On the television show The Bachelor, Rachel lies to her fellow contestants about last night's date. Over on The Amazing Race, Jonathan shoves his wife after she slows them down en route to the finish line. On The Apprentice, Maria attacks Wes, then Donald Trump fires them both.

In just a few years, more than 100 reality television shows have been striving to help contestants act like jerks, and audiences love it.

Sure, contestants sometimes form noble alliances, and the occasional romance blossoms, but the behavior that viewers talk about the next day at the watercooler invariably involves contestants behaving maliciously or embarrassing themselves by cracking under pressure. Although it's clear that participants are purposely placed in coercive situations, we nonetheless think we are seeing something real and noteworthy about the character and the psychology of fellow humans.


Perhaps that fascination explains why so many experiments in the field of psychology read like the premise for a reality TV series. Consider the most famous of all social psychology experiments, Stanley Milgram's "Behavioral Study of Obedience," published in 1963. After answering a newspaper ad, volunteers (all men) arrive at a Yale University laboratory, where a man in a gray lab coat asks for help in a "learning experiment." The subject is instructed to administer a shock to a stranger in an adjoining room when the stranger answers a question incorrectly. The shocks are mild at first, but after each wrong answer the experimenter asks the subject to deliver a stronger voltage. The cries from the stranger in the other room grow more agonized as the shock is increased in 15-volt increments. (The shocks aren't real; the "stranger" is merely acting.) If the subject hesitates, the man in the lab coat says sternly, "Please continue." If the subject still balks, he is first told, "The experiment requires that you go on," then, "It is absolutely essential that you continue," and then, "You have no other choice, you must go on."

By the time the subjects deliver what they believe to be a "very strong shock," some are sweating, trembling, stuttering, or biting their lips. In the most interesting reaction, which would have made for great television, some of the subjects experience uncontrollable fits of nervous laughter. One 46-year-old encyclopedia salesman is so overcome by a seizure of laughter that the experiment has to be stopped to allow him to recover.

What drew attention to Milgram's paper was his report that most of the randomly selected men were coaxed into hitting a switch labeled "Danger: Severe Shock," administering a supposed 420-volt zap. Milgram was surprised that although "subjects have learned from childhood that it is a fundamental breach of moral conduct to hurt another person against his will," most were willing to do so.

Milgram was inspired to figure out why prison guards at World War II Nazi death camps willingly followed horrifying orders. That question still rings out today, not only on TV shows like Survivor or The Apprentice but also on the network news, as corporate executives steal millions, terrorists behead innocents, and prison-camp guards in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cuba mistreat inmates. We are fascinated, troubled, and desperate to know how human behavior can go so wrong, fearful that we, too, might behave badly in a similar situation.

For more than a century, psychologists have attempted to get to the root of evil and error. What they have discovered is not encouraging. Milgram and earlier researchers demonstrated that the ability to act rationally can be subverted by crowds or by pressure from authority figures. Recent studies show that humans, even when left alone, are prone to bewildering mistakes and biases.

"Basically, the job of the social psychologist has been to demonstrate how people screw up," says Joachim Krueger, associate professor of psychology at Brown University. By night, he has been mesmerized by both Survivor and, more recently, by the naked ambition and displays of status on The Apprentice. By day, however, he has become convinced that misconduct is only half the story. Evil and error, he argues, cannot be grasped without first understanding why humans often do the right thing. If he is correct, the first century of social psychology study may one day be likened to the early days of medicine, when doctors sought cures for diseases by practicing procedures like trepanning without any true inkling of how the body functions.

Recently, Krueger and a colleague, David Funder at the University of California at Riverside, published a paper calling for a reorientation of the field. Without a greater effort to examine how humans do things well, they argue, a "distorted view" emerges that "yields a cynical outlook on human nature." Another researcher summarized their argument this way: Krueger and Funder are asking researchers to abandon the "people are stupid school of social psychology."

Krueger is tall and soft-spoken, his voice accented by his native German. His cinder-block office is neat and unadorned. One afternoon, to explain why social psychology became so obsessed with human errors and why that obsession may itself be in error, Krueger began pulling books off his shelves, offering a trip through the history of this science.