into perpetrators of evil, as you have seen. Let's see. So it all begins with a study. I'M only going to be able to, in a short time, present a few social psychological studies that demonstrate the power of the situation. Most dramatic ones some of you have heard about, but probably few really know the details of. And I'll try to go through very quickly. It's a study done by Stanley Milgram back at Yale university in the 1960s. And this study is the most representative and generalizable in all of psychology because he utilized 1,000 ordinary citizens from New Haven, Connecticut and Bridgeport, Connecticut. They started by answering this ad. And the ad says, we're going to pay you to be in a study of human memory. Tells you why it's important for psychologists study memory. And it says, we don't want college students or high school students. We want ordinary people, factory workers, businessmen, professional people, construction workers, white collar workers, whatever. So you read the ad and you say, well, four bucks is not so good, but I want to help science. And you go down and there are two people there. One of you is going to be a teacher, one of you is going to be a learner. So you're going to play good roles. The experimenter is in the white lab coat, and he tells you that there's no research done on whether punishing errors will help improve memory as well as rewarding right answers we know will improve learning and memory. So that's what we're going to do. The teacher is going to give the learner something to learn. When the learner gets it right, you reward him. When the learner gets it wrong, you punish him. And we do this until the learner learns it and gets it all right. So here's the learner being hooked up into kind of an electric chair. Here's the teacher being told what the apparatus does. And before you is a box with 30 switches. First switch is 15 volts. He doesn't even feel it. And each successive switch increases just by 30 volts. So 15, 45, et cetera. When it starts off, the guy is doing well, and then he starts dumbing down and making errors and errors, and you're shocking more and more. He's in the other room, you're in the room with the experiment, and the guy starts screaming. And you're a good person. You turn to the experiment and say, sir, who's going to be responsible if something happens? Experimenter tells you, I'll be responsible. Continue. And it goes on, and the guy's screaming more and more, I got a heart condition. And again, those thousand people are mostly good people, and they don't want to go on. But the experimenter now switches from being a caring, just person to being this authoritarian Nazi. You must go on or you have a verbal contract. And whatever you say, you're not getting out of that situation. So the question is, it now gets up to 375 volts, dangerous, severe shock. The guy screams and there's silence. And you say, sir, something's wrong. Somebody should go and see him. Experiment says, we'll see him when the experiment's over. You continue to shock, and the system goes up to 450 volts, triple X, the pornography of power. And the question is, would anybody go all the way? Well, Milgram asked 40 psychiatrists what their estimate was, and they said only 1% of American citizens would go all the way to 40 because that's sadistic behavior and only sadists would engage in it. They are guilty of the dispositional error because psychiatrists believe everything is in the person. They ignored the authority, the roles, the contract, the situation, et cetera. And they make what we call the fundamental attribution error. It's what we all make that is we tend to overestimate the contribution of personality and we underestimate the contribution of situations where we're trying to understand any behavior. Here's the data, very simply, of one study. This is the number of people who drop out. And this is the shock level from 15 up to 450. Nobody drops out to 285 volts. The guy has been screaming all along. And at that point, six people drop out. Here's 375. The guy screams, silent. How could you be helping him improve his memory? He's dead or he's unconscious. So at that point you quit. Doesn't make sense. But now you're under the control of this experiment who say, you must go on, you must go on. And in fact, not 1%, 2/3, 65% of the people go all the way. So psychiatrists could not be more wrong. Well, this is only one study. I said he ran 1,000 participants. He actually did 16 different experiments. And what you show is this is the percent going all the way. You can go from 90% down to almost zero. And not by putting good people or bad people in or out. In each experiment, he varies one situational variable. Well, what about women? Women as participants, 13. Same as men, 60%. How do you get 16%? How do you get 90%? If you see somebody like you go all the way, you know what? That social model influences you, and you go all the way. In Study 5, if you see people like you resist, then you resist. So people present powerful social models of compliance or rebellion, and those models can influence your behavior. But what Milgram shows, this is like putting a dial into human nature. You can dial up obedience from zero. Almost nobody does it all the way up to 90%. But in most studies it was that same level about two thirds. All research is artificial. Obviously, you're never in your life going to be sitting in front of a box, pressing buttons and so forth. So you always want to say, what are the real world parallels? Well, 912American citizens, many from San Francisco, most in Los Angeles, from our neighborhood, committed suicide or were killed by their family and friends in the jungles of Guyana following the commands of a minister, Reverend Jim Jones. He was a minister of something called People's Temple. November 1978. Big Temple in San Francisco, actually down the street from where the Fillmore is. And if you go online, you can listen to that speech. He gives a speech encouraging them to commit revolutionary suicide. But he had brainwashed them. He brought them under mind control over several years. So this was just the end product of blind obedience to authority. In the long and gloomy history of mankind, there have been more crimes committed in the name of obedience than in the name of disobedience. So God was wrong by punishing Lucifer and not going through some conflict resolution. Well, while Milgram, who was my high school classmate, by the way, in Monroe High School in the Bronx, while he was doing that, I was reading Goulding's Lord of the Flies. And as you remember, the key in Goulding's Lord of the Flies is one of the boys changes his external appearance, takes his clothes off, paints himself. Then a previously inhibited behavior, killing animals, wild pigs that they needed for food gets disinhibited, and now they can kill the pig. Once barriers against killing are dropped, then they also kill other kids and they start killing. They kill the intellectual boy, piggy. And so the question is, is that psychologically valid? That's a novel. So social psychologists say, well, let's see, let's do an experiment. And what we do is women from my class at New York University come to lab. We're going to make them anonymous. There's my assistant, Scott Fraser. He gives them a cover story, a big lie about. They're in an experiment where other women are trying to be creative under stress. The other women are going to be creative. Your job is to give them stress, but we don't want them to pick up nonverbal cues. And you're going to be in A group of four women. And we're eliminating all nonverbal cues by putting these hoods over your head and putting them in big floppy lab coats. You listen to tape recordings of the two different women you're going to meet. We give you a sample of the shock. And the shock is very painful. And the measure is not shock intensity increase as a Milgram, it's duration. How long do you hold your finger down on that button? Again, what you always got to ask in experiment, what is compared to what? What is the comparison group? What is the control group? In this case, it's women from the same group, treated exactly the same, with one exception. Instead of taking their individuality away, we emphasize it, but everything else is. And they're randomly assigned to that condition versus what we call deindividuation condition. So here I am behind the screen with the first of the two victims. A light goes on. You put your finger on the button, another light goes on. Shock is in the system. You believe it because she's twisting and turning and moaning and complaining, as in the Milgram study. They are actors, they are confederates. They do not actually get punished, but it's so realistic that people believe it. So here's the data. This is the amount of shock. This is the first 10 trials. And the second 10 trials, if you are individuated, you start at a low level and you stay there. But we're interested in what is the effects of anonymity in the deindividuated condition. You start at twice as high, and over time you shock more and more and more. We've done this study with masks. We've done this study throwing styrofoam balls rather than shock. You always get the same effect. Anything that makes you anonymous in a situation that gives you permission to be aggressive, to be violent, will enhance that tendency. And the second thing is, once you get into shocking, once you get into hurting other people, it becomes self reinforcing and it increases more and more over time. It's kind of like a shark feeding frenzy. Does it make a significant difference? Again, we're going to go in the real world, if warriors change their appearance before going to battle. Again, who cares about college students in hoods shocking other college students? Anthropologists ask this question. Does it make a difference in how they treat their victims, if they change their appearance before going to battle or not? Well, we know in many cases they don't. You just go to war, you don't change your appearance. In other cases you do, as in the Lord of the Flies. You paint Yourself, you put on masks. And in most civilized nations, we put men in military uniforms. Has the same exact effect. So what's the difference if you don't change your appearance? Well, I should say there are 23 different cultures that he found two bits of data. Do they change their appearance or not? There are eight that don't change, 15 that change. And the measure he's looking at, do they kill, torture, mutilate their victims? Not pressing a button on a shock generator. Thirteen societies are high on killing, torture, mutilating. Ten are low. So if they don't change their appearance, only one of eight cultures do this. We're interested obviously in the red zone. If they change their appearance. Look at this. 90%. 12 of 13 societies that change their appearance are high on torturing, killing and mutilating. So in fact, that little study in the and NYU has dramatic parallels in the real world. So it's culture. Culture has wisdom. It says if you want young men to kill other young men in war, put it back up. If old men want to send young men to kill other young men in war, that's what all war is about. The only thing that's different is whether it's for turf or for oil or things like this. Then you put them in a uniform, you change their appearance, and it makes it easier for them to do it. Uniform also makes them all behave the same. You take away individuality. But now when the war is over, whether you win or lose, you know what? You have to give the uniform back. Because we don't want you to come home and be a killer. We want you to go back to being a good little boy. This leads us to the Stanford Prison Experiment, which I did back in 1971. We put an ad in the paper, a little bit like Milgram's, trying to get college students for study of prison life to run up to two weeks. And 75 people volunteered. We gave them personality tests, clinical interviews, and we picked two dozen who were the most normal and healthy. And we randomly assigned them, flip the coin. Guard, Prisoner. Guard. Prisoner. Guard, prisoner. So that means at time one, we know the only good apples going to go in our prison. And we know there's no difference between prisoners and Guards. Prisoner 819 did a bad thing. Prisoner 819 did a BAD thing. Prisoner 819 DID a BAD thing. So this is the paradise at Stanford University. We're gonna turn it into a hell very quick. Unbeknownst to the kids who are going to be prisoners, we said wait at home in the dormitories. They didn't know that I had recruited the Palo Alto Police Department to do very realistic arrests because he wanted to take away their freedom. We didn't want them to come and voluntarily give it up.

Police car pulls up in front and a cop comes to the front door, knocks and says he's looking for me. So they, right there, they, you know, they took me out the door. They put my hands against the. It was a real cop car. It was a real policeman. And there were real neighbors in the street who didn't know that I was. This was an experiment. And there was cameras all around and neighbors all around. They put me in the car. Then they drove me around Palo Alto. They took me to the. To the police station, the basement of the police station. Then they put me in a cell. I was the first one to be picked up. So they put me in a cell which was just like a room with a door with bars on it. You could tell it wasn't a real jail. They locked me in there in this degrading little outfit. They were taking this experiment too seriously.

Well, indeed we were. This is what one of the guards looked like. The guards had military uniforms, symbols of power, and also silver reflecting sunglasses. An idea I got from the movie Cool Hand Luke with Paul Newman. If you haven't seen it, you should see it. It's a classic. We put them in an anonymous yard. We converted a basement of psychology department into a prison yard. Prisoners went through degradation rituals, as most prisoners do also in military boot camp. Stripping the naked bags over the heads. The prisoners were put in sand, essentially dresses with numbers on. They became their number. They gave up the name. So total deindividuation. This is the art in action. There's solitary confinement, the hole. And again, as you saw in the Abu Ghraib picture starts with push ups, jumping jacks, simple things. And over time, it gets more and more boring. Guards work eight hour shifts and go home. Prisoners live there 24 7. There were three prisoners and three guards. There were nine prisoners and three guards on any one shift. And the guards rotated through three shifts. Over time, the abuse escalated. Having them do more and more humiliating things. Cleaning out toilet bowls with their bare hands, stripping them naked. Sexual humiliation. And finally, sexually degrading activities, including simulated sodomy. Here's hooded prisoners awaiting a parole board hearing with their legs chained together with the bags over their heads. That kid you saw who was the first to get arrested, he was the first to break down. Normal, healthy kid, chosen three days, 36 hours earlier. He's now having an emotional breakdown. And each day thereafter another student broke down in a similar way. You could just call it extreme stress reaction. And so we had to end the study. We couldn't go. We ended it after six days because it was out of control. The guards were stepping up their psychological abuse. I limited only physical abuse but the guards were stepping up psychological abuse to the extent that five of the prisoners had emotional breakdowns. I have a wonderful website I Recommend to you lucifereffect.com which has everything about the book, about the experiment, about it's going to be a popular movie, links to I'm going to talk later about heroism, about resisting influence, about dehumanization. Also gives you a chance to vote. The extent to which George Tennant, former head of the CIA, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George Bush are responsible for command complicity in the abuses we are talking about Again, what are the real world parallels? Compare this with this. Only paper bags are, you know, we're ecologically minded in America so we substitute those with sandbags. So now we don't use paper anymore. We have prisoners in black sandbags chain. This is Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. So of course I'm going to see parallels. But James Schlesinger, who is a former secretary of defense, he headed one of these investigative reports and let me just take a minute to say the parallels that he sees. The potential for abusive treatment of detainees during the global war on terrorism was entirely predictable. Based on a fundamental understanding of the principles of social psychology coupled with an awareness of numerous known environmental risk factors. Findings from the field of social psychology suggest that the conditions of war, the dynamics of detainee operations carry inherent risk for human mistreatment and therefore must be approached with great caution and careful planning and training. No training, no caution, no careful planning. Psychologists have attempted to understand how and why individuals and groups who usually act humanely can sometimes act otherwise in certain circumstances. That's my looser effect. He hadn't read it because I hadn't written it yet. But he did read the landmark Stanford study provides a cautionary tale for all military detention operations. This is 35 years old. I mean who doesn't know the basics of that study? In contrast, in the relatively benign environment of the Stanford prison experiment, the report makes evidence, quote that in military detention operations, soldiers work under stressful combat conditions that are far from benign. So here's this guy I defended, Chip Frederick. It was his idea to put this guy, putting him on a stress position was Donald Rumsfeld idea. But to put electrodes on his hand and make him think that when his legs gave way he'd fall off and he be electrocuted. So he did some bad things. He admitted to them. There's no question about it. You're in the pictures. What was he like before going down to that dungeon? The most all American patriotic soldier imaginable. He's a poster boy for the military. He loves the American flag. He loves the Star Spangled Banner. He won nine medals and awards before going down to that dungeon. When he was in Kuwait, the kids loved him. There are pictures of him playing with the kids. He's trying to learn Arabic. Even though he has very limited educational level. A model soldier in every way. So dispositional very quickly. I had him tested by the army psychiatrist. Normal. Normal on every dimension. No sadistic tendencies. Comes from a small town in Pennsylvania, I said won nine medals and awards. He had been a good guard in a low security prison. He was a super patriot. What's the situational? Everything we saw in the Stanford Prison study? Is there the dehumanization, deindividuation, moral disengagement? Worst abuses happen in both places. On the night shift he worked 12 hour shifts, 4pm to 4am seven days a week with not a day off for 40 days. He gets one day off and works two more weeks in the most chaotic conditions. The place is under bombardment. Prisoners and guards are being killed all the time. Prisoners are trying to escape. Electricity goes out, prisoners are wandering around naked. It's filthy, there's no toilets. There's porta potties that overflow. So there's shit everywhere. There's rats all over. And he's in charge now of 1,000 prisoners, 12 army reservists, 60 Iraqi police who are smuggling weapons in. And he has no training and no supervision. Not once in three months did any senior officer come down to that dungeon. And as I said, extreme fear. Why did it happen in this one place? This was the place where the CIA and military intelligence did their interrogation of high value detainees of people they thought were connected to Al Qaeda. And then what happened is when the insurgency started that our military and our military command had not a clue about, they started arresting whole families, men and women. There were children here as well, and they didn't have any information to give. So the CIA and the military intelligence and civilian interrogators put pressure on these military police, army reservists. They're not real soldiers, they're weekend soldiers. To soften them up, to take the gloves off, to prepare them for interrogation. So they give Them the permission to do whatever they wanted to do to soften them up. They just went a little too far. And they went. They took. Took the trophy photos. So who's responsible for creating and maintaining these conditions? Using dogs to induce fear, nakedness of prisoners, extreme stress and fear imposed Sleep, food, sensory deprivation, concealing illegal practice from Red cross. There were 21 murders in military prisons in Iraq, Cuba and Afghanistan. Not Chip, Frederick or any of those MPs on the night shift. All of these were standard operating procedures that I outlined in my book that came directly from Donald Rumsfeld in a memo of acceptable techniques of interrogation. He brought those to Guantanamo Bay. General Miller put them in practice. General Miller took them to Abu Ghraib and told General Sanchez he had to do it. One of the reports is by a General Fay. He says the system is guilty For a period of seven months. Military intelligence personnel allegedly requested, encouraged, condoned or solicited military police personnel. Or they participate in detainee abuse themselves. Or they establish procedures. They violate established procedures. The abuses would not have occurred had military doctrine been followed and mission training conducted. It was the environment created Abu Ghraib that contributed to currents of a such abuse and the fact that it remained undiscovered by higher authorities for a long period of time. Who was watching the story? It was not one day. It was months and months that these things went on. General Fah and General Jones get together on their report. They said there are seven factors leading to this abuse. Only one was dispositional, the character structure of these soldiers. Six are situational or systemic. The they say looking beyond personal responsibility, leader responsibility, command responsibility. Systemic problems and issues also contributed to the volatile environment in which abuse occurred. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who was himself a prisoner in Stalin's Gulag Archipelago, says the line between good and evil cuts through the center of every human heart. Every human heart of every human being. So I want to quickly, in the last five minutes, switch to positive things. The last chapter of my book, I give advice. How do you resist these kinds of influences? Because not everybody does them. Even if it's 90%, there's 10% who resist. And also it's a celebration of heroism. The reason those abuses came to light was because this ordinary army reservist, Joe Darby, saw the pictures you saw and he said, this is terrible. We're supposed to be bringing democracy to these people. We're bringing degradation, humiliating. So he took that CD and he gave it to an investigative officer. And that was an enormous act of courage because Army Reserve is Like the lowest level of military life. And he's taking this knowing that he's going to get his buddies in trouble. And he does it because he said it's the right thing to do. In fact, they had to put him, his mother and his wife in protective custody for three years because everybody wanted to kill him. Not just the soldiers in the unit, but people in his hometown because they said he humiliated the Bush administration and the military. The messenger, not the people that he exposed. We all saw this famous picture of a Chinese student who heroically challenged the government forces after the student rebellion in Tiananmen Square. He went in front of a row of tanks that were heading to crush that rebellion. He started screaming, saying, you know, we're all Chinese. All we want is freedom. Don't hurt us. And the row of tanks turned around and went away. So he's a physical hero. Joe Darby, I'm going to call him really more social hero. The banality of evil. Hannah Arend's famous, famous concept is that people who do evil don't look like monsters, they look like us. And that's what's really scary. It's the terrifying normality of people. She's saying Adolf Eichmann, who orchestrated the deaths of millions of Jews before going into Auschwitz and after is normal. Everything about him, everything. But you put him in that situation. He's now transformed. I argue that there's a banality of heroism, that heroes are not extraordinary people. Heroes are ordinary people who do an extraordinary deed. And so I demy. Demystify what it means to be a hero. And so the same exact situation that inflames the hostile imagination in some people will inspire the heroic imagination in others, while rendering most people passive. What do I mean? The psychology of heroism is how do we encourage, and this may be a Google project, children, families, everyone, to develop a hero, heroic imagination. To think of yourself as a hero in waiting for some situation to come along that will provide a catalyst for action on behalf of other people or for defending an ideal. To be a hero requires only two things. That you act when other people are not. You can't be a hero without doing something. In fact, you got to go against your mother's prescription. Don't get involved. Mind your own business. Mama. Humanity is my business. You're wrong. And you have to stop being egocentric and be sociocentric. I want to end with this very moving video clip. Some of you have heard about it. I don't know if you've seen it. A few months ago in New York City, On a train station, subway station, some guy gets a seizure and he falls across the track and the subway is coming. He's going to cut him in half. There are 76 people on that station. 75 freeze and do nothing. One of them is an African American construction worker. Wesley Autry, 50 years old. He's got a reason not to do anything. He's got his two little kids with him. He gives them to a stranger, says take care of them. He's black, the other guy's white. He jumps down on that platform and he says, I did what anyone could do. Didn't take special ability to jump down, but I did what everyone ought to do. And that's really a mantra of ordinary heroes. Then we'll end right after this open for questions.

On the New York City subway. It's hard enough finding someone who will give up his seat to a stranger, let alone be willing to give up his life for one.

Train was coming in like light like that.

It happened. Just 50 year old Wesley Autry, a construction worker and navy veteran, was standing on a subway platform with his two little girls when right in front of them a man started having a seizure.

He kind of stumbled over his own feet and fall backwards. I see a train coming, but the.

Train is so close, I'm like, what do I do? Wesley jumped onto the tracks and thought if he could just lie on top of the man, keep him from flailing, maybe the train would roll right over both of them. The clearance was exactly 21 inches. Wesley and the man 20 and a half.

No way the train can stop before this gentleman could get him up off the tracks. So he covered him with his body and pushed him down to a point where the train wouldn't hit his head and held him down under the tracks while the train came and rolled right over the top of him.

It gave Wesley's children the scare of their young lives.

I thought he was going to get.

Killed and Wesley the scare of his too.

I'm like talking to him. Sir, you can't move. I got two kids up here looking for their father to come back. I don't know you, you don't know me. But listen, don't panic, you know I'm here to save you.

As for the guy Wesley saved, he's 20 year old Cameron Hollupter. And other than a few scrapes and bruises, his father says he's doing fine. Mr. Autry's instinctive and unselfish act saved our sins. You know, the word hero gets thrown around a lot nowadays.

What a Better way to say to start off the new year than to save, save a life.

Nice to be reminded of what one really looks like. Steve Hart.

So one day you will be in a new situation that had there were three paths before you. One of those paths, people are going to be doing bad shit. Lying, cheating, cursing, telling racist sexist jokes. If you're in school, kid teasing, bullying, and you're going to join in because you want to be one of the guys, one of the team. The second path is you become guilty of the evil of passive inaction. Most people do nothing. You look, you see, you look the other way. It's awkward. Every time you get in a taxi cab in New York and and the guy starts telling you a racist sexist joke, you just, you know, I don't want to hear this. You don't tell him or when your uncle Charlie does. The third path is you go straight ahead and become a hero. And you become a hero by taking action to stop the evil. We know in psychology that if we get you to think of yourself as a generous person, that next time there's a blood drive, next time there's a charity drive, you're more likely to give blood and donate to charity. We get you to think that you're not the kind of person lit is next time you're about to throw something on the ground, you put it in your pocket. I think the same thing is true about heroism. If we can get young people to think that heroes are not special people, you don't have to be more compassionate, more altruistic. You don't have to be a Quaker. You don't have to have a special religious background. All you have to do is have compassion for others and act when other people are acting badly or not acting at all. And stop being concerned about yourself, your self interest, your egocentrism. Because ordinary heroes are waiting for the right situation to put our heroic imagination into action. And you know what? That situation is going to come once in your life. Almost nobody is a two time hero. And if the situation comes and you let it go by, you've lost your chance to become a hero. So we want to figure out how can we develop curricula for school kids to promote celebrate heroism. So I thank you for your attention. And the end note is oppose injustice, immorality, incompetence, entitlement and personal power. Fascist governments at home and abroad. Thank you very much. We have time for questions. Yeah, so I have no place to go. I know you guys have to get back.

Thank you Dr. Napardo for being here and taking your talk. On behalf of authors at Google, I'd like to apologize. We do not have the books here, unfortunately. But if you would like a book, please sign up here. I'm going to pass these out while we do the Q and A and we will do our best to get them to you as soon as they arrive. And if you would like to ask a question, just raise your hand and I'll get the mic to you. Thanks.

Actually got two things. First off, I was curious if you'd seen the follow up article on the subway hero in New York magazine. I think it was no, he was sort of used terribly by people around him. I'll send you a link if I can find it again. Used and what way people tried to take advantage of him, sign him up for things and take money away and.

Yeah, I mean it's very hard to be a hero.

His life was not significantly better afterwards was the guest of it.

The big problem is and this you got to have how we work this into the curriculum. Most people, whistleblowers suffer that. Whistleblowers, you know, usually are scorned. I mean, you know, by the corporation that you're exposing the fraud in. By the, you know, I'm saying here's Joe Darby who exposed this thing. If he had not been put in protective custody, he might have lost his life. So you have to be willing, I mean to be a hero means you're making a sacrifice of time, of reputation, not just your life. See, I would like that. Send me that.

And the other factor is I like to think of myself as being in the hero class. And I have had some fairly minor incidents come up which I think contribute to that. One thing I think may have done that was I grew up reading and still do a lot of superheroes hero comic books. But on the other hand I've noticed things like even in a minor situation, like I was in a marching band, someone runs up, swipes the drum major's hat which he had paid for himself. The band knew this. The guy was well liked. I was the only one who took off after him out of 150 people. So I really don't think the. You're stressing the ordinary heroism. I don't think it's that ordinary. I keep seeing situations where as you say, it's mostly people being very passive. So I think there is something extraordinary in the people who do go out and make those efforts.

My point is that the heroic act is always extraordinary because most people are not doing it But I don't want it to be that the hero is a special person and that if you don't have the hero gene, you're not going to do this. I'm saying anybody could do this. Some people, you know. Well, let me put it this way. There is Nelson Mandela, there's Martin Luther King, there's Mother Teresa. There are people organized their life around sacrifice. They are the exception in the same way that evil dictators are the exception. Most people who do evil do it once, do it in Abu Ghraib, do it in some other situation, do it as guards in the same prison study. So the important thing is how, how do you develop a curriculum where kids begin to think about what have I done that's heroic in my life in the last week? Who in my family, who in my friends have done something heroic? Just begin to think about heroism in our culture. I just developed a developing website, Everyday Heroes. But it's really saying the best antidote to evil is having a culture society that has a lot of heroes waiting to oppose evil. Other comments? Questions?

Yeah, so very quick, the sort of.

I know you have to leave it whenever it's time, it's okay.

The anthropological study and data about the uniform effect of mutilation. I mean, you know, there's too many potential confounding variables. There's a lot of people in the military and a lot of them probably commit violent crimes in their normal country when they're not on duty in war or whatever. And some fraction of them wear their uniforms around. I mean, is the probability, have people looked at it as the probability of committing a violent crime of a soldier in their normal off duty culture higher during those times when they're wearing their uniforms? I mean, they wear their uniforms around a lot. They don't wear their uniforms around sometimes. And there's probably enough data about how often they commit violent crimes.

Oh yeah, society. Nobody's looked at that. I mean, the anthropological study of course has confoundings for me. It's just impressive to say if you look across 23 different cultures, you get this very dramatic effect of 90% versus 10%. But, you know, but essentially the idea would be that simply the whole purpose of being in a soldier and the infantry or the Marines is to make you a killer. That's the point that when somebody says shoot, you shoot. You don't think. Just like the Milgram study, when somebody says press the button, you press the button. You don't think. It doesn't make sense. The guy's unconscious. Press the Button. You press a button, shoot. You shoot. You have to be a killer. That's what the training is. But in fact, we want you to be a killer in a situationally specific environment called war, and only when somebody is the enemy. Now, the problem is, you come back having done that, and you've lowered threshold against aggressive behavior, and it becomes highly likely that you're going to be aggressive toward your spouse or your friends and, you know, as part of the PTSD syndrome, you know, a big aggressive component. Other comments?

Yes, I have two questions for you. First of all, you mentioned the effect of anonymity or deindividuation in your studies. And I noticed that there was anonymity on both sides, right? In the. In the guard's case, the anonymity of the sunglasses and so on, and the uniforms. In the other case, the number. In the other study, the shockers and the ones who were shocked were both deindividuated. I was wondering if there's been any study into the differences between the anonymity of those who are acting, who are doing the evil, and those who are receiving it. For instance, is there a difference if someone knew that they would not be anonymous in what they were doing, but they didn't know who they were doing it to? Or if they knew that they were anonymous, but they knew that this individual they were doing it to was the one receiving it?

That's a good question. In the Milgram study, he has one condition where if you are in the same room as the victim, then obedience level goes way down. It's like being a bombardier, you know, I mean, if you're looking down, there's a map and you're dropping bombs, you know, you're not dropping on people, you're just dropping bombs, which is different than, you know. Let me back up. What was really difficult in the Second World War was to get people to use their bayonet on the enemy. Took a lot of. Lot of training. Desensitization. Desensitization. A lot of that was a whole training program. You start by sticking it into straw thing. Then you stick it into cows or dead horses, because when you put it in, blood is flying all over. It's not a video game. That's all out there. It's everywhere. But killing just as easier. The more remote it is, the more you don't have to think in your mind that this is a human being like me. It's really critical to dehumanize. See, dehumanization takes place in your head. It's like a cortical cataract that blinds you to humanity. And once you begin to dehumanize, then it's easy. All stereotypes do that. When you think of somebody in the Vietnam War, gooks or geeks or niggers or spics or waps or, you know, the use of those terms takes away the dignity, humanity of somebody else. And then it makes it easy to tell dirty jokes about them, to hit them, to punish them, to do anything.

And quickly, the other thing that struck me in the case where you defended that. That soldier or analyzed him, right, it seemed that you were defending him by showing that he was. He had, you know, a normal psyche and he was just put in a bad circumstance he couldn't control. Well, in other cases, I hear commonly where you try and defend somebody saying, well, they've got this abnormal psyche that they can't control. So I wonder, you know, if you have a normal psyche and it's still behind your control, you have an abnormal psyche, it's beyond your control. Is there any place for guilt? And what should the judicial system do about that?

Really great question. My defense was only to mitigate the extremity of the sentencing. He said he's guilty, so that was an issue. He got eight years. But the question is, should we change legal theory which says it's all in the person? If I can document that until this guy stepped down those steps, he was as normal, healthy, all American as possible. And then within a few weeks, he's doing these terrible things to say, well, he had free will, he didn't have to do it. Everybody who was on the night shift did it. So that wipes that out. It's not. Some did, some, some didn't. Everybody who was in that crucible of human nature did those terrible things in that night shift or they looked the other way. Nobody challenged it. So, yeah, there really has to be a revolution in legal theory which says to what extent do we take into account situational forces as described in the Milgram study, my study, my book, I have two whole chapters on all the resources on the power of the situation. And do we take into account the system? The Nuremberg trials and all international tribunals, that's really what they're doing. They're putting the system on trial. But the system is always people. Milosevic, you know, Saddam Hussein. It's always people who are at the top, who set the stage. And that's the important thing about international tribunals. So we do recognize that in some cases, the system is three responsible. On May 4, 2004, when these pictures were seen the Abu Ghraibe pictures. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld came before the Armed Services Senate Armed Services Committee, and he said to them, these abuses occurred on my watch as Secretary of Defense, therefore I am fully responsible. Should he be in a prison cell next to Chip Free Frederick, or should he be behind a big fancy desk at Stanford's Hoover Institution? I think he should go to prison, not go to a Hoover Institution. You can't say I'm responsible for the abuses and then not be responsible to say I'm responsible. But, you know, just get the guy, the grunts at the bottom of the line. Other questions. My question to you is if you were going to do it again, how would you change the Stanford prison experiment?

And given what developed in the emotional.

Breakdowns, would you do it again? No. My study and Milgram's study has permanently prevented any kind of research like that again ever being done. The sad thing is that the pendulum has swung so far that there's almost no behavioral research that actually puts people in behavioral context. So most research is paper and pencil. How do you think you would behave if you. You are a guard in the following situation? It's not until you're in this situation that you can experience what those forces are. I can describe it. I can give you 10 page scenarios. And it's not the same as feeling the power of camaraderie or feeling the pressure that other guys are putting on you to do this. What I would change is very simple. The reason this got out of control is I was the principal investigator and I was also the superintendent of the prison. Those incompatible roles, that there should have been someone who. And there was nobody there to blow the whistle except me. I did, but not too late. I should have blown the whistle after the second prisoner broke down. When the first one broke down, you could say, well, maybe our screening procedure failed, that we let somebody through who was defective. But once the second one broke down and said, look, we demonstrate, that's it. We've demonstrated the power of the situation. But at that point, I'm thinking like a superintendent of a prison. My job is to maintain the security and the stability of my institution. So there's a rumor when that young man, prison 8612 breaks down, that he's going to bring his friends, they're going to break into the prison. I go to the Palo Alto Police Department. I say, I want to move all the prisoners and our prison down to your old jail. And I persuade him to do it. It's only the last minute the city manager calls up and says, no, we can't do this. We get sued if something happens, and so forth. So I'm thinking like a prison superintendent, and I get. I'm angry with this guy saying, where's the institutional cooperation between correctional officers? The guy must have thought I was a lunatic, you know? So, yeah, so essentially, it's. If I did it again, it's separating those two roles, having somebody who has the power to stop the study. The other thing is, this went through Human Subjects Committee, and they approved it. Why did they approve it? Because it's kids playing cops and robbers in an experiment. If it's an experiment, you quit. Right. They couldn't imagine that. The situation got so profound that no one thought in terms of quitting an experiment. They thought of being poor, paroled from the Stanford Prison. Experiment. From the Stanford Prison. It stopped being an experiment. It was a prison. So, you know, so that's the hardest. So after the fact, you say, look at these terrible things that happened after the fact. What happened in Guyana, in Jonestown, was horrendous. Before that, Jim Jones was a hero in San Francisco. He was put in charge of housing. He was a buddy of Mascone, Rosalyn Carter. Anybody who came to the city would visit him because he had organized 2,000 people elderly. He was preaching brotherhood and racial integration. And so until he got to the jungle and started doing this really crazy stuff. Up to that point, he was a good citizen, a doer of more good deeds than bad deeds.

Just a couple more questions here.

You guys got to go back to work.

I just wanted to ask a question about. You mentioned this. Sort of 90% of people will obey and do the evil, the situational evil. But how can we sort of strive to be that 10%?

No, 90%. Only when you're in a situation where you see other people like you go all the way. So where it's facilitated, socially facilitated.

But on your section on heroism, you kind of went into how can we strive, you know, not to be in that group. What I thought you were going to say and what I guess I'm wondering about is I thought you would say something more like when you're in a situation that begs for heroism, heroism can become the equivalent where people will, you know, in much the same way that these are ordinary people doing evil things, that you can have ordinary people step up to do heroic things. But it sounded instead as if you were saying that for the ordinary person to do the heroic thing, he has to find a way to step into that role. Of that 10%, why do you suppose it is that situations in much the same way that they can lend themselves to evil, don't lend themselves to heroism?

No, no, I said they do. I mean, you know, maybe I misunderstood. No, I said the same situation that inflames the hostile imagination. It's the same situation that made Chip Frederick and he's other people do bad things, made Joe Darby do something good. So what did you say? The same situation that made 70 people freeze on that platform, made, you know, that situation facilitated Wesley Autry's act of heroism. So I'm saying the same situation can do those three things. Most people do nothing. You freeze, you know, you don't want to get involved, do vet or do good. So I'm saying it's inherent in the same situation as seeds of evil and the seeds of good.

Okay, so then, but you would say then there would be situations, separate ones that would lend themselves to heroism in much the same way that certain ones.

Yeah, but okay, I mean, what I'm saying for me, the biggest problem we have now, one of the biggest problem, everyday problem is bullying and teasing in schools. Recent research shows one quick quarter to one third of all kids report being teased and bullied in school. That means they end up hating school. If they hate school, they're going to do poorly in school. If they do poorly in school, their whole life is going to be ruined. They're going to hate going to school. Who knows that bullying is going on? Everybody, everybody in a classroom knows who's being bullied. And typically it's kids who are shy who get bullied because they're more fragile. You know, they're not going to defend themselves. So my sense is that's a perfect evil. And now it's cyberbullying. Then you use the anonymity of Internet. You go on, you say, you know, Janie is really popular with the boys because she's a slut, she puts out. Or Billy gets all the good grades because he cheats. Your reputation is ruined because there's no way to undo that. So I'm saying, so he is a kind of everyday evil that you have to now change the system that to combat bullying has to go from top down. The principal, the teachers, the parents have to be involved, not the which identification. Let's find the bully and punish him. Because there's endless number of bullies out there. It's in the situation, the system you say there is zero tolerance for bullying and teasing other than, you know, lighthearted friendly thing. And when you do we expect kids to anonymously turn them in? Same thing. If you have an honest code. You know, you don't have to be here and go say, Jimmy cheated, but you can do it anonymously. You can say so and so cheated, or, you know, the teacher did such and such. My sense is we have to rethink how the system allows these kinds of everyday heroes, everyday evil to go on. And what do you have to do to challenge that system? As a kid in the class, for example, I mean, slightly different thing. 600 kids were taking the law school exam, and somebody in the back room had a seizure, fell out of his seat, you know, moaning. And everybody knows 598 kids continue with their exam. Two kids got up to help him and they got penalized. They didn't give them extra time until they complained and made the median sense, so forth. So here's a situation where, you know, you're going to be a lawyer, you want to do good for. Here's somebody like you who has a seizure. And unlike Wesley Autry, only 2 of 600 got up out of the seat to help this guy. Well, I mean, again, you know, how do you begin to promote a heroic imagination? So as soon as that happened, everybody would stop or somebody said something, just get up and say, timeout. You don't need 600 people. But you just challenge the system to say, we're all stopping, rather than these two guys are going to get penalized because they're the Good Samaritans.

Okay, I think we have time for just one more question. So who thinks they have the best question?

Come on.

Hey, so sort of two part one's more of a comment. Actually. There was on NPR pretty recently a story about a teacher who, who basically in her classroom said it was elementary school. You cannot say to any kids that you can't play. If you tell another kid you can't play, you're sent out for recess. And it actually worked, not just for recess play, but for preventing bullying. Because if everyone plays together, it's better. So how do we. So that sort of made a systemic change, I think that prevented the bullying.

But how.

How do we do that for things like prisons where systemically they are meant for control? I mean, how, like, do you have. Are there any suggestions. Has there been any research into a more positive experience?

No. I mean, in prisons, fundamental prisoners, guards are afraid of prisoners. There's a few guards in a lot of prisons, and prisoners are, you know, strong, and many of them are violent. And so what you really want is you Want the prisoners to fight each other. You don't want them to fight you or you want the prisoners to sexually degrade one another. And so you look the other way. So everybody knows that if you're a young guy going to prison, you're going to be gang raped over and over again. And you know it. I mean, the system knows it. They do nothing to really nothing to protect you. They know there are gang fights between racial groups at some level. They allow it to happen. Because if you're fighting each other, you're not fighting the system, fighting the guards. So this has to be above that. I mean, the change is systematically above that. If you take prisons, prisons are a social experiment that has failed. It's an experiment. Society says, what are we going to do with people who don't follow our rules? We're going to separate them from their family, from their community. There are 2 million people in prison in America, more than any country in the world. It costs us billions of taxpayers money to keep those people there. It costs a million dollars to keep one guy in prison for 20 years. And now we're putting more people in for a longer time. Unions prevent, actively prevent prisons from teaching prisoners a trade because they don't want them to come out and take jobs away from union paying members. So here's this failure. When I say failure, the recidivism rate of almost every prison in the country is 60% within three years of being released. You go right back to the prison and research I did said one quarter of the time the second offense is much more serious than the first. In many cases, you're learning how to be more of a criminal. So here's something that fails that we're paying this huge amount of money for. And what we do is say, let's build more prisons. We're privatizing them. We're making a big business, making profit only. Same way we're privatizing our army. So here's a failure. So you need a total system change, but there's nobody willing to do it in California. The most powerful union in all of California is the California Correctional Officers Union because they give huge amounts of money to Democrats and to the Republicans and they can, they have stymied any attempts at reform. The governor down. And they're the ones who get more prisons built. They want to have prisons built. They want to have the prisons filled with prisoners because that's their job. So I'm saying for me that's really an issue. How do we change prisons as a federal failed social experiment because it's costing us too much money and especially devastating black community. Black and Hispanic communities. There are probably more blacks in prison than in college now. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.