“Blood-Cement”: Does Liking For and Compliance To Authority Increase After Killing?

It is a common observation that organizations of violence make use of moral transgression to bond new recruits to the group‘s authority figures and to encourage compliance to them. The present study drew on the work of Festinger (1957), Aronson and Mills (1959) and Martens, Kosloff, Greenberg, Landau and Schmader (2007) and, for the first time examined this observation empirically. It was hypothesized that when participants agreed to make a moral transgression for the experimenter that they would come to view him more positively, see him as more professional and become more compliant to him, and that this would happen even more when that choice to comply was made salient. Participants were asked to place a number of bugs into a modified coffee grinder that ostensibly exterminated the bugs and then to activate the device. No bugs were killed in any condition, but participants were either led to believe that they were killing the bugs or informed that it was just a simulation. Subsequent positivity in the perception of the experimenter and how professional he was considered to be was then measured by questionnaire and compliance to him was measured in an optional data-entry task. Results yielded partial support for the research hypotheses suggesting that at least under some circumstances, agreeing to make a personal moral transgression for an authority figure leads to increases in the positivity in the perception of that figure and compliance to him and that making that choice salient enhances this effect. The implications of this finding for the understanding of the processes by which a person can become bonded to unsavory authority-figures and potential applications to community education programs are discussed; as are the limitations of this study and possibilities for future research. ―Blood-Cement‖: Does Liking For and Compliance To Authority Increase After Killing? Introduction The Initiation of Individuals into Organizations of Violence. Organizations of violence such as gangs, militias and even state-sanctioned military forces can do incredible damage to the lives of individuals and the stability of their communities. Although many individuals actively seek membership in these groups for themselves (Vigil, 1996; Honwanna, 2006), regardless of whether a person makes a choice to join or is coerced, these group‘s processes of induction are explicitly intended to bond the person to them (van Gennep, 1960). A crucial step in this process of induction is the initiation itself. This usually requires the person to commit a moral transgression of some sort at the request of an established member; usually the perpetration of violence aimed at persons outside the group or the receipt of violence done to themselves at the group‘s hand (Best & Hutchinson, 1996). The present research aimed to investigate whether this kind of initiation can create or strengthen a bond between the initiate and the authority-figure that directs him or her; and if so, to examine how this might occur. The specific focus was on whether choosing to comply with an authority figure to engage in a morally-difficult act such as, killing, affects the positivity of the person‘s perception of that figure and their subsequent compliance to him. Such a choice would most-likely run against strong internalized norms that restrain unprovoked violence and proscribe the following of authority-figures that request it. For this reason, if a person freely makes the choice to act against these norms and comply with a request to kill, he or she may feel uncomfortable at having done so. Tension of this kind was referred to by Leon Festinger (1957) as cognitive dissonance. In this investigation, it was considered that one way that this uncomfortable state might be alleviated is through the person changing their perception of the authority-figure so that he is viewed as somebody worth following. Additionally, it was thought that a second way in which this dissonance might be reduced is by the person committing more to their chosen course of action and complying more with the authority-figure. This research is a direct extension of the work by Aronson and Mills (1959) who examined how the severity of an initiation into a group increases liking for it, and also of Martens, Kosloff, Greenberg, Landau and Schmader (2007) who examined how a level of initial killing at the request of an authority figure can lead to greater subsequent willful killing.