Like a lot of us, I keep asking myself, How did we get into this mess? Since humans have innate needs and capacities for cooperation, empathy and fairness, which science now confirms, why does so much suffering and destruction continue? For many, the answer seems obvious: Humans just aren’t good enough; we need to become better people; we need to overcome selfishness and evolve into more caring and cooperative creatures. I disagree. Since these positive qualities are hard-wired in virtually all of us, maybe what we really need more of is something else: backbone.

Have you ever considered we’re too cooperative? Maybe we’re hard-wired to follow others, even if we should say “no way.”

The infamous Stanley Milgram experiments of the early 1960s’ in which people were instructed to administer electric shocks to others have recently been redone, amped down, literally, to conform to new ethics standards. Jerry Burger at Santa Clara University in California replicated the format: subjects are instructed to send “shocks” they believe are real to induce learning in a confederate. More than half conform, delivering up to a maximum 150 volts even after subjects cry out to stop the experiment. We’re all likely to wonder, Would I be among that go-along majority? Interviewing participants afterward, Burger uncovered a clue, reported in The New York Times: “Those who stopped generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable.” The implications are huge. In disempowering societies like my own wherein most think government listens not to us but to the interests of concentrated wealth, and few workers are in unions enabling them to experience a sense of agency one would expect to find widespread cruelty. Too many people feel someone else is in charge; we’re powerless… thus, unaccountable. So we go along, abiding racial slurs in the office and poverty so deep that, in the U.S., for example, one in 10 people is relying on food stamps this year despite the fact that enough food is available to make us all obese.

Another study, reported in 2006 in Science, points to a related aspect of innate tendencies that helps explain why cruelty is rampant, even though humans are empathetic. The bottom-line finding, says senior author Bettina Rockenbach, is that when people share standards and some “have the moral courage to sanction others, informally,”a society “manages very successfully.”

Full Story: http://www.odemagazine.com/doc/58/a-call-for-guts/