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The Lucifer Effect I — A Situational Approach to Local Government Ethics
Wednesday, October 12th, 2011
Robert Wechsler
A year and a half ago, I wrote a
blog post about a 2007 book by Philip Zimbardo, entitled The
Lucifer Effect. I had read about Zimbardo's book in another
book, Susan Neiman's Moral
Clarity.
I finally got around to reading The Lucifer Effect, and I highly recommend it, despite its length and the small size of its type (for the middle-aged and older, this is a book that's better read as an e-book, where you can make the type as large as you want; I, alas, bought the paperback edition). In this and following blog posts, I will go beyond what I wrote in 2010.
Zimbardo's book starts with an experiment he did back in 1971, the Stanford Prison Experiment, where normal college students were assigned roles as guards and prisoners, and quickly became either abusive, silent as to others' abuse, or accepting of abuse to them even as they rebelled in some ways against it. The experiment shows how quickly we can all be shaped by aspects of the situations we are in and the roles we are asked to play, and thereby accepting of new, unethical norms.
Zimbardo also looks at others' experiments, as well as real-life situations, such as the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons.
Local governments are hardly prisons, but they are situations that, especially where there are poor ethics environments, can place strong pressures on individuals to go along with unethical norms. The pressures involve us in loyalty, secrecy, becoming and remaining one of the gang, and playing the games necessary to raise funds in order to get re-elected and to appease those with power, whether in the government, in the party, or in the community (that is, large taxpayers, employers, developers, contractors, organizations, and their lobbyists).
Zimbardo's book is the perfect follow-up to Dennis F. Thompson's Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption, about which I wrote several blog posts in August. Thompson's book successfully draws our attention away from government ethics' narrow focus on individual misconduct, and makes us look squarely at the institutional corruption that sets the context for individuals' misconduct. Institutional corruption is legal misconduct that "everyone does," and yet it involves the abuse of public office for private purposes, favoritism, and secrecy. Thompson wrote, "That a practice is widespread makes it worse. Rather than being an excuse, the plea that everyone is doing it should strengthen the case against an individual member charged with improper conduct.”
Thompson's vision of government ethics is not limited to the bad apples every politician declares responsible for ethical misconduct. Thompson recognizes that a bigger problem is the bad barrels, that is, poor ethics environments.
It's Not Enough to Focus on the Individual
Zimbardo takes this a step further. His distinction is not between individual and institutional corruption, but between individual (what he calls "dispositional") and situational orientations toward individuals' misconduct. Most institutions (and people) take the individual orientation: that an individual who does something wrong is culpable and lacking in integrity. We tend to underestimate how much a person's character can be transformed by powerful forces in his environment, and ignore the fact that we act differently in different roles and situations, working alone or in a group, with our families or on a ball field, with a close friend or among strangers, at home and abroad. A good person put into a bad environment can do bad things.
The individual orientation leads to talk of bad apples and bad character, and treats matters in isolation from the situation in which the individual acted. The individual orientation separates "good people" from "bad people," and thereby takes "good people" off the hook, freeing them from their role in creating, sustaining, and conceding to the conditions that contribute to others' misconduct. Zimbardo feels it is important to recognize that, in some situations, under certain kinds of pressure, we may act in ways we think we would not act.
Taking the individual orientation, an ethics commission, when an ethics complaint is filed against a council member who, say, helped get a grant for her brother’s nonprofit organization, rarely looks into misconduct relating to grant-making by other council members or their staff, nor does it look into the conduct of those who are supposed to provide oversight or those who failed to make provision for oversight related to grant-giving. The ethics commission does not investigate the norms of grant-giving, or who knew, who approved, who failed to disapprove. Instead, the single council member is fined and then, perhaps, stripped of a committee chairmanship by people who knew all along what she was doing and may have done similar things themselves.
No one asks what situational forces may have been involved. We say that power corrupts, but that is simply an abstract statement. We also say that government officials are co-opted, that they come into office with ideals and plans, and end up becoming one of the boys. But we do nothing about the process of co-opting and corruption until an individual is caught helping himself or someone close to him, and then all we do is take that individual to task.
It is, therefore, no surprise that the individual brought before an ethics commission feels that an injustice has been done. He knows that he hasn't done anything wrong, at least within the ethics environment he works in. And he knows that others have gotten away with what they've done, that he's been unfortunate, possibly singled out by political opponents. And yet he can't point fingers, except perhaps against his political opponents, who might not be culpable at all (except in the tactical employment of an ethics complaint). Pointing fingers at one's colleagues isn't how the game is played, even though it is the rules of the game that got him in trouble in the first place.
If the topic of discussion were the local government's ethics environment, the accused official might not be so defensive (although others might be). In such a discussion, the official's conduct might be considered in light of the situational forces and the unwritten rules, rather than only in terms of guilt and innocence. If it could be admitted that the conduct occurred, that people knew about it and accepted it, and why, then something might be done about the forces behind the conduct, that is, about the ethics environment rather than the "isolated" instance of misconduct.
See the other blog posts on The Lucifer Effect:
II–Situational Forces
III–Debriefing and Other Ways to Deal with Situational Forces
IV–Miscellaneous Observations
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
203-859-1959
I finally got around to reading The Lucifer Effect, and I highly recommend it, despite its length and the small size of its type (for the middle-aged and older, this is a book that's better read as an e-book, where you can make the type as large as you want; I, alas, bought the paperback edition). In this and following blog posts, I will go beyond what I wrote in 2010.
Zimbardo's book starts with an experiment he did back in 1971, the Stanford Prison Experiment, where normal college students were assigned roles as guards and prisoners, and quickly became either abusive, silent as to others' abuse, or accepting of abuse to them even as they rebelled in some ways against it. The experiment shows how quickly we can all be shaped by aspects of the situations we are in and the roles we are asked to play, and thereby accepting of new, unethical norms.
Zimbardo also looks at others' experiments, as well as real-life situations, such as the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other military prisons.
Local governments are hardly prisons, but they are situations that, especially where there are poor ethics environments, can place strong pressures on individuals to go along with unethical norms. The pressures involve us in loyalty, secrecy, becoming and remaining one of the gang, and playing the games necessary to raise funds in order to get re-elected and to appease those with power, whether in the government, in the party, or in the community (that is, large taxpayers, employers, developers, contractors, organizations, and their lobbyists).
Zimbardo's book is the perfect follow-up to Dennis F. Thompson's Ethics in Congress: From Individual to Institutional Corruption, about which I wrote several blog posts in August. Thompson's book successfully draws our attention away from government ethics' narrow focus on individual misconduct, and makes us look squarely at the institutional corruption that sets the context for individuals' misconduct. Institutional corruption is legal misconduct that "everyone does," and yet it involves the abuse of public office for private purposes, favoritism, and secrecy. Thompson wrote, "That a practice is widespread makes it worse. Rather than being an excuse, the plea that everyone is doing it should strengthen the case against an individual member charged with improper conduct.”
Thompson's vision of government ethics is not limited to the bad apples every politician declares responsible for ethical misconduct. Thompson recognizes that a bigger problem is the bad barrels, that is, poor ethics environments.
It's Not Enough to Focus on the Individual
Zimbardo takes this a step further. His distinction is not between individual and institutional corruption, but between individual (what he calls "dispositional") and situational orientations toward individuals' misconduct. Most institutions (and people) take the individual orientation: that an individual who does something wrong is culpable and lacking in integrity. We tend to underestimate how much a person's character can be transformed by powerful forces in his environment, and ignore the fact that we act differently in different roles and situations, working alone or in a group, with our families or on a ball field, with a close friend or among strangers, at home and abroad. A good person put into a bad environment can do bad things.
The individual orientation leads to talk of bad apples and bad character, and treats matters in isolation from the situation in which the individual acted. The individual orientation separates "good people" from "bad people," and thereby takes "good people" off the hook, freeing them from their role in creating, sustaining, and conceding to the conditions that contribute to others' misconduct. Zimbardo feels it is important to recognize that, in some situations, under certain kinds of pressure, we may act in ways we think we would not act.
Taking the individual orientation, an ethics commission, when an ethics complaint is filed against a council member who, say, helped get a grant for her brother’s nonprofit organization, rarely looks into misconduct relating to grant-making by other council members or their staff, nor does it look into the conduct of those who are supposed to provide oversight or those who failed to make provision for oversight related to grant-giving. The ethics commission does not investigate the norms of grant-giving, or who knew, who approved, who failed to disapprove. Instead, the single council member is fined and then, perhaps, stripped of a committee chairmanship by people who knew all along what she was doing and may have done similar things themselves.
No one asks what situational forces may have been involved. We say that power corrupts, but that is simply an abstract statement. We also say that government officials are co-opted, that they come into office with ideals and plans, and end up becoming one of the boys. But we do nothing about the process of co-opting and corruption until an individual is caught helping himself or someone close to him, and then all we do is take that individual to task.
It is, therefore, no surprise that the individual brought before an ethics commission feels that an injustice has been done. He knows that he hasn't done anything wrong, at least within the ethics environment he works in. And he knows that others have gotten away with what they've done, that he's been unfortunate, possibly singled out by political opponents. And yet he can't point fingers, except perhaps against his political opponents, who might not be culpable at all (except in the tactical employment of an ethics complaint). Pointing fingers at one's colleagues isn't how the game is played, even though it is the rules of the game that got him in trouble in the first place.
If the topic of discussion were the local government's ethics environment, the accused official might not be so defensive (although others might be). In such a discussion, the official's conduct might be considered in light of the situational forces and the unwritten rules, rather than only in terms of guilt and innocence. If it could be admitted that the conduct occurred, that people knew about it and accepted it, and why, then something might be done about the forces behind the conduct, that is, about the ethics environment rather than the "isolated" instance of misconduct.
See the other blog posts on The Lucifer Effect:
II–Situational Forces
III–Debriefing and Other Ways to Deal with Situational Forces
IV–Miscellaneous Observations
Robert Wechsler
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics
203-859-1959
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