Are there provable methods we can use to become more altruistic and compassionate? Can Buddhist compassion practices be adapted for a secular society?
Apr 12th, 2010 by admin
In 1961, following the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann
in Jerusalem, Yale social psychologist Stanley Milgram conducted a
study to find out how much pain test subjects would be willing to inflict on other
people at the behest of an authority figure. He was trying to ascertain whether people
could perform acts that went against their conscience merely as a result of “taking
orders.” When the results were published in 1963, the Milgram Experiments
became instantly famous and controversial. Advertised to would-be participants
as a study of memory ability, the experiment asked them to act as “teachers” who
would test the memory ability of a “learner.” When the learner offered a wrong
answer, the teacher was to administer electric shocks of increasing severity, up to
four hundred and fifty volts. These produced screams from the learner, whom the
teacher could hear but not see. If the teacher resisted applying more shocks, the
experimenter verbally prodded him to do so, issuing increasingly stern commands.
In reality, there were no shocks, the cries of the learner (an actor) were taped, and
the commands came from a script.
The Science of Love
Are there provable methods we can use to become
more altruistic and compassionate? Can Buddhist
compassion practices be adapted for a secular society?
Barry Boyce reports on the growing number
of scientists and researchers who are studying
how to bring out the best in human nature.
Sixty-five percent of participants overcame their reluctance
and administered the maximum voltage. Commenting on the results,
Milgram concluded that when “asked to carry out actions
incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively
few people have the resources needed to resist authority.” The experiments
(which incidentally would not meet today’s standards
for ethical psychological testing) looked at moral fiber and conscience
in the way that most of Western psychology and neuroscience
has tended to: from the point of view of dysfunction, pathology,
and neurosis, with an eye perhaps to fixing what’s wrong.
Fifty years later a number of scientists and scholars are taking
a new approach. They are trying to understand the nature and
depth of our empathetic behavior toward other beings. A colleague
of Milgram’s—the renowned social psychologist Philip
Zimbardo—is updating the Milgram Experiments by using assessment
tools to measure people’s empathy, compassion, and
altruism, and then putting them in a situation requiring them to
buck authority in order to prevent harm to others. The study will
try to determine whether we can predict how readily someone is
willing to act heroically. If the measurements work, they can be
used to assess the effectiveness of training people to cultivate compassion.
That’s one of the main interests of the new group funding
the study: the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and
Education at Stanford University, known as CCARE.