The Lucifer Effect I — A Situational Approach to Local Government Ethics
A year and a half ago, I wrote <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/moral-clarity-iii-ethics-environments…; target="”_blank”">a
blog post</a> about a 2007 book by Philip Zimbardo, entitled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lucifer-Effect-Understanding-Good-People/dp/08129…; target="”_blank”"><b>The
Lucifer Effect</b></a>. I had read about Zimbardo's book in another
book, Susan Neiman's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Clarity-Grown-Up-Idealists-Revised/dp/06911…; target="”_blank”">Moral
Clarity</a>.<br>
<br>
I finally got around to reading <i>The Lucifer Effect</i>, and I highly
recommend it, despite its length and the small size of its type (for
the middle-aged and older, this is a book that's better read as an
e-book, where you can make the type as large as you want; I, alas,
bought the paperback edition). In this and following blog posts, I
will go beyond what I wrote in 2010.<br>
<br>
Zimbardo's book starts with an experiment he did back in 1971, the
Stanford Prison Experiment, where normal college students were
assigned roles as guards and prisoners, and quickly became either
abusive, silent as to others' abuse, or accepting of abuse to them
even as they rebelled in some ways against it. The experiment shows
how quickly we can all be shaped by aspects of the situations we are
in and the roles we are asked to play, and thereby accepting of new, unethical norms.<br>
<br>
Zimbardo also looks at others' experiments, as well as real-life
situations, such as the abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and other
military prisons.<br>
<br>
Local governments are hardly prisons, but they are situations that,
especially where there are poor ethics environments, can place
strong pressures on individuals to go along with unethical norms. The pressures involve us in loyalty, secrecy, becoming and remaining one of the gang, and playing the
games necessary to raise funds in order to get re-elected and to
appease those with power, whether in the government, in the party,
or in the community (that is, large taxpayers, employers,
developers, contractors, organizations, and their lobbyists).<br>
<br>
Zimbardo's book is the perfect follow-up to Dennis F. Thompson's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ethics-Congress-Individual-Institutional-Corrupti…; target="”_blank”">Ethics in Congress: From Individual to
Institutional Corruption</a>, about which I wrote several <a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/ethics-congress-i-institutional-corru…; target="”_blank”">blog
posts</a> in August. Thompson's book successfully draws our
attention away from government ethics' narrow focus on individual
misconduct, and makes us look squarely at the institutional
corruption that sets the context for individuals' misconduct.
Institutional corruption is legal misconduct that "everyone does,"
and yet it involves the abuse of public office for private purposes,
favoritism, and secrecy. Thompson wrote, "That a practice is
widespread makes it worse. Rather than being an excuse, the plea
that everyone is doing it should strengthen the case against an
individual member charged with improper conduct.”<br>
<br>
Thompson's vision of government ethics is not limited to the bad
apples every politician declares responsible for ethical misconduct.
Thompson recognizes that a bigger problem is the bad barrels, that
is, poor ethics environments.<br>
<br>
<b>It's Not Enough to Focus on the Individual</b><br>
Zimbardo takes this a step further. His distinction is not between
individual and institutional corruption, but between individual
(what he calls "dispositional") and situational orientations toward
individuals' misconduct. Most institutions (and people) take the
individual orientation: that an individual who does something
wrong is culpable and lacking in integrity. We tend to underestimate
how much a person's character can be transformed by powerful forces
in his environment, and ignore the fact that we act differently in
different roles and situations, working alone or in a group, with
our families or on a ball field, with a close friend or among
strangers, at home and abroad. A good person put into a bad
environment can do bad things.<br>
<br>
The individual orientation leads to talk of bad apples and bad
character, and treats matters in isolation from the situation in
which the individual acted. The individual orientation separates
"good people" from "bad people," and thereby takes "good people" off
the hook, freeing them from their role in creating, sustaining, and
conceding to the conditions that contribute to others' misconduct.
Zimbardo feels it is important to recognize that, in some
situations, under certain kinds of pressure, we may act in ways we
think we would not act.<br>
<br>
Taking the individual orientation, an ethics commission, when an
ethics complaint is filed against a council member who, say, helped
get a grant for her brother’s nonprofit organization, rarely looks
into misconduct relating to grant-making by other council members or
their staff, nor does it look into the conduct of those who are
supposed to provide oversight or those who failed to make provision
for oversight related to grant-giving. The ethics commission does
not investigate the norms of grant-giving, or who knew, who
approved, who failed to disapprove. Instead, the single council
member is fined and then, perhaps, stripped of a committee
chairmanship by people who knew all along what she was doing and may
have done similar things themselves.<br>
<br>
No one asks what situational forces may have been involved. We
say that power corrupts, but that is simply an abstract statement.
We also say that government officials are co-opted, that they come
into office with ideals and plans, and end up becoming one of the
boys. But we do nothing about the process of co-opting and
corruption until an individual is caught helping himself or someone
close to him, and then all we do is take that individual to task.<br>
<br>
It is, therefore, no surprise that the individual brought before an
ethics commission feels that an injustice has been done. He knows
that he hasn't done anything wrong, at least within the ethics
environment he works in. And he knows that others have gotten away
with what they've done, that he's been unfortunate, possibly singled
out by political opponents. And yet he can't point fingers, except
perhaps against his political opponents, who might not be culpable
at all (except in the tactical employment of an ethics complaint).
Pointing fingers at one's colleagues isn't how the game is played,
even though it is the rules of the game that got him in trouble in
the first place.<br>
<br>
If the topic of discussion were the local government's ethics
environment, the accused official might not be so defensive (although others might be). In such
a discussion, the official's conduct might be considered in light of
the situational forces and the unwritten rules, rather than only in
terms of guilt and innocence. If it could be admitted that the
conduct occurred, that people knew about it and accepted it, and
why, then something might be done about the forces behind the
conduct, that is, about the ethics environment rather than the
"isolated" instance of misconduct.<br>
<br>
See the other blog posts on <i>The
Lucifer Effect</i>:<br>
<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/lucifer-effect-ii-%E2%80%94-situation…–Situational
Forces</a><br>
<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/lucifer-effect-iii-%E2%80%94-debriefi…–Debriefing
and Other Ways to Deal with Situational Forces</a><br>
<a href="http://www.cityethics.org/content/lucifer-effect-iv-%E2%80%94-miscellan…–Miscellaneous
Observations</a><br>
<br>
Robert Wechsler<br>
Director of Research-Retired, City Ethics<br>
<br>
203-859-1959