Gandhi and the Psychology of Nonviolence, Volume 1

Scientific Roots and Development

V. K. Kool,Rita Agrawal

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030568658
• Categoría: Psychology
• Categoría: History & Theory in Psychology

The first of two volumes, this book examines Gandhi's contribution to an understanding of the scientific and evolutionary basis of the psychology of nonviolence, through the lens of contemporary researches on human cognition, empathy, morality and self-control.
While, psychological science has focused on those participants that delivered electric shocks in Professor Stanley Milgram's famous experiments, these books begin from the premise that we have neglected to fully explore why the other participants walked away. Building on emergent research in the psychology of self control and wisdom, the authors illustrate what Gandhi's life and work offers to our understanding of these subjects who disobeyed and defied Milgram.
The authors analyze Gandhi's actions and philosophy, as well as original interviews with his contemporaries, to elaborate a modern scientific psychology of nonviolence from the principles he enunciated and whichwere followed so successfully in his Satyagrahas. Gandhi, they argue, was a practical psychologist from whom we can derive a science of nonviolence which, as Volume 2 will illustrate, can be applied to almost every subfield of psychology, but particularly to those addressing the most urgent issues of the 21st century.
This book is the result of four decades of collaborative work between the authors. It marks a unique contribution to studies of both Gandhi and the current trends in psychological research that will appeal in particular to scholars of social change, peace studies and peace psychology, and, serve as an exemplar in teaching one of modern psychology's hitherto neglected perspectives.

© The Author(s) 2020

V. K. Kool, R. AgrawalGandhi and the Psychology of Nonviolence, Volume 1https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56865-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Beginning: From Resisting Violence to Promoting Nonviolence

V. K. Kool¹ and Rita Agrawal²

(1)

SUNY Polytechnic Institute, Utica, NY, USA

(2)

Harish Chandra Postgraduate College, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India

Keywords

DisobedienceEric EriksonGandhiGene SharpIntegrative powerJohan GaltungKenneth BouldingNVTObedience to authorityStanley MilgramThe ProtesterThree faces of powerTRANSCENDWilliam James

End Abstract

Opening Vignette

Can you believe that the following happened when a participant in an experiment was asked to deliver electric shocks to another human being? They agreed and continued to administer shocks, that too, at dangerous levels. For details, please continue to read below.

75 volts

Ugh!

90 volts

Ugh!

105 volts

Ugh! (louder)

150 volts

Ugh!!! Experimenter! That’s all. Get me out of here. I told you I had heart trouble. My heart’s starting to bother me now. Get me out of here, please. My heart’s starting to bother me. I refuse to go on. Let me out.

210 volts

Ugh! Experimenter! Get me out of here. I’ve had enough. I won’t be in the experiment any more.

270 volts

(Agonized scream) Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Let me out of here. Do you hear? Let me out of here.

300 volts

(Agonized scream) I absolutely refuse to answer any more. Get me out of here. You can’t hold me here. Get me out. Get me out of here.

315 volts

(Intensely agonized scream) I told you I refuse to answer. I’m no longer part of this experiment.

330 volts

(Intense and prolonged agonized scream) Let me out of here. Let me out of here. My heart’s bothering me. Let me out. I tell you (hysterically). Let me out of here. Let me out of here. You have no right to hold me here. Let me out! Let me out! Let me out! Let me out!

(Abridged from Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram. New York: Harper & Row, 1974, pp. 56–57.)

Most of us have often wondered what caused people, who are normally morally correct, to follow the extreme orders delivered during the Holocaust. Why is it that these soldiers from the German army were ready to incinerate thousands of innocent Jews and that too, not only adult males but also women and children? Did they show this compliance willingly? Did they not face conflicts while obeying such shocking orders from the Fuhrer?

Milgram’s Obedience to Authority Experiments

In the early 1960s, a University of Yale professor of psychology started thinking deeply about questions such as the above. That professor was none other than Stanley Milgram, whose classic experiments on what has come to be known as the obedience to authority experiments “remain one of the most inspired contributions to the field of social psychology” (Russell 2011) and through which he attempted to find out what happens when one faces a conflict between personal values and demands to be obedient and why is it that people are ready to inflict pain to strangers. So great can be said to be the impact of these studies that it has been written that “few psychological studies can claim a legacy as imposing as the obedience studies of Milgram. Their impact was of notable consequence in the separate spheres of research ethics, research design and theory in psychology and they changed the ways in which psychologists conceptualize and conduct their research” (Benjamin and Simpson 2009). They also became one of the most controversial experiments and one of the most talked of experiments in the field of social psychology. Or, as Lee Ross (1988, cf. Myers 1999) puts it, “they have become part of our society’s shared intellectual legacy.”

What was the experiment devised by Milgram (1974)? Creative artist that he was, Milgram devised an extremely ingenious situation which he presented to a group of 110 psychiatrists, college students and middle class adults. The situation was as follows: two men walk into the psychology laboratory where Milgram stands stern and forbearing, explaining to them that he is undertaking an experiment on the effects of punishment on learning. The two men draw lots, and one (who is a confederate of the experimenter) pretends that his slip says “learner” and is taken into the adjoining room. The other who is actually a subject having volunteered to take part through a newspaper advertisement is told to act as “teacher,” who sees the “learner” being strapped to a chair and an electrode attached to his wrist. The “teacher” is then shown the “shock machine” that has various switches to deliver electric shocks ranging from mild shock to 435 and 450 volts. He is also instructed that the “learner” has to learn a list of words and that, whenever he makes a mistake, the “teacher” must press one of the buttons on the shock machine to deliver a shock to the erring learner. The experiment is then started. As soon as the “learner” makes a mistake, a small shock is administered by the “teacher.” How does the “learner” respond? The initial low-level shocks are responded to by grunts from the “learner.” With more mistakes, the “teacher” has been told to increase the amount of the shock. As the size of the shock increases, the grunts soon change into a shout at 120 volts and cries to let him out at 150 volts. By 270 volts, the “teacher” hears screams of agony, while after 330 volts the “learner” becomes silent. The experimenter continues to prod the “teacher” to continue delivering shocks, saying that “you have no option; you must go on.”

When Milgram described the above “experiment” to 110 psychiatrists, college students and middle class adults, people from all three groups said that they would disobey by about 135 volts and that none would go beyond 300 volts. When asked how they thought other people would go, none expected that people would go to the 435–450-volt level. Yes, this is what they felt they would do or others would do! But when Milgram actually conducted the experiment on 40 men from varying vocations and of the age group 20 to 50 years, he was surprised to find that actually 25 of them (a whopping 63%) delivered shocks to the extent of 450 volts to the erring “learner” (see Opening Vignette). Though the “learner” received no shock, Milgram and many other social psychologists were upset and extremely perturbed. How could people electrocute innocent people for almost no reason? Table 1.1 reveals the percentage of people who showed obedience. The results seem to point to the same answer as that given by officers, such as Eichmann, of the Holocaust: “we were simply following orders.” Should we call such people who comply with destructive orders accomplices? The most surprising finding is that the experiment has been repeated many times around the globe, with fairly consistent results.

Table 1.1

Percentage of subjects who delivered shocks of varying levels

Level of shock	Percentage of subjects
300 volts (intense shock)	12.5%
315 volts (extreme intensity shock)	10%
330 volts (extreme intensity shock)	5%
345 volts (extreme intensity shock)	2.5%
350 volts (extreme intensity shock)	2.5%
375 volts (danger: severe shock)	2.5%
450 volts (extremely dangerous)	65%

Milgram, vexed though he was, did not stop here. He went on next with other variants of the experiment (results summarized in Fig. 1.1) in order to discover the conditions under which such obedience to instructions is manifested. In his later experiments, he found four determining factors: the victim’s emotional distance, the authority’s closeness and legitimacy, the institutional authority of the experimenter and last but not the least, the liberating effect of a disobedient fellow subject. These factors were validated not only by a large body of empirical research but were also brought to the fore by everyday experience in our ability to harm someone or to be compassionate toward someone.

Fig. 1.1

Graph showing obedience levels in variations of Milgram’s study

For the purpose of clarity, let us now look at the first four experimental variations in which there were the least number of people who were ready to administer 450-volt shocks, starting with the variation # 9, in which there were the least number of subjects (refer to Fig. 1.1).

1. 1.
   # 9. Learner demands to be shocked
2. 2.
   # 11. Authority as victim, an ordinary man commanding
3. 3.
   # 12. When two authorities offer contradictory command
4. 4.
   # 8. Subjects free to choose shock level

Looking at Fig. 1.1 in this way, one finds that as conditions changed, the number of subjects, who were ready to administer high levels of shock, declined considerably, with compliance levels dropping to less than 10%. This data provides, in the process, interesting insights regarding ways of reducing aggression. Unfortunately, Milgram had not paid much heed to this aspect, preoccupied as he was, with the investigation of the dynamics of obedience to authority in terms of aggressive behavior. However, we see exciting possibilities in this part of Milgram’s data and take this opportunity to extend this monumental research on the psychology of aggression to understand more about nonviolence. Further, in this book and elsewhere, we have emphasized that such a limited approach in understanding aggression or its counterpart, nonviolence, is detrimental to the understanding of our own survival, in general, and to the applications of psychology in real life, in particular (Kool 1993, 2008; Kool and Agrawal 2013, 2018).

Kool (2008) was, particularly, perturbed and concerned regarding the reasons for Milgram’s not going beyond the experimental framework of his hypotheses concerning obedience to authority. In particular, Kool and his associates were of the view that the developments in prospect theory (Kahneman 2011; Kahneman and Tversky 1979) offer a more scientific explanation for the differences between the behavior of those who choose violence vis-à-vis those who choose nonviolence.

What is the learning from the example in Box 1.1? The ways in which we have been primed to think color our perception and our ways of thinking. The same is true for all forms of behavior, including violence and nonviolence. With violence being constantly primed by the mass media and the prevailing social order placing us in settings which have compliance and obedience...

Índice

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Beginning: From Resisting Violence to Promoting Nonviolence
• 2. The Disobedient Gandhi
• 3. Interviews with Survivors from the Gandhi Era
• 4. The Building Blocks of Gandhi’s Nonviolence
• 5. The Evolution of Nonviolence and Its Neurological Basis
• 6. Measurement of Nonviolence
• 7. The Psychology of Nonviolence: Models and Their Validation
• 8. Cognition of Nonviolence
• 9. Epilogue: Summing Up on the Science of Gandhi’s Psychology of Nonviolence
• Back Matter