Following the Holocaust, researchers began to investigate the sources of human evil with the help of a series of fascinating psychological experiments. The findings they discovered are intriguing and shake up our perceptions of ourselves. In preparation for Holocaust Day, we decided to continue a series of articles about these experiments and the conclusions derived from them. The results of the experiments show that we have tendencies to submit in spite of the group when there is social consensus and in spite of authority. Most of us will change our decisions and even commit very violent acts according to the demand of authority or consensus. These tendencies are so deeply ingrained in man that the question arises, is it even possible to prevent phenomena like the Holocaust from happening again in the future? Second article in the series.

First published on a free and approved blog in 2011.

in the previous post, How we missed one of the most important lessons of the Holocaust I showed four experiments in social psychology that were done after the Holocaust. They teach us a lot about what it is to be human and how such a great evil like the holocaust could happen. The conclusions are unpleasant, but reveal what human tendencies are and are therefore important. This time too we will rely on two experiments, both related to television, but they are later. From the previous four experiments it seems that we are very submissive when there is a social consensus and we will change our decisions according to this consensus, even if we know that the majority is wrong. We also seem to be very obedient and it is likely that even though we don't want to be mean, we would still hurt people if we were instructed to do so by an authority source who actually took responsibility. We saw how easy it is for us to enter the role that was defined for us and to include others in labels, generalizations and roles. We will try to use almost every opportunity the power we have against those who are weaker, and in general we seem to be sure that the truth is exclusively with us and that any generalization we have made is the absolute truth.

Now the question is, what do we do next? According to the experiments, it seems that these tendencies are deeply embedded in man. So is it even possible to prevent phenomena like the Holocaust from happening again in the future?

I think so.

There will be those who will say that the conclusion from these experiments is that man was created evil from his youth and there is nothing to be done. In my opinion this is not true, the answer lies in the education and culture we pass on to our children. We saw that a person has a tendency to label and generalize and once he has done so it is difficult to free himself from the labeling. The generalization becomes the truth, even though it does not represent reality. So it is not worth making this mistake again and generalizing the entire human race and labeling man as a creature with bad qualities that are so deeply embedded that there is no chance of changing them. Despite the Holocaust and despite the bad feeling that remains after reading the results of these experiments, one should not give up, not fall into a pessimistic label, but learn from experience and experiments how to improve.

It should be remembered that the results of the experiments show a tendency towards behavior, and a tendency can be changed. If we do nothing, then most people will follow the inclinations, as we have seen in the experiments. But with the help of education, habits and behaviors can be changed. It is enough to remember how with the help of education in a certain culture we managed to overcome our tendency to eat with our hands and today the absolute majority of people eat meals with a knife and fork (or chopsticks). In the western world there is no such thing as eating with your hands, it is dirty and socially inappropriate. The person who does this will immediately be considered primitive and rejected. Look how much power education has, and this is a marginal example on a not particularly important subject. We need to harness this power to change the destructive tendencies we saw earlier.

Let's start with another experiment, this time on the right. I previously mentioned the excellent BBC television program, A contemporary child (In the post discussing heredity vs. environment - born with passion?) The program follows the development of children born in 2000 in different places and different economic strata in Britain. The program continued until 2018 when the children were 18 years old. In one of the programs, when the children were only five years old, there was an interesting experiment related to prejudices about what it means to be poor and rich. Pay attention to the children's answers about who lives in the old and the new house and what are the characteristics that describe these people:

Note that already at the age of five the children internalized not only where the poor live and where the rich live but also that the poor are bad children who should not be friends with.

Here is another example from the program, this time an experiment regarding prejudice and racism towards "dark-skinned" Africans (note my political correctness..). 3-4 year old children were asked to choose from the pictures of their kindergarten friends who they want to be friends with. It turns out that none of the children chose a dark-skinned child as a friend, and what is even more surprising, even the dark-skinned children themselves did not choose other dark-skinned children as their friends! How can these results be explained?

It seems already at the age of 3-4 Children internalize social norms. Even the dark-skinned children internalized that being dark-skinned is not good and stay away from other dark-skinned children. It seems that already at a very young age we learn from the environment values ​​and norms, what is good and what is not good, what is acceptable and what is rejected. I am sure that not all the parents of all these children are racists and that not all the parents explicitly told their children that being dark-skinned is less good. The conclusion from this is that the children picked up these norms from the environment, and not necessarily from the parents. Apparently as a society we unconsciously transmit racist values ​​and norms without meaning to at all (at least most of us). There is an even more surprising result to this experiment, but we will return to it later.

So how do we educate and build a culture with values ​​and norms where the chance of evil like the Holocaust will be very low?

from an experiment he did Albert Bandura In 1961, regarding the effect of television violence on children, they saw that when children saw a doll being beaten on television and then saw the same doll in the next room, they became significantly more violent against the doll compared to children who did not see the program. They also saw that the children behaved in the most violent way when they saw in the program that the person who hit the doll was reinforced for it, and the children behaved in the least violent way when the person in the program was punished for his behavior. They were less violent than even children who had not seen the show at all.

Does television make us violent? 

Unfortunately, we don't have the rights to broadcast another segment from the program "Yald Ben Zamenno" (You can only watch directly on YouTube). In the experiment, they reproduce the Bandura experiment on 3-4 year old children. It is interesting to see that the fish that learned from watching TV was captivated by the background, just as small children are captivated by the background and then both the fish and the children imitated the behavior they saw on TV. Is this a sign that they learn from television how to behave? The segment beautifully demonstrates the power of education and television as an educational tool.

This experiment reminds me of the previous experiments. We seem to work, children as adults, according to methods of reinforcement and punishment. Think of Milgram and Zimbardo's experiment, when people felt reinforced by the environment or the authoritative researcher, they continued to do violent acts, just like the children. If they were not reinforced for the violent behavior, or punished for it, they would stop and not repeat it again. Hence, an important part of education should be based on strengthening the desired behaviors and punishing in case of unwanted behavior.

Of course, you should not exaggerate with the punishment activity, it is better to choose ways of strengthening and not of punishment. One of the problems with punishment, which is often a form of violence. The punisher forces the punished to do something that hurts him (eg not eating dinner). So if you want to educate for non-violence, it is better to use as little violence and punishment as possible, because you cannot educate for non-violence with the help of violence. That is why we are left with an education that tries to use as many methods of reinforcement as possible and as little as possible methods of punishment.

Reinforcement of two types of values- Humanistic values ​​and individualistic values. Humanistic values ​​mean that following education we realize that there is no essential difference between human beings, in essence we are all equal. This way we will reach openness and acceptance of the different even if he is weaker than you and even if we do not understand him. Because being human is more important than winning ideological battles. This is not only an education at the level of dry knowledge, but also an emotional education for the importance of developing empathy and love for others and an education in recognizing the importance of trying and understanding the other. Here is an example of humanistic education:

This is an excerpt from the excellent film, "The Help". In this segment, you see a young, racist woman who is not even aware that she is racist because it is the accepted norm around her. That is why it is so important to question everything and especially what we believe in wholeheartedly. Only in this way can we expand our perspective and understand and choose which social norms we have learned are good and which are racist.

Individualistic values ​​mean that every person has not only the right to live but also the right to realize himself, ZA The freedom to choose your own life path. To strengthen these values, you need to teach and reinforce the importance of Casting doubt And testing the path yourself and strengthening the person's confidence in himself and the courage to follow the path he chose for himself. Only if we manage to give a person tools on how to strengthen his security, he will have enough courage to doubt, choose his path and not follow the easy path, the conformist and obedient path. Here is an example of such individualistic education:

Think different! Be special

What's funny is that this beautiful piece written and read by Steve Jobs is actually an advertisement from the XNUMXs for Apple.

Another emphasis should be on Education for philosophical thinking. The meaning of philosophical thinking is that in addition to the development of in-depth thinking about certain areas, it is necessary to develop a tool of lateral thinking. A way of thinking that sees the contexts between subjects that supposedly seem different. For example, delving not only into how artificial intelligence is developed but also into the ethical consequences that our developments can have. This is how we educate the person to want to develop in many areas in order to be complete and to realize his abilities in the maximum way. Not only to be a kind of "savant" expert in a finite field but to see the contexts and his responsibilities for many fields. The hope is that with the help of developing philosophical thinking, the well-known excuse of "I'm just a cog in the system" will become a meaningless childish excuse and we will have a society of humans who have the tools to make informed and conscious moral decisions.

Life is a long and personal journey

With the help of education it is possible to create the experience and understanding thatLife is a long and personal journey that should lead to personal development. Everyone has the right to this personal development journey in which everyone builds their own path. In order for us to continue the journey, we must give everyone a place and try and learn from them what the way they are doing. That way we can open up to new ways that we hadn't thought of and that way we can continue to develop. In this way we unite all these values ​​into one framework and show the importance of the relationship between the different individual people so that we can continue to develop.

In my opinion, only by strengthening and encouraging such behaviors can we change our tendency to be small-minded and conformist and we can strengthen courageous behavior that goes its own way and does not submit to the dictates of authority. In such a situation, maybe the compliance percentages in Ash's and Milgram's experiments decreased. When we add to this the strengthening of the values ​​of humanism, we will perhaps arrive at a more sane society that is not in a hurry to regard labeling people and generalizations as absolute truth, but knows how to put the generalizations in their proper place. A society where people have more confidence in themselves and therefore can accept more those who are different from them and do not have to use the power given to them to humiliate those who are weaker. We humiliate someone else to feel better about ourselves, to feel strong compared to the one we humiliated. But as soon as we have confidence in ourselves and know that we are strong, the need to humiliate the weaker decreases wonders. That way we might get more positive results from experiments like Zimbardo's prison experiment and we won't see abuse of authority and abuse of the weak.

Another positive thing that can grow from a society where people have more confidence in themselves is that then we will not have to find a false meaning for ourselves in belonging to a group that distinguishes itself from other groups. Think for a moment about sports teams or an entire country, we really like to differentiate ourselves from the rest and thus feel special, better than the other foreign teams. It is very nice to like a certain group, but there is always the danger that this differentiation will lead to racism, the rejection of difference and hatred. That's why you should be careful and reduce this need to a minimum. Once the culture reinforces behaviors that lead man to feel confident in himself, he will hardly need a larger group that differentiates itself. His security will not come from the group from the outside, but from within himself, from the way he does and his actions. That way, not only will we accept the other, the different and the weak without fearing them, but we will also feel strong enough to help the weak.

In order to succeed in educating these values, today's conventional education is not enough. Must Active education that pushes the company to these values. It is not enough, for example, not to educate about racism, but we need to educate about equality. Otherwise we will fall back to tendencies like we saw in the experiments. Here I want to tell about the most interesting result of the experiment conducted by the BBC on kindergarten children regarding racism. The researchers saw that no child wanted to be friends with a dark-skinned person, not even dark-skinned themselves, with one exception. There was one boy, dark-skinned, who chose dark-skinned friends. The researchers were stunned, what is so special about this child? Why is he different?

They checked and found. It turns out that his mother was afraid that he would grow up with feelings of inferiority because of the color of his skin, so when he was a baby she started active education so that he would be proud of himself and his origin. For example, even before he could talk she would take him on guided tours of Martin Luther King's (assassinated black leader of the XNUMXs) home. ZA that with the help of goal-oriented active education, she was able to give him confidence in his skin color so that he did not adapt racist norms to himself, like the other children. Here is the excerpt from the program:

The situation today is of course not this situation. not today Active education And there is almost no education for the values ​​of humanism and individuality. On the contrary, I feel that the school is here to teach the children obedience, order and walking in the groove. We have to decide what is more important to us. If we want a more developed society where the chance of evil like the Holocaust is low, we must educate and push the next generations to the values ​​of human love and the values ​​of doubting and disobedience. We must give them tools on how to live with confidence in themselves and in their own way in light of these values. Thus, as the generations pass, we will reach a better society. That's why I'm turning to you, right now everything depends on you, there's no one to trust except your education. I do give lectures on these topics, but this is only a drop in the ocean.

We need education at home and in schools that will be against our tendency to obedience, against our tendency to racism and against our tendency to oppress those who are weaker than us. We need to start examining ourselves, according to what norms do we live and educate? Are these oppressive norms or egalitarian norms? Norms that encourage obedience and conformity or norms that encourage freedom of thought and action of the individual? Then behave and educate according to the norms we have chosen.

That way we might have a chance to change, that way maybe evil like the holocaust will not return in the future and that way we will develop and become better people.

The preoccupation with the Holocaust and its conclusions can lead to pessimism and the conclusion that man has been evil since his youth and therefore there is not much that can be done about it. But if this is really the case? Is man's nature evil from his youth? About this in the next article in the series.

Hello Hanoch - don't call me a people

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGpzVhXFVUo

Many artists refer to this theme in their works. For example Shalom Hanoch in the song don't call me a people From his album 'Arab Arab'. In the poem, he expresses the individualistic values ​​that see the individual at the center in sentences like "A person remains a person, don't call me a people" or "There is no virtuous people, there are only individuals". and the humanist values ​​in sentences like "again you think you're smart, if you haven't noticed I also exist" or "when once enemies are now brothers". He also expresses his fear of another type of values ​​taking over, racist and oppressive values ​​- "I'm not afraid of God, of you...even reality needs protection". With the help of the song, he actually educates and spreads these values. This is part of the active education that should be. But this is only the beginning, this education should be intentional and aware of itself and rooted in society as a whole.

If you pass by our neighborhood
You will see an old address there on the wall -
"May God protect me from faith"

There is no such thing as a virtue, there are only individuals
Not everyone is stupid and not everyone confesses
These are Jews and these are Jews
A man remains a man,
don't call me a people

The same exile also here in vain I work
How much more Golani versus a lone suicide
Not from God, from you I am anxious

Again you ride when blood is spilled here
Again you think you are smart
If you haven't noticed I exist too
what do I have with you what do I have with them
A man remains a man,
don't call me a people

When flowers bloom and children are happy
And former enemies are now brothers
The heroes are resting and the borders are open
The convoy passes and the dogs bark...

A man remains a man, don't call me -
don't call me a people

If you pass by our neighborhood
You will see an old address there on the wall -
"Reality also needs protection,
May God protect me from the faith"
A man remains a man,
don't call me a people

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• A child's soul in space
• How did we miss one of the most important lessons from the Holocaust?
• Why we cling to false beliefs - feedback from our environment beats solid evidence
• Why do people believe in ghosts and amulets? Because they want to believe
• The Value of Science, by Richard Feynman