Copyright ©) 1999 by
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
Personality and Social Psychology Review
1999, Vol. 3, No. 3, 269-275
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Methods for the Study of Evil-Doing Actions
John M. Darley
Department of Psychology
Princeton University
For obvious ethical reasons, experimental studies of severe harm-doing actions are
precluded. What methods are available to experimental social psychologists for the
study of harm- and evil-doing activities? Three are suggested: experiments that may
have a component of role-playing but still can illuminate nodes in the socialization
into harm-doingprocess, probes into the conceptual world ofindividuals who are enlisted into real-world harm-doing socialization processes, and secondary analyses of
case studies written by those who have been caught up in harm doing. The methodological limits of each activity are examined, and it is argued that an approach in
which combinations of methods are employed to arrive at theoretical constructions
can both support generalizations that provide insights into the socialization process
and be sufficiently rigorous to support prudent social action recommendations.
The problem is twofold, involving both ethical and
logistic components. Consider the logistic component
first. The two studies that have told psychologists the
most about socialization into harm doing, to my mind,
are the Sherif and Sherif( 1953) summer camp explorations and the Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo (1973)
prison study. Both required having groups of respondents in constant interaction, sequestered from the conditions of their normal lives, over days or, in the Sherif
(Sherif & Sherif, 1953) case, weeks. Funding and arranging such studies is enormously difficult, particularly because they produce what is essentially a case
study, because the critical unit of analysis is the group.
The degree to which we are convinced that these
sorts of high logistic-high complexity studies tell us
important things about socialization into harm doing is
exactly the degree to which we are troubled by the ethical issues that they raise. "Troubling" puts the case too
mildly; most would consider the ethical issues insurmountable. In the Sherif (Sherif & Sherif, 1953) studies, such a high level of conflict between the two teams
of campers was induced that the staff had to invent
tasks that would bring the sides into a cooperative situation lest the conflict become dangerously physically
aggressive. Zimbardo (Haney et al., 1973), greatly disturbed by the increasingly demeaning and violent actions his "guards" unleashed on his "prisoners,"
terminated his study prematurely.
What the articles in this issue seek to do is to illuminate the social contexts that contribute to creating individuals who act as sources of harm to others. The
general story that social psychologists wish to tell is
that individuals are socialized into an acceptance of the
legitimacy, or at least the necessity, of harming or kill-
ing others because those others are threatening some
deeply held and culturally shared values.
To provide an explanation of a person who, independently, using his will and intelligence, acts to torture others when that torture is not compelled by a
present authority structure, we need to include in our
explanation the recognition that the actor has been
socialized, that is, permanently changed by the processes that brought him to this state. For a number of
reasons that will be apparent to the reader, these
changes in cognitive structure are ones that we do not
generally find in our psychological experiments. The
Milgram (1965, 1974) experiments, which hover at
the ethical limits of what we are willing to do to respondents, produce only the first step or two toward
creating an autonomous, harm-doing individual
(Darley, 1995); we would not go farther.
Requests for reprints should be sent to John M. Darley,
Department of Psychology, Princeton University, Princeton,
NJ 08544-1010. E-mail: jdarley(phoenix.princeton.edu.
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So we are not going to create full-scale experimental social contexts that complete the process of
socialization of individuals into harm doing. This is
not to denigrate the value of the information provided
by a number of sets of ingenious experimental studies
that social psychologists have done, studies that manage to convince us that the actions and reactions of
the respondents can be mapped genuinely onto destructive actions in the nonexperimental world, and
yet that manage to stay within our ethical boundaries.
Included among this set are studies on obedience,
conformity, deindividuation, diffusion of responsibility, and group influences on definitions of the situation. Still, I do not think that the authors of those
studies would assert that they tell us all we need to
know about the interlocking processes of socialization into harm doing. Therefore, it is necessary for us
to draw on other sources that illustrate or illuminate
these processes. We also need to decide what credence we give to these sources because they do not
provide the usual clarity about causation as do the experiments on which we characteristically rely.
What are some of these other sources that we
might draw on? I see three: first, role-playing experiments that cast the actor in a role that can inflict harm
on others; second, naturally occurring experiments in
socialization into harm doing, in which researchers
use probes that allow us to infer the changing psychological state of an individual who is in a setting in
which he is required to inflict harm on others; and
third, psychologically oriented secondary analyses of
published reports of individuals caught up in
harm-doing organizations. We examine each in turn
for its strengths and weaknesses.
Role-Playing Research
In these studies, the respondents are given a role
and asked to make decisions from the perspective of
an actor who is really "in" that role. The decisions required can be generated and sequenced according to
an experimental design, and therefore, standard inferential statistical procedures can be used to analyze
the data. More important, the design allows the researcher to infer what variations in stimulus materials
are responsible for differences in responses on the dependent variable. The problem, as is well known and
debated in social psychology, is that the respondents
are performing according to their theories of how
they would act if they were really "in role," and their
theories may differ from what their actions would be
if they were in role.
In the harm-doing literature, there are a number of
examples of this sort of research, perhaps beginning
with the Mixon (1973, 1976) work on the Milgram par-
adigm. Meeus and Raaijmakers (1995) reviewed the
research and made a useful classification of
role-playing research. They distinguished between
three types of role-playing studies. In the first, the experimental situation is described and role players are
asked how they would behave. Meeus and
Raaijmakers (1995) reported that, in all studies of this
sort on the Milgram paradigm, the role players consistently and seriously underestimated the degree to
which they would obey-generally reporting obedience levels of less than 10%. In nonactive role playing,
the participants actually observe the experimental situation and say how they would behave. When this is
done for the Milgram paradigm, obedience levels rise
but not quite to the observed levels of obedience. In active role-playing settings, in which the role players
take the position of the participant and act out the way
that they think the participant would behave, the rate of
obedience is only about 1% lower than Milgram
observed.
Meeus and Raaijmakers (1995) carried out a series
of studies on what they called "administrative obedience." An applicant (actually a confederate) is interviewed, and whether he will get a job depends on how
well he does. Response to stress is not important for the
job, but it is the task of the participant to make a series
of stressful remarks to the applicant during the interview because the experimenter has imposed a study on
the effects of stress on top of the real job interviews. He
characteristically begins to make those remarks, and
the applicant becomes tense and it slowly becomes
clear, if the stressful remarks continue, that the applicant may really lose his job prospect because he does
poorly in the interview. In the baseline conditions, generally more than 90% of the respondents continued to
make stressful responses, eventually costing the applicant the job.
Obviously this was an active role-playing study.
Interestingly, the authors also ran nonactive and descriptive replications of the experiments, and the
findings corresponded to the pattern for the Milgram
study. In the descriptive version of the study, very
few respondents thought participants would "go all
the way"; in the witnessed conditions, the results
were higher than the described conditions but lower
than the active conditions.
Advantages of Role-Playing Studies
Active role-playing studies can create data about
behavior in socialization settings and can contain the
variations in independent variables that allow for
causal inference. When such studies are done in a
way that gives the role-playing respondent a full experience of the actual situation, some evidence sug-
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gests that the respondent's behavior converges with
that of actual respondents.
perior to hire a White applicant over a Black one, regardless of credentials, rate White applicants more
highly for the job and short list a higher number of
White candidates.
Difficulties of Role-Playing Studies
Advantages of the In-Basket Exercise
The difficulties of these studies are twofold: First,
as illustrated by Meeus and Raaijmakers (1995), the
ethical dilemmas are not entirely avoided; from the
participant's perspective, a person really lost a job because of the participant's actions. This is not likely to
endear the study to the University committee on research ethics. Second, the question persists about the
respondent's interpretation of the meaning of the instruction to behave as if one were a "typical person"
fulfilling the research obligation or, in the Zimbardo
(Haney et al., 1973) study, a typical prison guard. Such
behavior can be modeled on their theory-driven interpretations of how some average person would act if
functioning as an actual prison guard. There is the possibility of feeling that one is instructed to play an actual
sadistic prison guard, which may not reveal how the
participant would enact the role if he were a prison
guard in fact and not in theory.
The in-basket research technique seems to have two
advantages as a research technique for the study of
harm doing. First, it seems to induce a sort of time
compression, in that respondents go through a set of
decisions in an hour or two that normally would be
spread over a period of months; also, earlier decisions
affect later ones, which is important in demonstrating
that harm doing often progresses in a set of small steps.
Second, to the degree to which a participant feels genuinely evaluated as an organizational member, it both
creates involvement on the part of the participant and
casts the respondent into an organizational milieu. Because many harm-doing actions are done by individuals who cast themselves as obedient to organizational
directives, this is a useful research environment to be
able to create.
Disadvantages of the In-Basket
Method
The In-Basket Exercise
A second set of role-playing situations that seem
to retain considerable reality components are those
called "in-basket exercises," a technique that originally was developed as a job selection device to test
an applicant's potential for a specific managerial position within a specified organization (Lopez, 1966).
The participant's task consists of making a rapid set
of decisions, responding to problems posed in memos
requesting instruction from subordinates, communications from peers, and directives from superiors. Situations can be made to arise for which prior
directives and information provide decision conflicts,
and the influence of prior directives and prior decisions made on subsequent decisions can be studied.
When in-basket exercises are used for research purposes, experimental designs can be used. In-basket
exercises about socialization into harm doing can include a series of directives from superiors that mandate an escalating set of harm-doing actions to
consumers of organizational products, or workers, or
a set of notes from peers indicating the use of harmful tactics in their divisions and the fact that the corporation has rewarded the commission of these acts.
Brief and his colleagues (Brief, Buttram, Elliot,
Reizenstein, & McCline, 1995; Brief, Dunerich, &
Doran, 1991) reported a series of in-basket studies of
ethical transgressions, culminating in a demonstration
that participants who are illegally instructed by a su-
One of the advantages of the exercise-that the individual perceives himself functioning within a real
organizational structure, with real rewards of real
possible jobs-creates an ethical problem. An individual is being directed, or at least led, to commit potentially unethical harm-doing actions to other actors.
To the degree to which the exercise is moved away
from its standard function to provide evaluations of
individuals for jobs within the organization, respondents are moved away from direct involvement and
are increasingly aware that no real persons are
harmed by their choices-they are, in other words,
increasingly aware of the role-playing aspects of the
research. Recognizing the problems with exercises
cast at both ends of this involvement dimension,
many who have examined the in-basket exercises that
present ethical dilemmas find the results informative.
Of course, the results of these studies need to be conceptually integrated with other sources of information
about the phenomenological transformations that individuals go through as they are socialized into
harm-doing actions.
Psychological Probes During the
Course of "Natural Experiments"
Cognitive and now social psychology has in the last
two decades developed a set of techniques for probing
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the cognitive mappings of individuals participating in
experiments. Those techniques could be used for mapping the progressive changes in thought patterns of individuals who are being socialized into roles that
require harm doing. An example may make this clear.
Consider what we could learn if during the Vietnam
War we had been able to measure the facilitated associations and semantic shifts of a soldier to, for instance,
the word "gook" as he moved from basic training to actual combat in Vietnam.
It is not only military socialization that results in individuals who are ready to harm others. Many corporations take quite aggressive stances toward competing
corporations, and this leads to a willingness to engage
in actions of dubious ethicality against those competitors. Accesses to changes in concept mappings of individuals who join those corporations could provide
information about socialization into harm doing as
well.
As well as semantic mappings, probing attitude
changes of, for instance, individuals who are recruited
to sports teams who hold aggressive attitudes toward
other teams might well reveal the growth of justifications for violence against those others.
If we recognize that many professions require individuals entering those professions to be willing to take
actions toward others that, at least, require the overriding of usual standards about what one is entitled to do
to others, then we have another arena for the study of
socialization into harm doing. It would be informative
to track a cohort of students as they leave their undergraduate colleges, move into law schools, emerge from
them, and go on to corporations that specialize in litigation. Because those individuals are self-selecting, it
is likely that they are dispositionally disposed to justifications of adversarial practices, and competitive conceptualizations of negotiation opponents. Nonetheless,
the development of these justifications and conceptualizations over time would be of great interest.
The medical practice of surgical specializations requires practitioners to inflict physical injuries on others that would be taboo in most settings but are
justified for the eventual benefits gained by the patients. Still, there perhaps needs to be a desensitization
to the immediate cues of blood and slashing that could
be cognitively mapped and that would be informative
about harm doing.
The argument about the existence of natural experiments on socialization into harm doing is twofold. The first prong asserts that there are
organizations that quite straightforwardly socialize
individuals into harming certain designated classes of
others. The second suggests that some organizations
or professions that develop individuals who carry out
actions that the culture regards as legitimate or even
praiseworthy still need to give those individuals cog-
nitive structures that allow them to take actions that
from a normal perspective are taboo. Both organizations provide sites for the investigation of socialization into harm-doing practices.
Advantages of Cognitive Probes
The probes can map the cognitive structures of individuals and perhaps provide a trace of the changes
induced in these structures by steps in the socialization processes induced by the organization. This provides a valuable window into the phenomenology of
the individual, one that may give us more insight into
process than we had previously. In fact, it would
make sense to use them in the experiments that researchers find ethically possible to conduct in laboratory settings.
Disadvantages of Cognitive Probes
In practice, researchers working in naturalistic settings are likely only to be able to probe cognitions
and attitudes. They may observe behaviors that they
think flow from those cognitions and attitudes but
will not be able to verify this experimentally. The
cognition-action link cannot be causally established
or tested.
Secondary Analyses of Reports of
Cases of Harm Doing
A third source for information about socialization
into harm doing consists of analyses of published reports of individuals caught up in harm-doing organizations. Often, these reports are authored by
investigative reporters, occasionally by a person who
has passed through the socialization experience.
Happily for our purposes (unhappily for society), a
number ofarticle- or book-length reports (Eichenwald,
1995; Lewis, 1989) are available to illustrate the ways
in which organizations have shaped individuals within
the organization to be independent producers of harm
to others.
The task for the psychologist in reading these reports is, first, to become aware of the workings of processes that are not emphasized in the standard
psychological story about socialization into harm doing. Second, one can observe the workings of psychological processes that we know to be components of
the socialization process. In my experience, as we do,
we discover how several of those processes work in
conjunction with each other. Furthermore, the psychological processes we identify often take on slightly dif-
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ferent forms, in ways that can cause us to broaden and
refine our definitions of those processes.
Reading these accounts, for instance, reveals a role
for "locker room humor" in framing acts ofharm doing
as normatively allowable within the aggressive subculture of competitive sports. Lewis (1989), reporting on
his socialization into bond selling on the trading floor
of Salomon Brothers, stated that the experienced traders who had sold underperforming bonds to naive customers gave humorous renditions to their group of the
anguished protests from the customers. The customers,
of course, had sometimes been ruined as a consequence of buying the bonds. Humor framed the situation as one in which a fool (the buyer) had gotten what
fools deserved, rather than one in which the bond salesman had unethically victimized an innocent to whom
he had a duty.
Psychologists are quite aware of the role of the
foot-in-the-door technique, in which initial small actions cause a person to agree to commit more extreme
actions in the future. Eichenwald (1995) reported a
case in which a brokerage house sales force were led,
by the assurances of their research group as to the
safety of a particular investment, to sell it to people
seeking safe investments. The investment proved unsafe and plummeted in value. As Fischhoff (1975)
taught us, hindsight does not equal foresight, and
looking back, the sales force had trouble seeing that
they did not at the time "know better" and did not
know that the investment was dangerous rather than
safe. They then felt morally tainted by the act, but
committed to continue, or felt that they had made a
decision that it was morally appropriate to continue
to mislead clients. Hindsight coupled with self-perception interpretations led to the acceptance of unethical actions by some on the sales force. Kelman and
Hamilton (1988) reported a similar occurrence
among Ford corporation personnel after a series of
catastrophic fires occurred in Pinto cars due to the
dangerous placement of the gas tank.
Advantages of Secondary
Analyses of Narratives
The advantages of examining reports of organizational harm doing have already been mentioned. They
can cause scientists to realize the existence of processes
that they did not previously think were involved in harm
doing. Narratives can suggest how various psychological processes combine and cascade to produce effects
that are more powerful that the use of a single process in
isolation could produce. They can cause us to broaden
our conceptualizations of processes we have identified
in psychological experiments.
The primary advantage, of course, is that these narratives give us a window into a world that we cannot
experimentally enter, which is the world in which organizations develop over time to perform sustained
and often escalating harm-doing actions on persons.
Disadvantages of Secondary Analyses
The primary disadvantage is that these narratives
invite what they cannot produce, which is the sort of
certainty that can be gained within experimental contexts, in which causes can be unequivocally identified.
Reading them, we become sure that one process is central to the production of harm doing although this may
be false. These sorts of analyses do not demonstrate
causation but falsely invite its inference.
Conclusions
Different comments need to be made about the
three methods of inquiry into harm doing outlined in
this article. Methodologically, adding probes that reveal individuals' conceptual systems into what we
might call "naturally occurring experiments" during
which organizations are socializing individuals into
harm doing can provide warrants for conclusions of
causation that are nearest to those made in conventional experiments. It should be possible to demonstrate many of the processes, such as the cognitive
restructuring of inhumane conduct into worthy conduct, or dehumanizing those victimized, that are suggested in Bandura's article (1999/this issue). Using
similar probing techniques on different generational
cohorts, we might also get evidence in individual
cognitive structures that define what counts as sexual
or domestic violence, thereby providing evidence
supporting the Muehlenhard and Kimes (1999/this issue) account for cultural shifts in society's construction of those terms. Here, the method-probes into
individuals' cognitive structure-could provide information we would count as evidence about the existence of postulated processes and the consequences
of those processes.
The examination of narratives of actual cases of organizational or individual harm-doing actions can provide us with insights about the existence of processes
that are involved in harm doing that were not previously seen. Baumeister (1997) examined many narratives about evil and returned from that examination to
remind us of the possibilities that one could take satisfaction or even pleasure from inflicting harm doing on
others. In the Baumeister and Campbell (1999/this issue) article, the authors draw on that insight and turn to
psychological theory to suggest processes that will
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produce that counterintuitive quality of pleasure in
harmdoers. Here, discovery in narratives leads to the
mobilization of psychological theory to account for a
real-world observation, and future research has hypotheses to guide it.
Berkowitz (1999/this issue) uses the examples of
sadistic harm doing taken from narratives about the
Holocaust to point out that the Milgram (1965, 1974)
studies provide an importantly incomplete account of
the Holocaust. He then goes on to sketch a prototype of
the "evildoer" who would commit such sadistic actions. He too provides a psychological informed account of how a phenomenon discovered in narratives
might be produced, giving us hypotheses we can test in
future research. These two contributions provide a
stronger demonstration ofthe utility of examining narratives than I could have invented.
Staub's (1999/this issue) article updates us on his
project of examining historically documented instances of harm doing and drawing together the different psychological processes that, taken jointly, can
account for the harm-doing instances. Staub uses the
existence of narrative and historical material on harm
doing in a way that is different from Baumeister and
Campbell (1999/this issue) and Berkowitz (1999/this
issue). He uses the differing historical accounts in a
comparative way, seeking to protect the psychological account from a too-heavy reliance on any one historical instance and to force the psychological theory
to come to grips with the features found in many of
the narratives. This represents a second use of narrative to facilitate theory development.
How are the theoretical statements that are developed by inferring psychological process from narrative accounts to be tested? It is worthwhile to pause
to consider what standards we ought to apply to this
sort of project. The maximum claim that can be made
is one of plausibility rather than proof, that is, after
the suggestion is made that a particular psychological
process is involved in organizational socialization
processes, the reader must decide if that claim seems
reasonable. Evidence from psychological studies documenting process, as well as from efforts to move
back and forth from real-world observations and psychological theories (Darley, 1996; Staub, 1989), are
relevant to this assessment, however, they are not definitive if "definitive" is taken as a set of conclusive
proofs that this or that account is differentially valid
as compared to others that are offered.
Still, the accounts offered seem to contain a good
many psychological insights and to share agreement
on the role of many psychological processes in the
production of socialization into harm doing. Would it
perhaps be prudent for leaders to draw on these insights, to decide, if one were in a position of organizational authority, to take steps to avoid the
occurrences of the occasions that cause psychological
process to tip toward harm doing? Would it be prudent to decide, if one were in a position of political
leadership, to do what is possible to avoid political
processes producing similar tendencies toward
demonization and harm doing?
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