A while back I came across a fascinating paper in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin (Martens et al, 2007), in which the researchers had asked how killing can become self-perpetuating even when no one retaliates. This is clearly relevant to, for example, genocides and massacres. The researchers suggested that continuing to kill in such situations may help to justify the earlier killing.
In this post and the next, I'll take a close look at this research and some of its implications, starting with the big question:
How do you test a claim about deliberate killing within the limits of ethical research?
THE METHOD
Experimenting on murderousness ain't so easy. As Doc Martens and Co. point out, with glorious understatement: "For obvious reasons, however, laboratory procedures to date have not permitted direct and systematic investigation of why killing may promote further killing." To get round the ethical hole, they ... well, I'll let them tell you themselves.
"To examine these ideas, the authors developed a bug-killing paradigm in which they manipulated the degree of initial bug killing in a "practice task" to observe the effects on subsequent self-paced killing during a timed "extermination task." "
My first reaction: "You did what? You heartless (etc)!"
My second reaction: "What kind of bugs anyhow?" As if moral outrage depends on the exact species of invertebrate. (Doesn't it? Even people who extol the wondrousness of caterpillars, or go on about how useful spiders are, usually agree there are some kinds of critters you can just go ahead and squish.)
So I looked up the paper and learned that they were pill bugs. Then, being British, I looked up pill bugs (y'what?) and learned that they were woodlice. Harmless little things. Crustaceans. The flat ones running for cover when you lift a flowerpot.
Reading on, time to relax: no bugs were harmed in the making of this article. The researchers modified a coffee grinder to make a shredder, complete with crunching sounds. Yup. Doc Martens and co. put bugs in their coffee grinder.
But it was all as fake as the shocks and the actor's yells that Stanley Milgram used in his well-known experiment on obedience. Same principle though: make the person think they're causing harm, and see how willing they are to do more of it.
In my next post, I'll look at the thinking behind the study, and its results.
Reference:
Martens, A., S. Kosloff, et al. (2007). "Killing begets killing: Evidence from a bug-killing paradigm that initial killing fuels subsequent killing." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 33(9): 1251-1264.
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