Evil by Roy F. Baumeister Ph.D

Author:Roy F. Baumeister, Ph.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2015-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

Why Do They Laugh?

Satan laughs when human beings suffer. By the same token, it is a standard pattern in movies and other entertainments to depict the villains laughing with pleasure at the pain and suffering of their victims. We have seen that reactions to hurting others often involve disgust, depression, and sympathy, which seem the very opposite of amused enjoyment. How can these views be reconciled?

The problem is all the more acute because victim reports do sometimes claim that their tormentors were laughing. For example, Mevludin Oric is a Muslim villager who accidentally survived a massacre by Serb soldiers in July 1995 when his cousin and best friend, who stood next to him, was shot and fell on top of him. Mevludin passed out from terror, lying soaked in his friend’s blood under the pile of corpses, and therefore the Serbs did not finish him off. He recalls the actions of the Serbian soldiers: “They were laughing like crazy men—they must have been on drugs, that’s all I can think.”14 He said that right up until they opened fire, he could not believe the soldiers would shoot him and his unarmed, innocent friends.

Undoubtedly, one major reason to emphasize the laughter is the myth of pure evil. Victims can quickly and effectively make their point about the evilness of their captors by reporting this laughter. (In Mevludin Oric’s account, the myth is also invoked in the seeming incomprehensibility of the action, as well as in his ascribing their wicked acts to the alien power of drugs.) Yet it would stretch credibility to suggest that victims entirely invented the notion that their captors were laughing. Presumably, there must be some truth to the matter. Does laughter prove the existence of evil sadism? And if not, why would people laugh in the presence of others who are suffering and dying?

My own conclusion is that laughter is not very conclusive proof of sadistic pleasure, although it is revealing of how the perpetrator is feeling. People may laugh for a variety of reasons. Indeed, humor is one defense against a shocking or disgusting task. Thus, for example, an important part of medical training is growing accustomed to seeing injured bodies, and medical students are renowned for pranks and jokes featuring body parts from cadavers, such as hiding a severed hand in a lunch box. Such humor helps to overcome the normal reactions of shock and disgust that a physician cannot afford.

Nor are these reactions confined to medical students. An experiment by Bella DePaulo and Matthew Ainsville videotaped people’s facial reactions to a series of slides, and one of the slides involved a repulsive photograph of an accident victim.15 Males often responded to the disgusting slide with a smile (although females hardly ever did). It was not a smile of pleasure, but rather one that suggested embarrassment and an effort to distance oneself from the shocked or offended reaction. Still, something similar may be at work among people who find themselves working in a place where torture or execution is occurring.

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