The Fear Factor Read online

  Cory Booker, his burned hand wrapped in bandages, grimaces in response to a reporter’s question characterizing him as a “superhero,” while Detective Rodriguez looks on. © NBC Universal

  Social media exploded with admiration for the mayor. On Twitter, he was painted as a stereotypical stoic superhero, incapable of fear:

  When Chuck Norris has nightmares, Cory Booker turns on the light & sits with him until he falls back asleep.

  Cory Booker isn’t afraid of the dark. The dark is afraid of Cory Booker.

  Were these accurate reflections of Booker’s experience? Hardly. In all of the interviews he gave about the rescue, Booker was blunt about what he had actually been feeling at the time:

  “It was a really frightening experience for me.”

  “When you hear somebody calling for help and you’re staring at a room engulfed in flames, it’s very, very terrifying. You know, people say bravery, I felt fear.”

  “Honestly it was terrifying and to look back and see nothing but flames and to look in front of you and see nothing but blackness.”

  “I did not feel bravery, I felt terror. It was a very scary moment.… It looked like I couldn’t get back through where I came from.”

  “When I saw how bad those flames were and felt that heat… it was a very, very scary situation.”

  Frightening. Terror. Terrifying. Fear. Scary. Very, very scary. Booker could not have been clearer. In a terrifying situation, even someone who acts heroically feels terrified. Forget the movies, forget the stereotypes, forget the Twitter plaudits, and fight the urge to typecast: what distinguishes heroes from other people is not how they feel, but what they do—they move toward the source of the terror, rather than away from it, because somebody needs their help.

  On the surface this doesn’t seem like a big leap in understanding. But as it turns out, it’s an enormous one.

  2

  HEROES AND ANTIHEROES

  HEROISM AND ANTIHEROISM both ultimately boil down to suffering. What is heroism except relieving or preventing someone else’s suffering? What is villainy except causing it? What this means, unfortunately, is that gaining a better understanding of the roots of goodness and evil, compassion and callousness, requires that somebody suffer. I found this out the hard way—hard as a fist, hard as a slab of concrete—midway through my first year of graduate school, when I was violently assaulted by a stranger. The incident served as a bizarre counterpoint to having been rescued by a stranger. I’m not exactly glad it happened, but it undoubtedly gave me a more complete understanding of the human capacity for callousness and cruelty.

  It happened soon after the clock struck midnight on December 31, 1999—that giddy moment when the world realized it would not be ending in a massive global computer meltdown courtesy of the bug known as Y2K. I, along with several of my closest childhood friends from Tacoma, had convened to celebrate the event on the Las Vegas Strip. This was probably unwise. I knew that at the time. The Strip is a bit of a mess even on a quiet off-season night. On the New Year’s Eve that marked the dawn of a new millennium, “mess” doesn’t begin to describe what it was like. It was chaos, it was Mardi Gras on steroids, it was an endless sea of giddy, drunk, raucous humanity stretching for miles in every direction.

  My friends and I were six twenty-three-year-old women who collectively made a second unwise decision, which was that the theme of our night would be “sparkles.” Sparkly dresses, sparkly halter tops, sparkly makeup. Also, silly New Year’s–themed, glitter-caked cardboard hats and flashing-light sunglasses. We were shooting for glamorous and fell more than a little short. Luckily, Las Vegas standards are not high. When, at the beginning of the night, the six of us and all our sparkles poured out of the elevator and onto the floor of the casino hotel where we were staying, the whole floor burst into spontaneous applause. We heard people shouting, “Whooooo!” and thought we were the most spectacular things in town. It seemed an auspicious start to the evening.

  For most of the hours leading up to midnight, we had a ball. Everyone was in a great mood. Televisions in the casinos showed that the clocks had rolled over into 2000 in Australia, and the world had remained on its axis. No computer meltdowns, no shutdowns of city grids. All the people we met, most of whom were roaming around like us in large flocks of twenty-somethings, were ebullient. Buying each other drinks, stopping to pose for group pictures—not something people normally did back then either, when taking pictures required using an actual camera and waiting hours or days to see the results.

  But as the evening wore on and our sparkles faded, people’s manners started to fade as well. People—men, specifically—started getting grabby. At first it was just the occasional, seemingly errant brush of the hand. But as the hours and drinks piled up, it escalated to grabs and squeezes of breasts and backsides. By midnight, my friends in dresses could feel hands creeping up inside their skirts and down their tops when they stopped to take pictures. I was wearing leather pants and managed to escape some of that indignity, but I lost count of how many times strange men squeezed my ass.

  At first, honestly, it was all sort of funny. We were drinking and giddy just like everyone else. It seemed mostly harmless—there were lots of other people around, men and women both, and the Strip was brightly lit and lined with police officers. It never occurred to me that anything worse than a little silly grabbing would happen. Then I saw someone die.

  He was young, midtwenties at most. Maybe he was trying to get a better view of the Strip, or impress his friends, or maybe the night’s wild frissons just drove him to try something wild. Whatever the reason, he climbed up a metal traffic signal pole on the Strip and ventured out onto the arm that extended over the street. It was impossible to tell from below, but the wires that run through these arms are exposed. His hand made contact with one, and he tumbled, lifeless, to the pavement below. Even if the electric shock hadn’t killed him, the fall might have. I read later that he’d landed on his head. That night all I saw was a man up on the pole, and then, a fraction of a second later, he had fallen and the crowd around me was shouting incoherently. The news spread from group to group that the man on the pole was dead. We didn’t even know yet if it was true, but the night took on a newly sinister feel.

  Getting constantly grabbed rapidly went from funny to tiresome to infuriating. The evening’s alcohol was wearing off, and I was tired and my boots were giving me blisters. I remember muttering to myself as I hobbled along, “The next guy that grabs my ass…” I didn’t even have time to finish the thought before one did. I spun around and glared at him. He grinned proudly back. He was muscular and broad-faced with slicked-back and gelled blond hair. He was also very short. His face, his idiotically leering face, was almost level with my own. I don’t know if it was the leer or the gel or just that his grab was the last one I could tolerate, but I slapped him. Pretty hard too.

  I saw his grin falter, to be replaced with a flicker of annoyance, and before I had time to think or duck or even turn my head, his fist was hauling back and then smashing into my face with brutal force. The world went wavy and dim as my head snapped back and I crashed down onto the concrete, blood streaming from my broken nose. A murmuring crowd gathered around me. I felt dazed, and I couldn’t get the legs and feet around me to come into focus. It took a moment to figure out that the force of the blow had knocked out one of my contact lenses. My friend Heather rushed over. She cradled me as I struggled to gather myself, the blood from my nose trickling down my sparkly top and over her hand.

  As she was helping me to my feet, two police officers approached us. They were dragging a man between them—a man whose panicked face I’d never seen. They shook him by the shoulders.

  “Is this him?” one shouted. “Is this the guy who hit you?”

  His T-shirt was the wrong color. He was too tall. It definitely wasn’t him.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, “That’s not him.”

  They let him go, and he disappeared into the crowd. I fi
gured my assailant must have done the same. It would be impossible to find him in the swarming sea of people. We turned to leave, and I felt a tap on my shoulder. A woman with blazing eyes stood beside me. Her breath smelled of beer as she leaned in close and murmured in a low and satisfied voice, “I don’t know if you saw what happened. A bunch of guys saw that fucker hit you. They chased him down. He’s pretty much a smudge on the pavement now.”

  The whole incident left me newly tormented. It all seemed so bizarre that I would have been tempted to assume I had dreamed it, were it not for the black eyes blooming across my face the next morning and the fact that my nose was crooked and puffed up to three times its normal size.

  I had led a fortunate life in many ways. Intellectually, I knew that violence occurred. My hometown of Tacoma was a hotbed of gang activity throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and the local news was full of shootings and stabbings and muggings. More than one serial killer was picking off Tacoma residents during those years as well. But I had never personally been seriously harmed by anyone. The poet John Keats was correct in observing, “Nothing ever becomes real ’til it is experienced.” There really is no substitute for getting your own face smashed in to make you appreciate at a gut level that the world contains people who will actually hurt strangers to serve their own brutal purposes.

  My roadside rescuer had made me believe in the possibility of genuine altruism. But more than that, his actions had cast a wider glow over the rest of humanity, whose capacities for altruism were still untested. Perhaps, I’d thought, my rescuer was just one of a vast swath of people who were also capable of great compassion. But what happened to me in Las Vegas didn’t stay there. It followed me wherever I went, gnawing at me, whispering in my ear that perhaps I should reconsider my beliefs about human nature. Maybe my rescuer was an anomaly, and my attacker one of many. Who knew how many of the strangers I passed on the streets every day had the capacity to do what he had done? Every man I knew reassured me that under no circumstances would he ever punch a woman in the face, regardless of whether she had slapped him, regardless of how much he’d had to drink. But the fact remained that a whole mass of other strange men had rushed my attacker that night and brutally assaulted him next. Did the capacity for such violence lie latent in many or most people? I signed up for a self-defense class, just in case.

  My psychology studies offered me no comfort. Here I was at the university my Dartmouth professor Robert Kleck winkingly termed the “center of the intellectual universe,” immersed in the best that empirical research had to offer about the nature of human cognition and behavior, and most of it seemed to point to the same terrible conclusions as my Las Vegas encounter. I learned about the infamous case of Kitty Genovese, a Queens, New York, resident who had been brutally murdered on the street outside her apartment building as (so the story then went) thirty-eight witnesses watched silently, none calling for help. The results of follow-up psychology studies by Bibb Latané and John Darley seemed to confirm the reality of the apathetic bystander. I learned about Philip Zimbardo’s infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, during which a more or less random sample of Stanford University undergraduates were turned, practically overnight, into cruel and sadistic prison guards simply by donning the requisite role and uniform. So many studies seemed to convey the same message about humans’ terrible capacity for cruelty and callousness.

  Perhaps the most infamous of these studies—and also possibly the most important—were those conducted by one of Harvard’s most eminent PhD students and, later, psychology faculty alumni. Stanley Milgram’s research was so controversial it ultimately cost him his Harvard job and tenure. A psychologist of uncanny brilliance and prescience, Milgram is still ranked among the most influential psychologists of the last century (number 46, to be exact). Among his many claims to fame is that he conducted the research that proved “six degrees of separation” is a real thing. In 1963, Harvard hired Milgram away from Yale shortly after he’d concluded another series of studies that may represent the most notorious use ever of electric shocks in psychology research. Like every other psychology major in the world, I had learned as an undergraduate about these studies and the savage cruelty that they showcased.

  But also as nearly everyone does, including most psychologists, I initially drew entirely the wrong conclusions from them.

  In 1961, Milgram posted newspaper advertisements in New Haven and Bridgeport, Connecticut, inviting local men to volunteer for a study researching how punishment affects learning. When each volunteer arrived in Milgram’s Yale laboratory, he was led into a testing room by an angular, stern-looking experimenter in a lab coat. The experimenter introduced the volunteer to a stranger named Mr. Wallace, who, the experimenter explained, had been randomly selected to be the “learner” in the experiment. The volunteer had been selected to be the “teacher.” All the volunteer had to do was “teach” Mr. Wallace a long list of word pairs, like “slow-dance” and “rich-boy.” Simple enough.

  The experimenter showed the volunteer and Mr. Wallace to their seats, which were in adjoining rooms connected by an intercom. Mr. Wallace wouldn’t just be sitting, though—he would be tied down. Before the experiment began, and while the volunteer looked on, the experimenter bound both of Mr. Wallace’s forearms to the arms of his chair with long leather straps, ostensibly to “reduce movement.”

  One can only imagine what went through each volunteer’s mind at that point. Video footage shows them to be such a wholesome-looking bunch, in their dapper 1960s haircuts and collared shirts. Here they had volunteered for a Yale research study to help science and make a little money, and before they knew what was happening some mad scientist was tying a middle-aged stranger to a chair right in front of them.

  The volunteer and experimenter left the room and the experiment began. First the volunteer would read a long list of word pairs through the intercom to Mr. Wallace. Then he would go back to the beginning of the list and read out one word from each pair. Mr. Wallace would try to remember the other word. If he guessed right, they’d move on. If he guessed wrong, he was punished. The volunteer had been instructed to pull one of a long row of levers on a switchboard after each wrong answer. Each lever was marked with a different voltage level, ranging from 15 volts at the low end to a high of 450 volts. Pulling a lever completed a circuit within the switchboard and delivered an electrical shock of that voltage to Mr. Wallace’s tied-down arm.

  Nearly all the “teachers” went along with the experiment for a while. The experimenter reassured them early on that the shocks were “painful, but not harmful.” But as the study progressed and the teacher pulled lever after lever as wrong answers mounted up, the shocks grew stronger. Mr. Wallace started to grunt each time he got a shock, then to cry out in pain. He began complaining that his heart was bothering him. Eventually, the shocks drew long, ragged screams from him, and he bellowed through the wall, “Let me out of here! Let me out! LET ME OUT!”

  Then he fell silent.

  After that point, any teacher who elected to carry on could only grimly continue delivering shocks to Mr. Wallace’s unresponsive arm.

  Only nobody was expected to carry on that far. Before the study began, Milgram had polled a number of expert psychiatrists about what they predicted would happen. They overwhelmingly agreed that only a tiny fraction of the population—perhaps one-tenth of a percent—would continue administering shocks to a stranger who was complaining about his heart and screaming for mercy.

  The experts were overwhelmingly wrong. Fully half of Milgram’s volunteers continued administering shocks right through Mr. Wallace’s chest pain and screams and well past the point when he fell silent. No external reward motivated their behavior. They would keep their four dollars and fifty cents payment no matter what they did. The only thing urging them along—very mildly—was the experimenter. When a volunteer started to protest or asked that the experiment be stopped while someone checked on Mr. Wallace, the experimenter would reply, “The experiment requires
that you continue.” Calm prods like this were all it took to induce ordinary American men to subject an innocent stranger to terrible pain, grievous harm, and, as far as they knew, death. One volunteer later said he was so sure that he’d killed Mr. Wallace that he anxiously monitored the local obituaries for some time after the experiment.

  Of course Mr. Wallace didn’t die—nor did he actually receive any shocks. He wasn’t even named Mr. Wallace. He was part of the act, an amiable forty-seven-year-old New Haven accountant named Jim McDonough who had been hired and trained for the role of the study’s purported victim.

  Nor were the studies aimed at understanding learning. Milgram was really studying obedience to authority—specifically, whether ordinary people would commit acts of cruelty or brutality if told to do so by someone in authority. The research was inspired by the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who carried out some of the worst atrocities of the Holocaust. Captured in Argentina in 1960 by Israel’s Mossad intelligence forces and made to stand trial for his crimes, Eichmann’s defense was shocking. He claimed to feel no remorse for his actions, not because he was a heartless monster, but because he had simply been following the orders of those in authority. Later, pleading for his life in a handwritten letter to Israel president Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Eichmann protested, “There is a need to draw a line between the leaders responsible and the people like me forced to serve as mere instruments in the hands of the leaders… I was not a responsible leader, and as such do not feel myself guilty.” In essence, Eichmann was claiming that his superiors instructed him that the Final Solution required that he continue.

  The seated man is Jim McDonough, known to study participants as “Mr. Wallace.” They believed they were shocking him during Milgram’s studies of obedience to authority. At right is the experimenter, and at left is a volunteer who has just watched the experimenter strap Mr. Wallace’s arms to his chair.