Written by Dr Anna Itkin, PhD

Inspired by: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/features/the-science-behind-why-good-people-do-bad-things 

The brilliant bystander: why smart people enable harm

As I was reading an article by Catherine A. Sanderson about her social psychology research on harmful behaviour, drawing on Milgram’s decades-old obedience experiments, it reminded me of a story.

When I was around eleven years old, there was a boy in my class. He wasn’t a strong student, or a “popular” one. He was a bit of a class clown – silly, awkward, and gentle. One day I came across a group of boys surrounding him. Some of those boys were calling him names, hitting him, mocking him. He was crying, covering his face with his hands.

These were not bad boys. Some of them were my friends. Good pupils from good families. And yet not one person in that school corridor stepped in. Not one.

I knew some of his background. His father drank. His mother was effectively raising him on her own. None of that made what was happening to him acceptable. I was never someone who stood on the side in view of injustice or cruelty. So, I walked over and told them he wasn’t to blame for his father’s choices, or for being different, and that every person deserves basic respect – something my own parents had taught me, in words and by example.

It wasn’t the first time I stood up for what I believed was right. It wouldn’t be the last. But what has always stayed with me, and genuinely puzzled me, is why so few others do, even when they clearly disagree with what is happening right in front of them.

The same puzzle, at a different scale

Reading Sanderson’s work brought that question back, now being relevant on a much larger scale.

Why do so many brilliant, talented, and fundamentally good people participate in, and thereby enable, business activities they know are causing harm? To the planet, to communities, to the people their decisions touch. Surprisingly, it’s not through ignorance, but with full awareness. And often with a private discomfort they won’t disclose.

The science offers some uncomfortable answers. Milgram’s research, replicated across cultures and decades, shows that people will cause significant harm to others simply because an authority figure asks them to. What is more troubling is that neurological studies show this is not merely a rationalisation we make afterwards. When people act under instruction, their brains process those actions less intensely than when they act freely. The moral abdication begins in the moment, not as an afterthought. 

In a large organisation, the authority figure is not a person in a white coat. It is deeply embedded in the structure: the hierarchy itself; the approved process; the legal sign-off; the quarterly target; and the quiet assumption that if something were truly wrong, surely someone more senior would have said so by now.

Brilliance without agency

The qualities that make someone valuable inside a complex organisation, such as analytical intelligence, systems thinking, and the ability to optimise – are exactly what make harm more efficient when those systems are misaligned with human or planetary wellbeing. Think about a brilliant lawyer who structures the collaboration more elegantly. Or a gifted data scientist who builds the targeting model more precisely. Or a skilled communicator who makes the misleading narrative more persuasive.

In the absence of active moral agency, intelligence doesn’t protect against harm. It enables it and scales it.

And the forces that suppress that agency are not trivial. Those who dare to challenge the direction of a strategy or a business model from within an organisation risk real things: belonging, reputation, the identity of being a team player, and even their job. The social norms inside institutions present themselves not as norms at all, but simply as how things are done. That invisibility is what makes them so powerful.

This is what I saw in that school corridor. The boys who joined in were partly following a social script. The ones who stood silently were doing the same. No one had decided to be cruel. The situation had quietly made cruelty the path of least resistance.

What I hear in the room

A few months ago I was working with a group of executives – capable, thoughtful people who cared, visibly, about doing the right thing. At some point in our work together, the conversation shifted. One by one, they began to describe the ethical tensions they were carrying. Some were current. Some had been sitting unresolved for a while.

What was striking was how visceral it was for them. The way their job definitions -what the role required, what was expected, what success was measured by – had shaped their perception of the decisions available to them. When what the role demanded and what their conscience demanded pulled in opposite directions, they described something that felt like a trap. Whatever they chose, something suffered. The organisation, or their integrity. The short term, or the long. Their career, or someone else’s wellbeing.

That is a double bind. And sitting inside one long enough, without the tools to step outside it, has a cost, not just professionally, but in how a person thinks about themselves. 

What I’ve found, and what I told them, is that the way out of a double bind is seldom through it. The choices that feel like A or B are usually constructed by a frame you haven’t yet examined. When you step back from the frame, other possibilities become visible. But that stepping back is a skill that requires intention and practice. And the more you build it, the more it changes not just individual decisions, but how you think about everything.

The question worth starting with

I found an important insight in Sanderson’s research: the people who successfully resisted in Milgram’s experiments tended to challenge the authority earlier, before the rationalisation had fully set in. What they had was a capacity to observe their own thinking in real time. To ask who is framing this situation, and how, before the frame became invisible. It is a practical skill, and an urgent one, for anyone who wants to shift systems in the direction the world needs.

For those of us who work within organisations, or lead them, or build them: that boy in the courtyard had people around him who felt uncomfortable. They just didn’t act on it. The discomfort, on its own, changes nothing.

What would shift in your decisions, your teams, your strategies, if you learned to trust that discomfort earlier, and ask yourself what it’s actually telling you?