The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.
- John Milton
I've been reading Philip Zimbardo's book called
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. It's a fascinating read that deals with two very interesting issues: 1) the details of the Stanford Prison Experiment, which is, and will always be, one of the craziest psychological experiments ever performed and 2) asks provocative questions about how humans reconcile their need to be socially active against the constraints of their environment.
The book does not directly tackle the issue of roleplay as a leisure activity. However, the findings (and premise) of the book is built directly from a roleplay exercise. The book helps explain some basic psychological problems that occur when someone either roleplays too much or a novice engages in roleplay without properly preparing themselves for the experience:
1. Learned Helplessness
"Experiencing a loss of personal identity and subjected to arbitrary continual control of their behavior, as well as being deprived of privacy and sleep, generated in them a syndrome of passivity, dependency and depression that resembled what has been termed 'learned helplessness.' (Learned helplessness is the experience of passive resignation and depression following recurring failure or punishment, especially when it seems arbitrary and not contingent on one's actions.)."
This symptom is extremely prevalent in women (and men) who choose to play submissive roles in a roleplay environment. The concept of the kajira/kajirus plays to these characteristics: the kajira is not considered human (given the status of a beast) and her actions are subject to the control of her Master (which is generally arbitrary unless he lays out his mode of thinking or the kajira is very good at recognizing patterns in actions). Moreover, roleplay is a highly addicting activity, which if consumed in large doses, affects real life sleep patterns and encourages a lethargic and sedentary lifestyle (which increases depression).
It's important to note that learned helplessness is not a problem per se. However, it does create a general feeling of depression (people who log into SL and play their role out of obligation instead of pure joy) and that insecurity manifests itself in their real life. THAT is the problem. The kajira, in an effort to solve her in-character depression, plays more and more SL, which in turn makes her more depressed in real life, which in turns causes her character to become more depressed. It's a vicious cycle that can have devastating consequences.
2. Overestimation Bias
"We want to believe in the essential, unchanging of goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and rational faculties that make us both just and wise. We simplify the complexity of human experience by erecting a seemingly impermeable boundary between Good and Evil. On one side are us, Our Kin and Our Kind; on the other side of that line we cast Them, Their Different Kin, and Other Kind. Paradoxically, by creating this myth of our invulnerability to situational forces, we set ourselves up for a fall by not being sufficiently vigilant to situational forces."
People, when complaining about problems, love to create a dichotomy in their lives: everyone who they like is a good, smart person and everyone else is an idiot. This simplistic approach in sorting people makes life easier and simultaneously difficult. It's easy because you can sort people quickly and efficiently into piles so you can decide who to interact with and who to exclude. The problem is maintaining the standards and rules to create the piles. Eventually, someone comes along the way who is "good" but fits all the characteristics of an idiot. The mind is then forced to bend, stretch and challenge those preconceived notions in order to maintain the easy, simple life.
As the quote points out, people are pretty reluctant to rationally evaluate these inconsistencies. It is much easier to conceive of a simple world than acknowledge that choices are actually pretty difficult and people can change their behavior. Eventually, these unbending standards whittle down the pile of "good people" into only a few and then it's impossible to maintain a thriving roleplay community anymore. The good people hang around if there's roleplay, and there's only roleplay if there are enough people. It also doesn't occur to anyone that they might, in fact, not be that good in their roleplay.
3. Internalization
"Typically, roles are tied to specific situations, jobs, and functions, such as being a professor, doorman, cab driver, minister, social worker, or porn actor. They are enacted when one is in that situation- at home, school, church, or factory, or onstage. Roles can usually be set aside when one returns to his or her "normal" other life. Yet some roles are insidious, are not just scripts that we enact from only time to time; they can become who we are most of the time. The are internalized even as we initially acknowledge them as artificial, temporary, and situationally bound. We become father, mother, son, daughter, neighbor, boss, worker, helper, healer, whore, soldier, beggar man, thief and many more.
To complicate matters further, we all must play multiple roles, some conflicting, some that may challenge our basic values and beliefs. As in the SPE, what starts out as 'just playing a role' caveat to distinguish it from the real individual can have a profound impact when the role behavior gets rewarded. The 'class clown' gets attention he can't get from displaying special academic talents but then is never again taken seriously. Even shyness can be a role initially enacted to avoid awkward social encounters, a situational awkwardness, and when practiced enough the role morphs into a shy person.
This is a supremely difficult concept in SL Gor, because so many people self-identify with the Gorean lifestyle. The problem is that there are similarities between ANY role and a person's life. While someone may feel a strong connection with Tarl Cabot, if someone looked hard enough, they could also find a connection with Hannibal Lector (perhaps not as strong as the one with Cabot), Huck Finn, Tyler Durden, Bambi, or any other fictional being.
However, when people find a strong connection with a particular character, they not only internalize the similar parts, they also internalize the dissimilar parts. Thus, the person's personality and mannerisms change significantly and dramatically. This has two consequences: a) the person's behavior skews extremely to one direction, making them emotionally imbalanced and psychologically disturbed (i.e., self-identified submissives are rewarded for complacent behavior, which they internalize into their normal lives and thus fail to be assertive in real life when the situation calls for it), and b) a person becomes frustrated with the inability to fully internalize a role when confronted with impracticalities (for example in Gor, a kajira cannot lie to her Master because she is overwhelmed by his dominance; in reality, anyone can lie to another person at any time for any reason).
4. Compartmentalization
Just as discomfiting, people can do terrible things when they allow the role they play to have rigid boundaries that circumscribe what is appropriate, expected, and reinforced in a given setting. Such rigidity in the role shuts off the traditional morality and values that govern their lives when they are in 'normal mode.' The ego-defense mechanism of compartmentalization allows us to mentally bind conflicting aspects of our beliefs and experiences into separate chambers that prevent interpretation or cross talk. A good husband can then be a guiltless adulterer; a saintly priest can then be a lifelong pederast; a kindly farmer can then be a heartless slave master. We need to appreciate the power that role-playing can have in shaping our perspectives, for better as well as for worse, as when adopting the teacher or nurse role translates into a life of sacrifice for the good of one's students and patients."
Where internalization forces these compartments to blend together, the brain allows the compartments to remain separate by creating justifications and rationales as to why two conflicting points of view can actually be consistent. When a kajira stands up to her Master and refuses to obey an order, she ceases to be a kajira. Instead, she falls out of the kajira compartment and falls into another one like "disney" or "princess" or "imposter." People would rather believe that a kajira is good all the time, rather than allow a kajira to have a full range of emotions.
Thus, if we allow extremely constricting labels to be placed on our roles, then it's much easier to exclude and belittle people that fall outside those boundaries. At the same time, those boundaries also severely retard having a good roleplay experience because those labels force us to adopt roles that are unnatural.
5. Repression
"In institutional settings, the expression of human emotions is contained to the extent that they represent impulsive, often unpredictable individual reactions when uniformity of mass reactions is the expected norm...Emotions are essential to humanness. Holding emotions in check is essential in prisons because emotions are a sign of weakness that reveal one's vulnerability to both the guards and to other prisoners."
When people are presented with stunted categories, they get frustrated because they are not allowed a wide range of actions in order to develop their character. That frustration creates a whole bunch of emotions (many described above). The problem with roleplay in a structured environment is that there's no outlet for this frustration. People are only allowed to roleplay in that limited capacity...and that's it. So what do people do with these emotions? The only release valve is to explode on other players in an out-of-character manner. This encourages roleplayers to be excessively critical, and negative with little patience or overall social skills.
6. Equilibrium
"The fundamental human need to belong comes from the desire to associate with others, to cooperate, to accept group norms. However, the SPE shows that the need to belong can also be perverted into excessive conformity, compliance, and in-group versus out-group hostility. The need for autonomy and control, the central forces toward self-direction and planning, can be perverted into an excessive exercise of power to dominate others or into learned helplessness. Consider three more such needs that can cut both ways. First, needs for consistency and rationality give meaningful and wise direction to our lives. Yet, dissonant commitments force us to honor and rationalize wrong-headed decisions, such as prisoners remaining they should have quit and guards justifying their abuse. Second, needs to know and to understand our environment and our relationship to it lead to curiosity, scientific discovery, philosophy, the humanities, and art. But a capricious, arbitrary environment that does make sense can pervert those basic needs and lead to frustration and self-isolation...And finally, our need for stimulation triggers explorations and adventurous risk taking, but it can also make us vulnerable to boredom when we are placed in static setting. Boredom, in turn, can become a powerful motivator of actions as we saw with the SPE night shift guards to have fun with their 'playthings.'"
If the general roleplay community forces people to be individually unhappy for the greater good of consistency, the individual human brain is even more tormenting. When faced with a severe disruption, the brain tries to direct the individual into making decisions to restore equilibrium. Invariably, because the person is faced with a tilted playing field, the decisions he/she makes are equally slanted...going the other way. This means that the actions that a person deems to be proper in the situation are usually sadistic, unrealistic and/or absurd. In Gor, for example, Masters discipline their slaves extremely harshly and more often than is necessary...because they feel an overwhelming pressure to appear dominant all the time.
The unintended consequence of this action is that it creates a larger cyclical descent into chaos. A person that tries to act responsibly by bringing in some level of normalcy actually creates a
more unrealistic and absurd environment...which prompts a larger need to counterbalance and keeps pushing the roleplay farther and farther away from its ideal. Look at the two stereotypical Gorean sims: on the one end, you have sims that skew to extreme, sadistic violence (excessive capture roleplay where captive are put onto the cross and whipped, beaten and stabbed into obedience) and then you have sims that feature a polite Victorian society (people standing around, offering warm greetings, idle chit chat where the men fiercely protect their women and all the women act politely and subserviently). Given enough time and without any intervention, every sim will trend towards one of these extremes. To be clear, that's not because the players are inherently idiots; it's the nature of the construct.
7. Blamelessness
"People are motivated to generate explanations when they perceive that some expectation about their functioning is violated. They try to make sense of what went wrong when they fail in academic, social, business, athletic, or sexual situations- depending on how important such a discrepancy is to their self-integrity. The rational search process for meaning is distorted by cognitive biases that focus attention on classes of explanation that are not appropriate in the current analysis. Thus, overusing explanations that focus on 'people' as the causes of one's reactions may bias the search for meaning toward developing symptoms characteristic of paranoid thinking. Similarly, explanations focused on 'environments' as the causes of one's reactions may bias the search toward symptom development typical of phobic thinking."
The point has been discussed previously but one consequence of compartmentalization is the lack of personal responsibility. When the problem has to do with "others," there can be no solution because the individual is not an "other" and, as a consequence, has no influence in within the "other" group to promote change.
The reality is that there's no such thing as an environment in roleplay. Roleplay is how a person reacts to his or her environment. If there is something wrong with a roleplay situation, an individual ALWAYS has an ability to solve the problem. Sometimes, the problem is simply withdrawing from roleplay; other times, it's engaging the individual in positive ways to influence their actions in a more productive manner. After all, there's no way to promote global change since...there's no global environment in the roleplay world. The roleplay world only exists as far as the roleplayer's mind goes. However, the buildup of frustration and helplessness allow an individual to pass on all responsibility to another party because the problem is "larger" than themselves.
8. Impulsiveness
"Let's assume that the 'good' side of people is the rationality, order, coherence, and wisdom of Apollo, while the 'bad' side is the chaos, disorganization, irrationality, and libidinous core of Dionysus. The Apollonian central trait is constraint and the inhibition of desire; it is pitted against the Dinoysian trait of uninhibited release and lust. People can become evil when they are enmeshed in situations were the cognitive controls that usually guide their behavior in socially desirable and personally acceptable ways are blocked, suspended, or distorted. The suspension of cognitive control has multiple consequences, among them the suspension of: conscience, self-awareness, sense of personal responsibility, obligation, commitment, liability, morality, guilt, shame, fear, and analysis of one's actions in cost-benefit calculations. The two general strategies for accomplishing this transformation are: (a) reducing the cues of social accountability of the actor (no one knows who I am or cares to) and (b) reducing concern for self-evaluation by the actor. The first cuts out concern for social evaluation, for social approval, doing so by making the actor feel anonymous- the process of deindividuation. It is effective when one is functioning in an environment that conveys anonymity and diffuses personal responsibility. The second strategy stops self-monitoring and consistency monitoring by relying on tactics that alter one's state of consciousness. This is accomplished by means of taking alcohol or drugs, arousing strong emotions, engaging in hyperintense actions, getting into an expanded present-time orientation where there is no concern for past or future, and projecting responsibility outward onto others rather than inward toward oneself. Deindividuation creates a unique pyschological state in which behavior comes under the control of immediate situational demands and biological, hormonal urges. Action replaces thought, seeking immediate pleasure dominates delaying gratification, and mindfully restrained decisions give way to mindless emotional responses. A state of arousal is often both a precursor to and a consequence of deindividuation. Its effects are amplified in novel or unstructured situations where typical response habits and character traits are nullified. One's vulnerability to social models and situational cues is heightened; therefore, it becomes as easy to make love as to make war- it all depends on what the situation demands or elicits. In the extreme, there is no sense of right and wrong, no thoughts of culpability for illegal acts or Hell for immoral ones. With inner restraints suspended, behavior is totally under external situational control; outer dominates inner. What is possible and available dominates what is right and just. The moral compass of individuals and groups has then lost its polarity. The transition from Apollonian to Dionysian mentalities can be swift and unexpected, making good people do bad things, as they live temporarily in the expanded present moment without concerns for the future consequences of their actions. Usual constraints on cruelty and libidinal impulses melt away in the excesses of deindividuation. It is as if there were a short circuit in the brain, cutting off the frontal cortex's planning and decision-making functions, while the more primitive portions of the brain's limbic system, especially its emotion and aggression center in the amygdala, take over."
The final point: the farther a person descends on this cycle of frustration and depression, the more he/she becomes impulsive and irrational. They lash out more, their decisions don't make sense in the context, and whenever they do act, the actions are more extreme. Basically, a person becomes overly emotional.
It's pretty clear that these 8 points aren't distinct from one another. Many overlap. However, it's very revealing to see that these problems occur again and again in a roleplay environment and many people either don't recognize it...or misdiagnose the problem altogether. Sometime in the near future, I'll post Zimbardo's solutions to some of these problems.
Posts
