Shocking Human Behavioral Trends in Times of Crisis

TW: Descriptions of pain/injury

The world runs differently in times of crisis. Whenever there is a real or interpreted threat, physical, mental, biological, or social, we act in ways that we never thought we would. We go through these changes in behavior in ways that we don’t even notice sometimes, and this kind of behavior can make a negative situation become a dire one. We often find reasons to turn on people we love over the smallest things and act in ways that we would never dream of under normal circumstances. 

This phenomenon has been studied by various sociologists throughout the years. To note are the Stanford Prison Experiment by Philip Zimbardo in 1971 and the Electric Shock Experiment by Stanley Milgram in 1963. The prison experiment lasted less than a week because the participants began behaving in such alarming ways. They engineered a fake prison with willing participants where half were prison guards and the other half were prisoners. They mimicked the prison experience exactly, and the people in the study began to think they were actually in prison. The prisoners would be at the mercy of the guards, and they began to only think of getting out. They could have opted out at any time, but they did not. This behavior on the part of the “guards” and the “prisoners” was so alarming that they ended the experiment after just less than a week. The write-up done by Zimbardo on his findings had the conclusion that humans’ actions are not always necessarily in their full control. We are all responding to situations we find ourselves in, and this calls for certain actions. Sometimes the actions we perform are not always what we would predict ourselves doing in that situation. Much the same was found years earlier in the electric shock experiment by Milgram. Milgram wanted to know how so many soldiers in WWII did such terrible things that they knew were wrong without leaving service. He engineered an experiment in which average people were put in a room with a shock button and a wall between them and a human subject. There was a person in a lab coat in the room with the person who would instruct them to deliver increasingly high voltage shocks to the unknown and unseen person on the other side of the thin wall. The person delivering the shocks did not know that the receiver was a paid actor who would scream after the button was pushed in increasingly more painful expressions until eventually they fell silent; “dead.” The people delivering the shocks they thought could be deadly were upset and wanted to stop at some point, but they did not do so because the person in a lab coat – a figure of authority – said to continue. Some of the men delivering the shocks broke down crying while continuing to push the button as instructed. 

Now, in retrospect, these experiments must have been extremely hard on the participants’ mental health, but the results truly are remarkable and intriguing. In both of these instances, the participants showed drastic changes in behavior than they would in any normal situation. Both the prisoners in Zimbardo’s experiment and the shockers in Milgram’s experiment submitted to the people in positions of supposed authority: the guards and the people in lab coats. Some of the prison guards became the cruel ones we see on television, and the others became the secretly nice person who the prisoners couldn’t risk trusting, even when they had histories of good behaviors as students and friends. None of the participants predicted this kind of behavior, and they were probably either shocked or angry at themselves afterward for a long while for displaying these actions. 

So, the people in Zimbardo’s experiment knew that it was a behavioral experiment, and they still acted in ways that real prison personnel act. Their actions were not corrected, obviously, because that would defeat the purpose of the experiment. They were allowed to act in any way that they wanted, and they still acted in prisoner/guard behavioral patterns. Now, compare this to Milgram’s experiment; the participants did not know during the experiment that the person receiving the shocks was not actually being harmed. They did not see the person. They simply listened to the person in the lab coat. Everything inside them told them to stop, but they chose to ignore that shouting in order to follow orders. Now, put these people in a situation where they have a gun and are told to shoot whoever walks through that door or else they would be physically harmed or killed. You can probably understand that most people wouldn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. 

In times of crisis, our behaviors and thought processes change. We can betray those we love, we can murder countless strangers, but we almost always make sure to follow the orders of people in authority. Does this come from fear, selfishness, socialization, or instinct? There really isn’t an answer, or there are too many to count, depending on how you look at it. In the prison experiment, the participants could opt out at any time and had the freedom to choose their actions, yet they acted in these ways because it was how the power structure was organized. The guards were in positions of authority in relation to the prisoners, so the prisoners submitted to them. In the shock experiment, they acted under the will of the person in a lab coat. They ignored everything in them telling them that they should turn around and walk out, but we cannot understand if it was fear of what would happen if they didn’t listen or if it was how the person was brought up – to obey authority. In the case of WWII Nazi soldiers, we can assume that there was an element of fear to it, but they had guns too. Why didn’t they just turn on the authority figures threatening violence before they could hurt innocent people? 

People who go into the military are strictly resocialized. They are trained to listen only to the person that is in charge on their side. They are punished if they do not do as they are told. They are to ignore all their previous knowledge, and only carry with them into battle the mental and physical tools that their superiors have provided them. Socialization is how people learn from birth the correct ways to act in their culture. Resocialization occurs when you make a large cultural change such as moving to a different country or entering the military. The consequences of ignoring the social norms and expectations in these situations can be social/emotional as in the case of immigration, or they can be physical/mental in the case of the military. 

In times of crisis, the same kinds of changes happen in our minds. We begin to think only of getting through the situation, no matter what it costs. People would act differently in a zombie apocalypse than they would in a grocery store. People act differently if they think they are being followed home at night. People act differently when there is a virus that is illustrated as the worst thing known to humankind, and it can be spread by anyone they love or come into contact with every day. 

Humans are capable of many things. We are able to lift cars to save our children, but we don’t do it often because it would rip our bodies apart. We could revolt against our government, but we don’t do it often because we are taught from the age of ten that we would lose. We could overthrow an army that is commanding us to murder innocent children, but we would likely choose not to because we don’t want to get ourselves shot in the head. Think of all the things we could do, but we choose not to do them because of our instinct for self-preservation. We don’t want to die. A lot of people would rather live under the will of an unjust group of leaders who tell us exactly what to do and when to do it but never why than die because of those same people. And you may say you would never do that, but you really won’t know until you are put in that situation. We all think we are better than other people until we cave to the will of another because of our built-in reactions to the world around us. Behaviors can often shock us in times of real or implied crisis; COVID-19 is real, and the reactions to it are just as real but a thousand times more shocking when you compare it to our actions beforehand. People are rejecting their family members simply because of differences in opinion over vaccines. People are staying in the same house as their abuser more than ever because authority figures are telling them they have to. We are giving up our rights because the government says it is for the greater good and if we do it will end, but then they renegotiate again and again for the same “greater good.” What is the greater good exactly anyway? 

It’s interesting the way humans work. All of us are unique, but we behave far too similarly across time and space for our uniqueness to be well-known for prevailing in tough situations. We often surprise ourselves with the similarities between our own actions and others’ in periods where our common instincts kick in. We are all born with the same primitive senses; some of us can overpower them. No one in either of these groups is more or less valuable than the others, but one group will likely be stronger in some situations than the other.

Until next time, keep thinking outside the box, and keep reading in between!