Julia Shaw: belief

Transcript context

…And also, I think it’s useful to simulate or think through what it would take to say no in that situation. Meaning, once you’re able to imagine yourself doing evil things, you have to imagine the difficult act of resisting. A lot of people think they would resist in Nazi Germany. Well, most people didn’t, and there’s a reason for that. It’s not easy. Same reason, I’ve seen this. If something bad is happening on a public street, most people, it’s the bystander effect. Most people just stand there and watch. I’ve seen it once in my life. This is humans, so it’s actually you want to simulate stepping up. Yeah, so it’s also been called the heroic imagination. Someone who has studied evil, quote unquote, at length, is called Philip Zimbardo. He did the Stanford Prison Experiment, and that was an experiment which is, I mean, it’s now been torn apart in various ways. It was absolutely influential for psychology. It’s where participants were randomly assigned whether they would be prisoners or guards in a mock prison experiment, and then for a number of days, they were told to do various things. And it got out of control, and the guards went way over what they were supposed to be doing, and they effectively started pseudo-torturing some of these inmates or these pretend inmates. And the whole thing had to be stopped prematurely, but it was really fundamental in showing how just by randomly being assigned into guard, the person in charge, or inmate, you can, within a matter of days, have a completely different way of thinking about one another. And so Philip Zimbardo has also spoken at length about evil and that all of us are capable of it in the right circumstances, but he also is a big proponent of what he calls the heroic imagination. And the heroic imagination is really what the purpose of everything I do is. The purpose of what I do isn’t just to go, “Ooh, this is curious,” and to stop there. The point is to then prevent it, and to prevent it in ourselves because that’s I think ultimately what has to happen. You can’t do a top-down sort of government-level approach to trying to be so tough on crime that no one will ever commit crime. That’s impossible. But you can change, sort of to say it in a tacky way, the hearts and minds of individuals to recognize the pathways towards evil and to go, “Wait, I’m off track. I don’t want to go this way, and I’m going to stop myself here, and here’s how I can find my way back.” And so the heroic imagination is exercising that. I see someone on the street. How do I make sure that they’re okay? How do I not become a bystander? And actually, the bystander stuff is interesting because there was a really famous case, the murder of Kitty Genovese, and there were all of these both ear and eyewitnesses. So an ear witness is someone who just hears things, and an eyewitness is someone who sees the crime happening, and they didn’t intervene in the murder of this woman. And so this case was often taken as this almost example of, “Look how terrible human beings are. We just walk by. We don’t care about what’s happening to strangers on the streets.” And actually, what’s happened since is that there’s been lots of other bystander experiments, and they have not substantiated this. So we need to be very careful with looking at these extreme cases and going, “How horrible that this happened to this one person,” and it is, but that doesn’t mean that that’s always how it happens. And so actually, what we find in bystander research is that most of the time, bystanders do intervene. happened to this one person,” and it is, but that doesn’t mean that that’s always how it happens. And so actually, what we find in bystander research is that most of the time, bystanders do intervene. It’s just when there has already been a crowd that has accumulated, you read the room, and you assume, “Well, nobody else has intervened yet, and so it must not be a real problem.” That desire to not stand out in a negative way is often what hinders heroism. I mean, that’s why we look at heroes, people who especially risk their own lives to save others, especially strangers. We see them with a sort of respect that nobody else gets, and that’s because we recognize that we might not be capable of that. If I saw a stranger drowning in a river, would I really risk my life jumping in the river to maybe save them? I think that’s a big question mark. And so when people do that, especially when people almost have this inherent reaction that they just jump in, they just go for it, that is something that is a really admirable quality, and that we as humans do celebrate, and we should. And I think often we should celebrate those incidents more and not the, you know, the bystander moments where we didn’t intervene. We should be normalizing intervening.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.