Conformity In Arthur Miller's Are You Now Or Were You Ever

Morals are what distinguish humans from other animals. People are capable of understanding the complex network of emotions and relationships between each other and making choices that benefit themselves as well as others. However, the greatest phenomenon in human psychology is why people are also capable of doing bad things. We used to believe that some people are inherently bad. However, in recent history, the Zimbardo uncovered that in most cases, evil is "rarely . . . done by ‘bad apples' or rogues" (Aron). Philip Zimbardo's research reveals that good people are capable of doing bad things through conformity, blind obedience, and anonymity; these ideas can be proven by looking back at our history.
The social psychologist held a TED talk

where he explained his reasoning in why good people sometimes do bad things. First, Zimbardo referenced "the little shop of horrors, the dungeon, Tier 1A, the night shift," (Zimbardo) at Abu Ghraib. In a slideshow of horrifying pictures, the "naked terrified prisoners [were] being threatened with attack dogs or having guns pointed at their genitals by hideously masked guards" (Wargo), and although some think these soldiers must have been mentally ill or sadistic, Zimbardo believes that "the conditions would, in fact, have turned almost any young man into a torturer" (Aron). Zimbardo did not believe that "bad apples" were born with this horrible mindset, but "were transformed into perpetrators of evil by their situation," that they were in a "bad barrel" (Wargo).
Zimbardo hypothesized that individuals may act differently within a group than they would act by themselves. He believed that the notion that once one or a few people in the group start to do something particularly unauthorized, the rest find it acceptable to commit these otherwise heinous deeds. This idea can be seen in The Crucible by Arthur Miller. In the play, all of the town's young girls were caught "dancing like heathen in the forest" (The Crucible 10), and possibly "[calling] the Devil" (The Crucible 42). Why did every single one of them decide to do this? The answer is conformity. Once Abigail, the leader of the girls, joins Tituba in pleading to God after supposedly meeting the devil, many of her followers were peer pressured to follow suit. This is how even though each girl is a Puritan child of God, as a group, they decide to go dance in the woods. By "diffusing the responsibility" across a group, people don't feel "individually accountable" for their own actions; thus, a group of people can end up doing things that each individual "would never do" by themselves (Wargo).
Another example of people giving in to conformity is during the Red Scare of the 1950s.

Arthur Miller's Are You Now or Were You Ever? compares the effect of the Salem witch hunts that he wrote about in The Crucible to that of McCarthyism and the Red Scare. Similar to how everyone in Salem suspected their neighbor to be a witch, everyone was crazy about communists, and since "Paranoia breeds paranoia" (Are You Now?), people mistook the smallest actions for having an affiliation to the Reds. During this time, many of our beloved actors, writers, and stars had their careers tainted by a wild accusation of supporting communism, including Elia Kazan. Critics threatened that "if he refused to name people whom he had known in the party - actors, directors, and writers - he would never be allowed to direct another picture in Hollywood, meaning the end of his career" (Are You Now?). These examples highlight how, as a group, "seemingly ordinary, generally nice people" (Aron) could do

evil.
Zimbardo also used blind obedience to explain why ordinary people ended up doing bad things.

If some sort of authority figure is present, people are way more likely to listen to that voice, even if it leads them towards evil. An example of this concept is Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, where the townspeople of a village stone a person as part of an annual tradition. Even though "the original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago," and "some places have already quit lotteries" (Jackson 4), the village still participates in this dark tradition because their town elder, Old Man Warner, is trying to preserve it, and because of his title, most people in the village listen to him and carry on with the tradition. The townspeople are tricked by these traditions that are "hard to understand or remember" (Wargo), so they blindly follow their town elder, who they view as their beacon of

authority.
This tendency was also exposed in a real experiment conducted by Stanley Milgram, where subjects were instructed by a moderator to administer shocks, steadily increasing in voltage, to a student. The study found that "65% of very typical people will give electric shocks to someone in another room if they are told to do so," and some subjects even "will continue, even when the person they are shocking is screaming in agony, and then stops responding" (Aron), showing that ordinary people could be turned into obedient robots. This was very surprising, as professional psychologists predicted that only 1% of the subjects would obey fully. We tend to listen to others, especially when they seem more confident or more knowledgeable than ourselves. This obedience to a "legitimate-seeming authority figure" (Wargo) is what allows normal people to be led down an evil path.
Yet another conjecture that Zimbardo proposed was that the effect of anonymity has a huge impact on how people behave. The logic was that if no one knew who you were, they couldn't convict you of doing anything. In "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hester Prynne's husband assumes the identity of Roger Chillingworth. At the beginning of the story, Chillingworth has a creepy and devilish appearance. His look was "keen and penetrative" (Hawthorne 92) and he had a "smile of dark and self-relying intelligence" (Hawthorne 113). However, no one in the village suspected anything wrong; they only saw him as a kind, caring doctor taking care of a sick man. With this disguise, he is free to "burrow into the clergyman's intimacy, and plot against his soul" (Hawthorne 191) without revealing his true relationship with them to the public.
This effect can also be seen in Zimbardo's own Stanford Prison Experiment. During the experiment, the subjects were divided into guards and prisoners, "giving each group suitably depersonalizing attire" (Wargo). Guards were given fully reflecting sunglasses so the prisoners couldn't see their facial expressions. As a result, the guards were compelled to torture the prisoners ruthlessly and without hesitation. "Within 36 hours, the first normal, healthy student prisoner had a breakdown" (Zimbardo) because he couldn't endure the way the guards were treating them any longer. Zimbardo cited ancient cultures, where "warriors in cultures that donned masks or costumes before engaging in battle were significantly more likely to torture, mutilate, and kill their enemies" (Wargo). Disguises and uniforms help "[overcome] moral barriers to hurting another person" (Wargo), because of the way they conceal the face and identity of the individual.
Considering Zimbardo's theory on the emergence of evil, we can see that historically, normal people do extraordinarily bad things when they act as a group, obey an authority figure, or feel empowered by anonymity. However, it is still an individual's choice to do evil. As Zimbardo put it, "The line between good and evil lies at the center of every human heart" (Zimbardo). Everyone must fight the Devil within and prevent him from taking over our actions.