The Exception (40 page)

In the beginning of what became known as the Stanford Prison Experiment, there were no significant personality differences between randomly picked guards and prisoners. Later, both groups were to change remarkably quickly.

The absolute power given to the guards made the prisoners helpless and submissive, enabling the guards to extend their powers still further. This mutual interaction was the start of a self-reinforcing, damaging process.

A third of the guards behaved with increasing callousness and in an arbitrary manner, initiating punishments for no reason and devising inventive means of humiliating the prisoners. In their ordinary lives they had shown no tendencies to aggressive or tyrannical behaviour.

Two of the guards went out of their way to support the prisoners, but never came close to publicly confronting the hostile guards. The rest of the guards were tough, but did not initiate any unofficial punishments.

The prisoners became depressed, despairing and passive. Three of them had to be ‘freed’ only four days into the experiment, because they wept hysterically, lost the ability
to think coherently and became deeply depressed. A fourth prisoner was released after getting a rash that covered his entire body.

All but three of the prisoners were willing to forgo payment for the days they had spent on the experiment if they could be let out. When they were told that their pleas for ‘parole’ had been turned down, they passively and obediently plodded along back to their cells.

The Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrates that prisoners and guards acted according to the roles given to them by an external agent, gradually changing their thought patterns, values and emotional responses to fit in. Most of the participants seemed unable to make a distinction between their real selves and their role in the experiment. Prison brutality escalated with each successive day. Ordinary moral values vanished, despite the fact that each group was determined indiscriminately.

The experiment had to be interrupted after six days, mainly because the remaining prisoners were unacceptably close to mental breakdown.

There are of course many other contexts in which the role and the self become contiguous. As James Waller says in his book entitled
Becoming Evil
(parts of this account are based on his analysis of the existing evidence): ‘Evil acts not only reflect the self, they shape the self.’

Groups formed for almost no reason

The English social psychologist Henri Tajfel and a few of his colleagues set out to study how many features people must have in common in order to see themselves as part of a group and, as a next step, set up a system of prejudices against other groups.

His first plan was to recruit people without any regard to common features, allocate them at random to groups and then gradually introduce similarities, negative prejudices and conflicts between the groups. He expected that this process would
allow him to observe how and when group identity is formed.

In his best-known ‘minimal group’ experiment, he asked the subjects to express their opinions of a few abstract paintings and separated them afterwards into two groups. One lot were told that they had all expressed a preference for paintings similar to those by Paul Klee, while the others preferred the style of Wassily Kandinsky. None of this was true, as group allocation was entirely random.

The subjects did not know each other and had had no prior contact. Given the opportunity to evaluate photographs of all the subjects, participants ranked those in their own group as better at their jobs and more pleasant to be with. When individuals were asked to distribute money, group members were always favoured.

In a similar experiment some of the subjects were so biased against the other group that they were happier for their own people to receive $2 rather than three, on condition that the others received $1 instead of four. In other words, they were more interested in ‘beating the others’ than getting the highest possible payment for their own members.

Until this series of experiments, most social psychologists had assumed that group identity was created gradually in response to shared experiences. Nobody expected prejudice and hostility to emerge between people without any knowledge of their own group or of the others.

Relationships within a group, or between groups, constitute classical fields of research in social psychology. Many different experiments show that our thoughts operate according to an ‘Us-and-Them’ model. The basis for this is straightforward. Everyone is forced to work out how to deal with a world that is endlessly complex. In order to simplify existence and sort out irrelevant information quickly, we divide ourselves into categories.

Categorisation is a human way of thinking, as essential as it is unavoidable. Types of category vary between individuals and
cultures, but the process is common to us all. It shapes how we understand our environment and our relationship to it.

Social psychology has demonstrated some of the consistent distortions caused by the Us-and-Them model. We tend to exaggerate the similarities of those who belong to our group, just as we exaggerate the homogeneity in other groups and the differences among them. And normally, we care more for members of our own group than for others.

In crises or open conflicts these attitudes become extreme. All mankind has the potential for believing the propaganda machine when it repeats endlessly: ‘Kill, or be killed!’

The victim asks for it

We are all aware that good people are not immune from bad experiences, but a large majority of us nonetheless try to hold on to the hope of a fundamentally just world, a good place to bring your children into.

As numerous studies demonstrate, this hope, combined with the barely conscious human need for meaning and for coherence in the information we receive, makes us twist reality until it fits into our vision of order.

It is not only those who carry out terrible acts who are deluded by their distorted thought patterns, memories and sensory input into believing that their world is still just and meaningful. Those who witness the tragedies and, indeed, the victims themselves also collaborate in this fiction.

People struck down by a serious illness, as well as those close to the patient, are often determined to find the cause. They feel a strong need to establish exactly what they have done wrong to deserve the affliction. Again, it is common for victims of violence to wonder about the root cause. ‘Maybe I asked for it; maybe I shouldn’t have walked down that lane so late at night; maybe I shouldn’t have worn that dress.’ Such anxieties become the focus of their thoughts, regardless of the fact that
they have the right to walk down any lane and wear any knd of clothes.

Sometimes it seems that victims actively prefer to carry the burden of blame rather than recognise that mere chance can intervene to ruin a life. A wealth of experimental data supports this in every detail.

In one such experiment, Melvin Lerner and Carolyn Simmons asked seventy-two students to watch the punishment, in the form of severe electrical shocks, given every time a victim gave a wrong answer to a question. The victim was an actress, mimicking the pain.

Some of the observers were told that they would be allowed to stop the shocks later in the process. Asked to describe how they felt about the victim, those who believed she would continue to be in pain viewed her more negatively than those who thought that they would be able to control the shocks.

This way of construing the position of the victim is sharpened when we ourselves are inflicting the suffering. Cognitive dissonance makes us like those whom we have helped and dislike those we have hurt.

In the context of his experiment on obedience to authority, Stanley Milgram noted that many of the subjects later said things like: ‘He [the “pupil”] was so stupid he really deserved to be shocked.’ Another, similar argument was that, since the pupil had agreed to join the experiment, he was asking for trouble. This was despite the fact that those who expressed such a view had also joined the experiment and it had apparently been the luck of the draw that decided who was ‘teacher’ and who was ‘pupil’.

It seems that powerful psychological impulses drive perpetrators to think and feel that their victims deserve what’s happening to them. The more appallingly brutal the acts a perpetrator commits, the more strongly he comes to believe that they are only right and proper.

We all have a tendency to construe reality in the same way
as the German civilian who commented, when forced by British soldiers to walk through a newly liberated concentration camp: ‘What awful crimes these people must have committed to be condemned to this kind of punishment.’

It is late and Iben trudges heavily to her flat on the sixth floor. She has spent the evening in Malene’s place, discussing Anne-Lise. She feels worn out and the only thing on her mind is sleep.

At the last turn of the stair she senses someone on the landing outside her door. She looks up. The man is tall, with a mass of tightly curled black hair, greying at the temples. She takes in his black-leather jacket and the dead look in his eyes. In an instant she knows that he has been waiting for her, and why.

She flies down the stairs. He goes after her with long strides and soon catches up. He grabs her throat before she has time to scream – or, at least, that is how Anne-Lise usually imagines it. Then he grips her around her waist. Iben’s legs, much shorter than his, kick out wildly. She knows what will happen next. So does Anne-Lise.

The reel runs and reruns inside Anne-Lise’s head, showing every detail as Iben’s face changes. The bleak lamplight picks out the shadows under her eyes. Anne-Lise watches as Iben’s expression becomes remorseful. At last she has insight into what she has done, how she lied to herself and convinced herself that she was good – oh, so goody – at the same time as doing all she could to ruin another human being.

In Anne-Lise’s imagination the knife is large, with broad teeth cut deep into the steel. Iben will die now. Soon, reflex spasms will make her body twitch. She will weaken fast as life drains from her.

Anne-Lise’s tired mind steers in and around the fantasies that coalesce and then fade in her mind, while she tries to concentrate on other things. The familiar images, the rapist in the red track-suit murdering Malene, the man lying in wait for Iben, can start
up even when she is in the Winter Garden, talking with one of the other women.

She would like to make an appointment to see Yngve and be reassured by him. On the other hand, she knows he will insist that she confronts Iben and Malene. Anne-Lise would also like to tell Nicola what the last few weeks have been like, yet can’t bring herself to answer when her phone indicates that Nicola is on the line. She will keep insisting that Anne-Lise should hand in her notice.

Instead Anne-Lise tries to suppress her fantasies and think about something peaceful. Driving along the motorway in the morning, she speculates about the merger. She is still thinking about it when she turns left onto the Jagt Road slipway and when she parks her car and when she rides up in the groaning old lift with the three pornographic cartoons scratched in the corner. Everything will change when DCGI becomes part of DIHR. New colleagues and a new boss.

Anne-Lise thinks about the takeover while she fills her mug with coffee until it spills over the sides. She is still thinking about it later on, when she sends off an email to the wrong address.

Her first task is to assign keywords to classified reports on the genocide carried out by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. She compares scans from three different books to look for patterns and possible connections.

She reads about the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979 and the attempts to change the ethnic composition of Afghan tribes. The army chiefs were especially keen to reduce the number of Pathans in the northern Afghan provinces, because it would facilitate their incorporation into the Soviet Union. Reliable figures are scarce, but the UN estimates that between 1978 and 1992,1.5 to 2 million Afghans were killed. They were subjected to bombs and chemical weapons, but also air drops of children’s toys filled with deadly toxins, massacres and destruction of crops and wells.

Approximately 6 million inhabitants fled. To prevent them
from ever returning, the occupying army destroyed the irrigation systems on which Afghan agriculture depended, turning the refugees’ homeland into a desert.

The space bar on Anne-Lise’s keyboard isn’t working properly; sometimes it adds two or three spaces, sometimes none. Unless she proofreads everything with particular care the users won’t find what they are looking for. She is checking the phrase ‘Torture and murder of foreign journalists, doctors and aid workers’, when Paul steps into the Winter Garden to make an announcement.

‘Gunnar is going to drop in some time this afternoon. I have promised him a tour of the Centre and a talk about the funding of our operations. He insists he wants an idea about these things before he will agree to join the board.’

Anne-Lise listens through the open door. She can’t see the others, but senses that the atmosphere has changed. The keyboards have fallen silent and now drawers are being opened and there is the sound of paper being shuffled.

When Iben speaks to Malene, does her voice somehow have an edge?

Anne-Lise’s desk is awash with papers, but they’re in order. In case the many Post-it notes make it look as if she’s behind with a lot of jobs, she puts some of them away. She also decides to get rid of three large sacks of waste paper piled up close to her desk. The sacks, which are stuffed with wrappings of foreign books and magazine packages, actually demonstrate how efficient she is. All the same, they look too messy. She knows the spots the cleaners miss, especially with all the electrical equipment and the leads and sockets, so she does a quick spring-clean.

She is almost ready when she hears the others calling out to each other.

‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

‘Don’t know. But what about this then?’

Anne-Lise can’t hear the reply, but they start laughing. Then Iben comes running into the library, holding an empty bottle of
rum. Anne-Lise has no idea where the bottle has come from, but assumes that Iben has brought it with her to drop it in the glass-recycling bin. It’s the kind of thing she would do.