Whenever we think we are swayed by the mass, against our deepest feelings and convictions, we should question our conscience.

1. Guilt transfer in mass
following
Nivedhitha Mathan
Ashish Gour

3. Crowd psychology
● Differs from and interacts with that of the individuals within it.
● Influenced by
○ Loss of responsibility of individual
○ Universality of behaviour
Group following can both
○ Suppress individual response
○ incite individual response
Deindividuation vs. Convergence
Freud’s Theory:
Restraints of super-ego relaxed.

4. Jedwabne Massacre
Murder of Jewish neighbours by the non- Jewish citizens of Jedwabne.
Ordinary people - able to participate in genocidal mass murder
A central argument is that role of Nazi officers in the events at Jedwabne have been underestimated,
that the Jews had behaved badly when the Soviets were in power, leading their neighbors to turn on
them, that the numbers of victims were not as great as have been claimed and that the proportion of
townspeople who participated in the killing is smaller than has been estimate.

5. ● Manifests in
○ Groupthink
○ Social Loafing
○ Following superiors’ commands-obedience
Suppression of individual response
Deindividuation:
● Reduced
○ Personal identity/ attention
○ Concern for social evaluation
● Weakens personal controls (guilt, shame)

6. Eg. Bystander effect
● More the bystanders, less
likeliness to help
● Diffusion of responsibility
● Group cohesiveness
● Ambiguity of situations
Bystander Effect

7. Incitation of individual response
Group polarization
● when placed in group situations, people will make decisions and form
opinions to more of an extreme than when they are in individual
situations
● Terrorism, college violence
● Studied on judges, who gave harsher punishment for the same crime
when they were in groups rather than while giving decisions alone

8. Social Conformity
Adjusting behaviour to match that of/ norms of the group
Asch Conformity Experiment
Eg. Groupthink-
● Uncritical conformity to perceived majority view
● Eg. Bay of Pigs Invasion-JFK (Many generals knew plan would backfire)
● Eg. American media on Sadam Hussain- only voiced Bush’s justification.
Americans eager to launch attack

9. Attribution Errors
● Experienced when there exists discrepancy between attitude and behaviour.
● Strive to eliminate dissonance.
Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
● Tendency to overestimate influence of situational factors for self and vice-
versa for others.
● Majority- rationalize negative actions/ attitudes

10. Community reinforcement
Observed in terrorists
● Group mentality of a terrorist organization solidifies the mission of the
group through communal reinforcement.
● Members are more likely to stay dedicated and follow through with the
event of terror if they receive support from fellow terrorist members.
● An individual might abandon the mission in terror, but with the
reinforcement of his peers, he is more likely to stay involved.

11. Group polarization: large scale conflicts
● Group polarization has been reported to occur during war time.
● During a conflict, individuals with the same views spend all of their time together, their
viewpoints become stronger and more extreme.
● Group polarization can also help in explaining violent behaviour.
❖ E.g Holocaust
➔ Hitler united a group of like-minded individuals, Nazis, who shared the common belief that
Jews should be exterminated.
➔ Once these individuals united into a group, they viewed anyone who didn’t hold Nazi beliefs as
outsiders, thus demonstrating polarization.
➔ Their sense of unity increased and their Nazi pride intensified
➔ causing them to engage in the violent behaviour.

12. Superior orders and guilt shift: Nuremberg trials
★ The Nuremberg trials(1946) were a series of military tribunals, held by the Allied forces after
World War II, which were most notable for the prosecution of prominent members of the
political, military, and economic leadership of Nazi Germany who planned, carried out, or
otherwise participated in The Holocaust and other war crimes.
★ One of the most noted uses of this plea, or defense Superior orders, is a plea in a court of law
that a person, whether a member of the armed forces or a civilian, not be held guilty for
actions which were ordered by a superior officer.
★ The defense of superior orders was no longer considered enough to escape punishment;
but merely enough to lessen punishment.
★ A dozen of senior military officers were hanged and others given life imprisonment.

13. Obedience
● Adhering to instructions from higher authority
● Transfers burden of accountability to superiors
● Stanley Milgram Experiment
"Personally I have no hatred against
a Jew, I have never personally had a
bad experience with a Jew; [but]
when I switched from being a
military to a police officer, I had to
carry out all the orders I was given. I
am one of those men who carry out
orders without reservation,
according to my oath of loyalty."
Adolph Eichmann

14. Milgram experiment(1963): superior orders
● Authority of the instructor
● Anonymity of the participant(teacher) and their accountability shed off
● Fake shock administered to the learner (real wrt the participant)
★ Shocking results from the ‘shock’ expt.
In an opinion poll before the expt, MIlgram polled 14 ‘senior year
psychology majors’ to predict the behaviour of 100 hypothetical teachers.
Poll predicted an avg of 1.2 teachers(out of 100) giving maximum shock of
450 V
But in reality, 65 % of the teachers administered final massive shock of 450 V

15. Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of
Obedience", writing:
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility
on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover,
even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and
they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental
standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to
resist authority

16. Stanford Prison Experiment(1971)
● Anonymity
● Diffusion of responsibility
End of experiment-
● Fake prisoners- breaking down, rebelled, resigned
● Guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies
● Some fake guards- angry when expt called off
Anger
● Form of guilt transfer
● Thanatos -destructive form of energy

17. Conclusions
● Dehumanization & loss of personal identity of prisoners
● Prisoners accepted their roles as less important human beings
● The result of the expt favour situational attribution of behaviour rather
than dispositional (internal) attribution
★ Situations,rather than individual personalities caused the participants’
behaviour

18. Zimbardo aborted the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate
student in psychology whom he was dating (and later married),objected to the
conditions of the prison after she was introduced to the experiment to
conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that, of more than 50 people who had
observed the experiment, Maslach was the only one who questioned its
morality. After only six days of a planned two weeks' duration, the Stanford
prison experiment was discontinued

19. Abu Gharib prison torture
Zimbardo was paying close attention to the prisoner torture and abuse news at Abu Gharib and was
struck by the similarity with his own experiment.
He was dismayed by official military and government representatives' shifting the blame for the
torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison on to each other rather than
acknowledging the possibly systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration
system.
Eventually, Zimbardo became involved with the defense team of lawyers representing one of the
Abu Ghraib prison guards and helped him lessen his sentence by using the superior order defense.

20. Mass prejudice in the modern world: Islamophobia
An exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative
stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from
social, political, and civic life.
Nearly six in 10 Americans think the religion is prone to violent extremism, nearly half regard it
unfavorably, and a remarkable one in four admits to prejudicial feelings against Muslims and Arabs
alike.
Increase in hate crime rates against Muslims and Arabs after Sep 11.
There are growing instances of Islamophobia in Hindi cinema, or Bollywood, in films such as Aamir (2008),
New York (2009) and My Name is Khan (2010)

21. Asch : “Opinions and Social Pressure”:1955:
This is a chilling text that should be carefully read and remembered whenever we think we are
swayed by the mass, against our deepest feelings and convictions.
Life in society requires consensus as an indispensable condition. But consensus, to be
productive, requires that each individual contribute independently out of his experience
and insight. When consensus comes under the dominance of conformity, the social
process is polluted and the individual at the same time surrenders the powers on which
his functioning as a feeling and thinking being depends. That we have found the
tendency to conformity in our society so strong that reasonably intelligent and
well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern. It
raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our
conduct.

22. Thank you