Is there a cure for integrity?

The truth cure

I fear that no cure for integrity exists. The problem is, quite simply, that the dissonance-based phenomena we have been examining, our urgent desire as intuitive lawyers to arrange our world so that we remain upstanding citizens in it regardless of what we do, all operate unconsciously.

One comforting idea is that the truth will set us free - or, more precisely, that understanding the dynamics of self-corruption (integrity’s sturdy twin) can help us fend it off. Robert Cialdini has written an admirable textbook on the power of social psychological forces to influence us in directions we don’t want.^[554] At the end of each chapter, Cialdini offers a section entitled “Defense,” which distills from the experimental literature recommendations on how not to be taken in by the fundamental forces of reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity - the “weapons of influence.” Cialdini’s basic defensive recommendation is enhanced awareness.^[555] Yet he understands that enhanced awareness of unconscious forces may be impossible precisely because the forces are unconscious.^[556] His recommendations may well be the best we can do, but I have doubts that the best we can do will often be good enough.^[557]

A personal recollection. A few years ago, I was walking across a park in Dublin with my wife and in-laws. It was a nice summer day, and I noticed a man napping on the grass. As we drew nearer, I observed that he was lying on his stomach, not his back. Then, as we walked by, I saw that his head was not turned to one side like someone asleep. His face was pressed directly into the ground. His limbs were splayed at awkward angles, and he was completely motionless. I had what I can only describe as a moment of listless recognition that he seemed to be dead - listless, because although I recall the thought that he was dead passing through my mind, I kept walking.

At that time, I had been a consumer of experimental social psychology for more than five years, and had discussed the Darley-Latane experiments on bystander passivity in my classes at least three times. It wasn’t until we were past the motionless man that I suddenly recognized why none of us were doing anything. It had nothing to do with the red-eye. It had everything to do with diffusion of responsibility. I said, “That guy looks dead! We should do something.” We all turned back to look at him, and saw a Good Samaritan with a cell phone standing next to the fallen man, excitedly phoning for help. Just as the experiments predicted, the Good Samaritan was all by himself. Score one for Darley and Latane.

Of course, one explanation for my passivity is that Luban is a weak vessel, who talks the talk of morality and compassion but won’t walk the walk - or

rather, who walks the walk right past collapsed strangers in a park. Perhaps that’s it. But another example might persuade you that the case is not simply one man’s fecklessness and hypocrisy. The example comes from Philip Zimbardo’s recollections of his Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo recalls a critical moment several days into the experiment:

One of the guards overheard the prisoners talking about an escape that would take place immediately after visiting hours. The rumor went as follows: Prisoner #8612, whom we had released the night before, was going to round up a bunch of his friends and break in to free the prisoners.

How do you think we reacted to this rumor? Do you think we recorded the pattern of rumor transmission and prepared to observe the impending escape? That was what we should have done, of course, if we were acting like experimental social psy­chologists. Instead, we reacted with concern over the security of our prison.

Haney was one of the psychologists conducting the experiment. Zimbardo continues:

After our meeting... I went back to the Palo Alto Police Department and asked the sergeant if we could have our prisoners transferred to their old jail. My request was turned down... I left angry and disgusted at this lack of cooperation between our correctional facilities (I was now totally into my role).

It only got worse:

I was sitting there all alone, waiting anxiously for the intruders to break in, when who should happen along but a colleague and former Yale graduate student roommate, Gordon Bower. Gordon had heard we were doing an experiment, and he came to see what was going on. I briefly described what we were up to, and Gordon asked me a very simple question: “Say, what’s the independent variable in this study?”

To my surprise, I got really angry at him. Here I had a prison break on my hands. The security of my men and the stability of my prison was [sic] at stake, and now, I had to deal with this bleeding-heart, liberal, academic, effete dingdong who was concerned about the independent variable! It wasn’t until much later that I realized how far into my prison role I was at that point - that I was thinking like a prison superintendent rather than a research psychologist.⁷⁷

When I first described the Stanford Prison Experiment, I noted that the “prisoners” and “guards” were not the only ones to become captives of their roles. Their parents, the priest who visited them, and even the lawyer

who came in to consult with them about their “parole hearings” all did as well. Why not? None of these people were trained to recognize psychological mechanisms of influence at work. But Haney and Zimbardo were. If anyone should have recognized the “Pirandellian prison” of the mind, it is psy­chologists who devote their careers to mapping its gates and cell blocks.

The canary in the mineshaft

I have said that there is no real cure for integrity - the low-road kind of integrity, that is, the unconscious gerrymandering of principles to rationalize commitments and actions that are too inconvenient to forgo. I do have a few suggestions, however. If you really fear the gradual unconscious corruption that performing in role induces, you must decide in advance what line you won’t cross - and then, when you find yourself standing at that line, or, worse, when you find yourself having just crossed it, you will know that it’s time to quit. The inspiration for this suggestion comes from David Heilbroner, a former New York City prosecutor who wrote a fascinating memoir of his time in the District Attorney’s office - a story of inexperience and naivete gradually replaced by competence and cynicism. Heilbroner underwent a deep immersion in the seamy side of life where the good guys and the bad guys all lie sometimes, and where even doing good often leaves a bad taste. Heilbroner writes:

Before joining the DA’s office I had promised myself that above all, I would never take a case to trial if I had any doubt about the defendant’s guilt. At the time it seemed an easy enough standard to abide by. But during the past few weeks I realized that the Quintana case would probably force me to put my personal ethics to the test.^[558]

Heilbroner was prosecuting Quintana for theft, and had just learned that his star witness, the clean-cut, appealing, young victim, was really a drug dealer, bail jumper, and liar. Heilbroner’s supervisor was unimpressed by the revelations about the witness, and insisted that Heilbroner take the case to trial.

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My advice is to choose your canary carefully, understanding that before you enter a role your ideas about what ethical demands it entails may well be naive. But, once you’ve selected the canary, never ignore it. If necessary, write down the “I will never, ever” formula. Put it in an envelope, keep it in a drawer, and pull it out sometimes to remind yourself what it says. And, the moment the canary dies, get out of the mineshaft.

Noticing when you are deflecting blame to someone else

A second recommendation takes its inspiration from Milgram’s research. When he debriefed subjects after the electric-shock experiment, Milgram asked them to apportion responsibility for shocking the victim among the three protagonists - the subject himself, the “scientist” giving him orders to proceed, and the victim repeatedly earning electric shocks by giving wrong answers.

This recommendation may sound peculiar, given the situationists’ warning that assigning responsibility for behavior to personality, not to situational pressures, amounts to a “fundamental attribution error.” Am I now sug­gesting that you must not blame the situation for what you have done, that you must take personal responsibility - in short, that you must commit the fundamental attribution error? Well, yes, in a way. Recall my earlier critique of situational determinism, where I argued that situations do not determine behavior, but merely alter the difficulty gradient, making it easier or harder to behave in certain ways. This, I suggested, is compatible with a view that emphasizes the responsibility of agents in dealing with situations. To blame others - one’s boss, one’s co-workers, one’s situation - amounts (to borrow Sartre’s term) to a kind of bad faith.^[560] Regardless of whether or not it is bad faith, however, my suggestion at the moment is simply that whenever you find yourself blaming others for your actions, treat that as an alarm bell, signaling that you may well be in the grips of the psychological forces of rationalization.

Socratic skepticism

My third and final suggestion is less specific, but perhaps more important. Throughout this discussion I have been emphasizing the dangers of our innate tendency to falsify facts and abandon principles in order to avoid the belief that we are doing wrong. Apparently, the need to believe in our own righteousness runs deep. One possible antidote to the drive toward self­righteousness is a stance toward the world that might be labeled “Socratic skepticism.”

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates tells the Athenian jury at his trial that throughout his life he has listened to an inner voice, a daimon. The voice tells him when he is in danger of doing wrong. It never speaks when he is doing right - only when he is doing wrong.^[561] To give an example, Socrates men­tions a period in which Athens was ruled by the Thirty Tyrants. These rulers wished to implicate as many Athenians as possible in their crimes. At one point, they called Socrates and some others in and ordered them to arrest Leon the Salaminian so that he might be executed. The others went off to fulfill the command, but (Socrates tells his hearers), his daimon spoke up, and, at risk of forfeiting his own life, he simply went home. Socrates adds that his own life was spared only because the Tyrants were overthrown very soon after.⁸³

Socrates goes on to explain that throughout his life he has made it his mission to seek out those who claim to know, and test them with probing questions, hoping (in vain, he informs us) to find someone whose high op­inion of his own wisdom stood the test. He insists that he himself knows only that he does not know.⁸⁴ Although Socrates does not draw the connection between his daimon and his skeptical stance toward his own knowledge and that of others, it seems straightforward enough: the daimon tells him when his action has no justification, and his skepticism leads him to test every justi­fication that he hears.

This stance toward the world - a stance of perpetual doubt toward one’s own pretensions as well as the pretensions of others - is what I am calling Socratic skepticism. It aims to combat our basic drive to believe in our own righteousness in the most straightforward way possible: by trying to make a habit of doubting one’s own righteousness, of questioning one’s own moral beliefs, of scrutinizing one’s own behavior - “Know thyself!” - with a certain ruthless irony.

This advice will no doubt seem strange and disagreeable to many. Americans admire confident, can-do leaders who never second-guess their own decisions, and who avoid skepticism and self-doubt, the telltale signs of neurotics and losers. In the world of business and government, feelings of guilt or regret are career-destroyers, best cabined to ceremonial occasions like Bible breakfasts and sentencing hearings. Nevertheless, I suggest chronic skepticism and discomfort with oneself as a possible antidote for integrity - if, that is, any antidote for integrity can be found.