Little did I know that, in the course of researching for that post, I would come across an episode of Explorer seemingly even more precisely relevant to ponerology than that. But that is just what happened.

Ponerology is defined as “the science of evil.” And, to my surprise, I came across a 2008 episode of Explorer actually entitled “Science of Evil.”

Just as in “Born to Rage,” the main framework for this episode’s exploration is established by the narrator early on. This time the guiding quote is this:

“Evil. It is blamed for cruelty beyond our mind’s comprehension. Is it a dark force outside of us that we are all vulnerable to, that we must work to resist? Is it inside of us, a stain on the soul, a dysfunction of the brain? Or just a word used to distance ourselves from inherently human behavior?”

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

“Science of Evil” focuses on four stories:

• One of the “usual suspects” when discussing evil, Dr. Philip Zimbardo, gives a detailed chronology of the development of sadistic events in his famous Stanford prison experiment and discusses its relationship to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, after which he was called as an expert defense witness in the court martial of one of the accused American officers.
• We get a look at notorious serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer through the eyes of Reverend Roy Ratcliff, a minister who met with Dahmer at a maximum security prison in Wisconsin in 1994 to discuss the Bible and ultimately help fulfill Dahmer’s request to be baptized.
• Joshua Greene, an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Harvard, speaks about what defines evil and – along with colleague Jonathan Cohen of Princeton’s Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior – introduces us to their fMRI research, imaging people’s brains during moral decision-making to determine the sometimes conflicting neurological processes involved in our sense of right and wrong.
• We follow Aya Schneerson of the United Nations’ World Food Program as she reveals through her work some of the atrocities she has witnessed in the course of distributing food in war-torn Eastern Congo that she considers evil.

As these stories play out, we are led to consider how situational and neurological factors can both play roles in the development of behavior often deemed evil and the implications of what we may discover as we continue teasing apart their relative contributions to the harm and suffering in our world.

National Geographic Explorer’s “Science of Evil” provides a rather cursory overview of some of the questions involved in ponerology. It doesn’t do nearly as much to provide answers to those questions as some of the other resources featured on this site do. But it may, nonetheless, inspire curiosity in a newcomer to these issues.

I write frequently about the fact that, despite the increased level of attention to it that we document here, this topic, the science regarding malicious and neglectful activity – a.k.a. the “science of evil” – is vastly under-discussed and under-promoted in our society. The fact that even I, having researched and written about this topic for years, was unaware until now that this episode of Explorer even existed offers just one more illustration of that. But hopefully, sharing it here will enable it to reach a few more people who will share it with those they know and so on.

One response that has gotten a lot of attention is the one posted on Facebook by comedian and actor Patton Oswalt.

I highly doubt that Oswalt has ever heard of the term ponerology. But his response, more than many others, especially from celebrities, actually comes close to placing the event in a ponerologic context.

So first I want to point out the particular statements that reflect a somewhat-ponerologic perspective in his writing.

Toward the very beginning of his post, Oswalt says:

“I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.”

So he is very quickly zeroing in explicitly on sociopathy as a potential factor.

Just two sentences later he says:

“If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet.”

Here, he is already discussing the damaging act in terms of the statistical makeup of the population as broken down by those who purposefully cause significant harm and those who do not. Considering such statistics is one of the central roles of ponerology. Note that Robert Hare, the world expert on psychopathy (slightly different from sociopathy), estimates that psychopaths make up 1% of the population.

Later Oswalt says:

“…every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.”

I’m not sure if he even realizes how literally relevant his implication of “wiring” in the malice of a certain percentage of people really is. But ponerology is deeply involved in attempts to use neuroscience to discover how neurobiology contributes to harmful behavior and we cover that topic frequently on this site.

Oswalt then proceeds to comment on how those who are not evil vastly outnumber those who are. And he invokes an evolutionary viewpoint when he points out:

“We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.”

Overall, for someone who is not a professional in this area and probably has no specific knowledge of ponerology or related subjects, I think Oswalt’s response if full of valuable insights. While there is nothing wrong with simply expressing one’s emotional reaction to a painful situation, as many have done, it’s nice to see social media used to put forth a response to a damaging act that shares some real wisdom.

However, in addition to sharing and offering a bit of analysis of his response, I’d also like to show how ponerology – at least as Andrew M. Lobaczewski and some others have viewed it – might reveal the situation to be a bit more complicated than Oswalt portrays it to be here.

Oswalt attempts to inject some hope into the situation by pointing out that:

“…the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak.”

and:

“…when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, ‘The good outnumber you, and we always will.’”

Oswalt is correct that, by a huge majority, non-pathological people outnumber the pathological. However, this does not imply that the non-pathological necessarily exercise more power for several reasons:

1. The pathological demonstrate specific skill at rising in hierarchies, which, by definition, afford much greater influence to those in some positions than others. So even though there may be fewer pathological people, they may be in positions where they have enormously disproportionate influence.
2. The constant development of increasingly powerful modern technology enables fewer and fewer people, if willing to employ it inhumanely, to inflict greater and greater damage.
3. As the Milgram experiment showed, a huge percentage of non-pathological people will, despite any qualms, comply with the directives of those they perceive as authority figures, even if those directives involve knowingly inflicting great harm on others.
4. As the Stanford Prison Experiment showed, systemic factors and contexts can influence even non-pathological people to act in sociopathic and sadistic ways. In other words, as systems thinking often points out, structure can create behavior. And, if even a few pathological people are in positions of power, they can shape systems and structures so as to drive much of the rest of the population to act in ways that mirror their pathological values.

So while Oswalt’s response is quite astute and comes close to offering a realistic perspective about how to approach the fact that we live in this world alongside pathological people, I think the work of Lobaczewski, Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo can help modify his advice to make it a little bit more effective.

Outnumbering the pathological isn’t enough. In order to develop a situation in which cooperation overcomes exploitation, non-pathological people must become educated about the dynamics of ponerology so that they can recognize leverage points to resist the influence of even powerful pathological people and reshape systems that otherwise drive them into pathological positions even if they themselves are not pathological.

The real hope comes from the fact that, in Milgram’s experiments, while 2/3 of participants were willing to administer the maximum voltage to a screaming confederate when ordered by the authority figure, and a frightening 90% were willing if they first saw someone else do it, 90% rebelled if they first saw someone else rebel.

That means that, just as pathological people can exert disproportionate influence, so can those who resist them, even when those they resist occupy positions of authority, as their personal resistance generates a ripple effect of resistance.

I hope that Patton Oswalt and those who were moved by his thoughtful response to these bombings in Boston will take the time to do more research about ponerology and the highly relevant work of those mentioned in this article. Perhaps the best tribute we can pay to the people, families and communities suffering in the wake of this event is to use it as a springboard from which to learn more about the actual science of evil. That science may well offer us our best chance for moving beyond relatively helpless hope and prayer to real understanding of how to prevent and mitigate future harmful malicious and neglectful activities.

In our recent piece about Dr. James Fallon, we discussed the three ingredients that Fallon believes are required for the creation of a psychopathic killer.

These included:

• Certain structural and functional characteristics of the brain
• Certain variants of particular genes
• An environment that triggers the expression of these biological predispositions

While psychopathic killers can cause great harm to a certain number of people, they are relatively rare. The greater danger, from the perspective of society at large, is the emergence of “evil” on a broader scale within systems. And, as Andrew M. Lobaczewski makes clear in Political Ponerology, for that to happen, not only must people with disorders other than psychopathy be drawn into harmful activities, but so must some percentage of biologically healthy, normal people.

Zimbardo’s work has primarily focused on investigating how this latter event occurs – how everyday, average people can end up participating in destructive events.

Zimbardo has been a psychology professor at Stanford University for over forty years. He is best known for leading the team that conducted what has come to be known as the Stanford prison experiment back in 1971.

The study was actually funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research because they wanted to understand more precisely why military guards and prisoners come into conflict.

In the study, part of the basement of the Stanford psychology building was set up to resemble a dungeon. 75 participants were considered and, out of these, 24 male college students who were assessed as the most psychologically stable and healthy of the bunch were chosen. They were then randomly assigned to one of two roles – prisoner or guard.

Once divided into these roles, the participants were treated very much as their assigned role would normally entail.

• “Prisoners” were suddenly arrested by actual city police at an unexpected time, taken to the mock prison, fingerprinted, photographed, searched and dressed in uniforms, just as might take place in a real prison.
• “Guards” were dressed in professional uniforms, complete with batons, and instructed to do what it takes to maintain order.

Then the drama was allowed to unfold.

Zimbardo’s original hypothesis was that the conflicts in the scenario would arise due to the inherent personalities of the “guards” and the “prisoners.”

But instead, the study showed that these relatively healthy, normal participants quickly and deeply internalized their assigned roles within a system that justified and supported them in doing so.

• “Guards” began to treat prisoners poorly, with a third of them acting in genuinely sadistic ways.
• “Prisoners” became subdued and submissive, even turning against fellow prisoners who resisted the guards’ abuse.

Even Zimbardo himself was surprised by how extreme some of the situations became.

At its inception, the study was expected to last for two weeks. But some participants were so upset that they quit early and, after only six days, the entire experiment had to be shut down because of the excessive emotional trauma being manifested.

Decades later, during the Iraq War, when the abuse of prisoners by American personnel at Abu Ghraib prison came to light, many recognized the relevance of Zimbardo’s research to the case. So did Zimbardo himself. In fact, so much so that he became an expert witness for the defense of one of the accused Americans, Army Reserve Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick. In that role, he attempted to show that Frederick and some of the other perpetrators were not inherently evil people, but that, just as in the Stanford prison experiment, the systemic and situational forces involved played a significant role in generating the horrific activities that took place.

Zimbardo discusses the lessons of the Stanford prison experiment and his experience with the Abu Ghraib trials in his book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. The book uses the story of Lucifer, God’s favorite angel who fell and was transformed into Satan, as an allegory about how good people can, in certain situations or if intoxicated with power, become corrupted.

Zimbardo’s work is somewhat controversial. Some have criticized his methodology, while others have conducted similar studies using different methodologies and come to different conclusions. But Zimbardo himself is a strong advocate for the need to take into account systemic and situational factors when analyzing why harmful activities occur.

Now, the reason that all of this came up at this time is that, as mentioned earlier, Zimbardo was just featured by The Huffington Post.

The page, posted last Friday, features his 2008 TED talk entitled “The psychology of evil”, seen below:

The talk’s relevance to ponerology is immediately evident, as it begins with Zimbardo telling the audience:

“Philosophers, dramatists, theologians have grappled with this question for centuries: what makes people go wrong?”

while standing in front of an image of an ominous looking face superimposed with the words “Evil: What Makes People Go Wrong?”

In the talk, he discusses:

• How his early life experiences taught him that the line between a “good” and an “evil” person is not as fixed as some would like to believe
• His view that the world will always be filled with a yin/yang mixture of good and evil
• The paradox of the fact that, mythologically, God created Hell as a place to store evil, including His once favorite angel, Lucifer
• His definition of “evil”
• His experience working as an expert witness for the defense of Abu Ghraib perpetrator Staff Sgt. Chip Frederick
• The individual (dispositional) vs. situational vs. systemic factors involved in the abuses of Abu Ghraib
• The famous Milgram experiment, in which a surprisingly large percentage of participants were – if told to do so by a supposed authority figure as part of an ostensible “learning experiment” – willing to administer shocks to another person, even up to a dangerous degree of voltage. This experiment is often paired with the Stanford prison study as a famous example of the power of situational factors in the generation of harmful behavior.
• The relevance of the Milgram experiment to the Jonestown tragedy, in which hundreds committed suicide or were murdered as a consequence of their obedience to the People’s Temple founder and cult leader Jim Jones
• His Stanford prison study
• How anonymity changes behavior amongst warriors
• “7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil”
• Why harmful behavior must be studied using a public health model that assesses systemic and situational aspects rather than just focusing on individuals
• How we can promote heroism, especially by recognizing everyday heroes

The video is accompanied by a blog post written by Zimbardo entitled “Journeying From Evil to Heroism,” in which he covers much of the same material, but also tells the story of the TED talk itself, which was, apparently quite dramatic. Zimbardo says he ran over the strict time limit just as he was about to launch into the uplifting conclusion of his speech. Only after a special exception was made for him, because of the moderator’s belief in the importance of his message, was he able to complete his talk, explaining why it is so important that we not only study evil, but also focus on the other side of the coin, heroism, so as to better understand and promote it.

The enthusiastic response to this conclusion of his TED talk helped inspire and support Zimbardo in scaling up his current endeavor, the Heroic Imagination Project. This is a non-profit organization, of which he is president, “dedicated to promoting heroism in everyday life.” They also conduct investigations into how reformed people, who were previously involved in violent activities, were motivated and able to change.

Few people have made more of a name for themselves when it comes to the study of “good” and “evil” than Dr. Philip Zimbardo. And even at almost 80 years old, he is still continuing to do so. His work does not focus as much on the very important biological aspects of ponerology. But when it comes to thinking about the non-biological influences relevant to the field, Zimbardo has given us a lifetime of work to consider.