Psychology is a discipline that studies (and applies) the way to improve the quality of the quality of personal and social life of people.
Just as Psychology (without adjectives) studies and helps the individual person, Social Psychology studies interpersonal relationships and is concerned that they are functional and positive in the sense of improving the well-being of all.
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We must not confuse Social Psychology with Sociology. Sociology studies the behavior of groups and organizations, while Social Psychology studies the behavior of the person within groups and organizations, as well as the interrelationships that are established and the modification, in a positive sense, both of behaviors such as interrelationships.
Some behaviors of people are very surprising, the collective, political or social alienation of people who do real atrocities and lose all rational reference to follow the "single thought" and the behavioral instructions dictated by this single thought, no matter how insane and criminal they may be..
What's more, the surprise caused by this type of insane behavior in the Nazi movements of the early 20th century prompted the development of Social Psychology: Why are we capable of displaying these behaviors? What do we need to know in order to be and act as human, rational and social persons and not as automatons at the service of "higher" interests?
Despite this development of Social Psychology, these fascist behaviors (authoritarian, aggressive and violent) continue to occur in the 21st century, many times on both sidewalks of the same road.
However, on many occasions, the people in the group are unaware of the psychosocial mechanisms, which trigger their own behaviors, while they are known to the group leaders, making it very easy to manipulate social behaviors.
What matters is that we all know these mechanisms to enjoy freedom of behavior (there is no responsibility without freedom) and avoid self-alienation and use.
Maslow, a humanistic psychologist, tells us the scale of human needs. Every time we have the needs of a certain level covered (starting from the basic vital ones) we tend to satisfy the needs of the immediate higher level, until we go up and cover the entire scale of human psychic needs.
Once the physiological needs, basically food and hydration, and safety (among others, not living on the street at the mercy of any dangerous unforeseen) have been covered, the person has the need for esteem, love and belonging to a group (we are social animals in need of affection). So much so that Solomon Asch's experiment is astonishing:
Can you tell which bar of the three on the right is equal to the one on the left??
It seems quite evident that it is number 2. But what would you say if you were in a waiting room waiting to do a hiring interview and in the same room the employees of the company were discussing it and said that it was number 1? Most experimental subjects prefer to be satisfied, according to the group, and respond the same: number 1.
More chilling than the above is this Stanley Milgram experiment. This need not to be rejected by the group makes us bend its authority to inhuman and sadistic extremes. Just look at the behavior of some Israeli soldiers towards Palestinian children, or the treatment of the Guantanamo guards to supposedly Taliban prisoners. Or, without going too far, the violent sadism with which some of the police here repress peaceful demonstrations in favor of the Environment or Social Justice.
Milgram's experiment consisted in that the experimental subject, according to the "norms" received from the laboratory authority, had to "punish" by means of an electric shock the errors made by a second supposedly experimental subject (actually a conspiracy to be able to do the first experiment) in an experiment to analyze your memory.
The first subject, at the controls of a behavioral punishment machine, had to apply an electric shock to the second subject every time he made a mistake in his answer. These shocks would be of increasing voltage for each mistake made, and ranged from a few volts to life-threatening shocks. All the experimental subjects accepted their work and increased the potential of the shock with each error of the conspiracy (they did not really receive any shock, but they did an important comedy of pain in each supposed one), and it could be seen how a significant percentage arrived to "give" potentially very serious shocks and no one, when he abandoned the experiment, went to help the punished subject.
Behavioral psychologists and pedagogues have known for a long time that punishments are useless and, in a very high percentage, they achieve the opposite effect to the one intended. What is effective to correct a behavioral problem is reasoning, conviction, humanistic reinforcement of the subject and the reinforcement of the desired alternative behavior.
In these times, both supranational political organizations and educational organizations there is a proliferation of counterproductive punishments. Either the authority that advocates them is ignorant or it is bad: It pretends totally different objectives from those it claims to pretend and for which it theoretically applies the punishments.
As Philip Zimbardo says (probably excerpted from another author) "In the history of mankind many more atrocities and atrocities have been committed in the name of obedience than in the name of rebellion".
But what makes us behave in such irrational ways? Is it the human nature of those who do it? Is it a genetic issue that determines authoritarian, sadistic, submissive, liars, ..., a determination from which they cannot free themselves?
Zimbardo's experiment proves not. We can all act from authoritarian, antisocial, unjust and sadistic insanity or from human and social responsibility. Everything is a question of the "side" where "the war" takes us. Many times, practically always, police and crime are two sides of the same coin and one and the other could be on the other side if the circumstances had led to it. "I am me and my circumstances", and the same could be said of the executioner and the victim or of the members of two confronted groups. What interests us here is to become aware of the fact and avoid being a slave to our circumstances and try to be, rather, the free conductor of them.
Philip Zimbardo and his collaborators did the experiment of the role of the prisoner and the incarcerated: They were working with a group of American university students. They randomly selected a group that had to act as prisoners in a jail and another that had to play the role of prisoners. They started the experiment, which was to last three weeks, in an old jail that was no longer used as such. Immediately the prisoners, who wore a uniform, dressed in aggressive symbols (high boots, wide belts with thick metal buckles, sunglasses, badges on the pitcher, large black sunglasses ... and they developed authoritarian, capricious, humiliating and aggressive attitudes towards his colleagues who played the role of prisoners. These, on the contrary, developed a radical drop in their self-esteem, depression and many psychosomatic symptoms. Things got so bad that Zimbardo and collaborators had to suspend the experiment before completing the first week of the three planned. After many years, when those students were already mature people, most of them parents, they cited them again: Both some and others still had behavioral and psychic consequences of the role of that experience.
The international psychological community has prohibited such experiments from being carried out. The problem is that our world experiences thousands of realities every day, so they are not experiments, but pure and hard reality..
What matters is to know these social psychological mechanisms so as not to fall with their traps neither as a victim of them nor as an irrational executioner, so as not to elect our leaders who use these strategies and to report, where appropriate, the cases that we are aware of..
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