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anti-war
The Psychology of Resistance
What famous experiments really teach us about fighting authoritarianism today.
Jul 06, 2025
In my last article, I detailed how U.S. President Donald Trump misunderstands the fundamental truth about human nature. He projects his own transactional worldview onto all of us, imagining that we're all determined to step on others to rise. I pointed out that our true nature is represented by the millions who have taken to the streets to speak out against injustices, by people like Mahmoud Kahlil (finally free!), and the mothers and fathers facing deportation whose children cry out as masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials abduct them outside schools. Our fundamental nature is rooted in care for one another. We are not killers but carers.
But what do we do with that information? How does that help us resist what's happening now?
To answer this, I want to talk about psychology, my disciplinary home, and what we can learn from some foundational studies about manipulation, power, and resistance. If you've taken psychology in high school or college, you've likely learned about these three infamous experiments: Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, Sherif's Robber's Cave Experiment, and Milgram's shock experiments.
If evil is inevitable, then resistance is pointless.
The rudimentary takeaway from each might sound like this: Ordinary people will do extraordinarily evil things in certain circumstances. This conclusion reinforces a cynical view of humanity that is both lazy and tragically disempowering.
Cynicism about human nature, fueled by the findings from these experiments, is lazy because it stops us from asking harder questions about systems, power, and how change actually happens. If we're all monsters deep down, then there's no point in organizing, no point in building better institutions, no point in fighting for justice. We can just shrug our shoulders and say, "Well, I guess this is who we are," and watch each other burn.
This kind of fatalism is exactly what those in power want. It lets us all off the hook, we don't have to show up for each other, we don't have to do the difficult work of dismantling harmful systems and speaking truth to power, we don't have to take responsibility for preventing the continuation of harm. If evil is inevitable, then resistance is pointless.
The cynical view, supported by the "findings" of these experiments, is dangerous propaganda that serves authoritarians.
What Really Happened in Zimbardo's, Sherif's, and Milgram's Experiments
Let's first correct the record on each of these studies, because the actual truth reveals something very different about human nature and gives us a roadmap for resistance.
Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment supposedly showed that people become sadistic when given power over others. In 1971, Zimbardo recreated a prison environment in Stanford's basement, paying students to act as guards or prisoners. It quickly devolved into what appeared to be guards relishing their role as violent dominators, torturing and abusing the "prisoners." Zimbardo, who had given himself the role of the warden, allowed it all to happen and instigated much of it.
Zimbardo, Sherif, and Milgram all built their careers on lies about human nature that serve authoritarians.
While the narrative pushed by Zimbardo, that good people will become evil in certain roles, made him famous, the truth revealed by the experiment is that we will try our best to meet the parameters of an assignment that are articulated to us. The students were acting because they wanted to make Zimbardo happy. They weren't revealing some dark truth about human nature; they were trying to be good research participants, following what they thought were the experimenter's expectations.
Sherif's Robber's Cave Experiment claimed to show how easily children form hostile groups. Sherif brought boys to summer camp and arbitrarily organized them into two teams with the exciting names of the Rattlers and the Eagles. The story, according to Sherif, goes that they quickly degenerated into "wicked, disturbed, and vicious bunches of youngsters," burning flags, raiding camps, and inventing weapons made of socks and rocks.
When psychologist Gina Perry dug into the archives, she found that this was a manufactured narrative with the boys actually wanting to be friends with each other. To get the outcome Sherif wanted to report, the one that could make him famous, he had to manipulate everything, rigging games, tearing down tents themselves and blaming the other group, stopping the boys when they tried to make peace symbols for their T-shirts. When the boys figured out they were being manipulated, the experiment collapsed.
Milgram's shock experiments supposedly proved that 65% of people will follow evil orders, delivering potentially fatal electric shocks to strangers when told to do so by an authority figure. For decades, this has been cited as proof that we're all potential Nazis, just waiting for the right circumstances.
But when researchers finally got access to Milgram's archives, they discovered he was more director than scientist. Anyone who deviated from his script was bullied and coerced. The man in the lab coat would make eight or nine attempts to force people to continue, even coming to blows with participants who tried to stop.
Not only that but a large percentage (44%) of the participants didn't believe the study to be real, they didn't actually think they were delivering real shocks. Among those who did believe the shocks were real, the majority refused to continue.
So how did Milgram get his results? Psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher discovered that participants weren't submitting to authority; instead they were trying to help with what they believed was important scientific research. When told their contribution would benefit science, participants expressed relief: "I am happy to have been of service" and "Continue your experiments by all means as long as good can come of them." It turns out people weren't mindlessly obedient. People were being tricked into thinking they were doing good.
The Real Lessons: How to Resist
What can we learn from these manipulated experiments? The true lesson isn't about human evil, it's about how some people will do anything to establish fame and power for themselves. Zimbardo, Sherif, and Milgram all built their careers on lies about human nature that serve authoritarians.
But buried in their own data is the real story of resistance. When researchers analyzed who successfully resisted in Milgram's experiments, they found three key tactics:
- Talk to the victim—Connect with those being harmed;
- Remind those in power of their responsibility—Hold leaders accountable; and
- Repeatedly refuse to continue–Don't give up after the first "no."
We can develop these capacities through practice and education. This is one reason we must fiercely protect our universities; they are critical sites where communication skills, critical thinking, and moral courage can be cultivated. It is not surprising that college students are often on the frontlines of fighting for justice, from the civil rights movement to anti-war protests to today's demonstrations for Palestinian liberation and immigrant rights. It's why being in community and knowing our neighbors is a necessary strategy of survival and resistance. It's evidence that calling our representatives and holding them accountable actually matters. We can resist questionable authority just as those participants in Milgram's studies who refused to continue did. And we can get better at it.
Why This Matters in Trump's America
My discipline of psychology has repeatedly told us lies that benefit men seeking power. As I shared in my previous article, Trump is exploiting a myth about us being fundamentally evil because it serves him to have us believing that, even though we are actually wired toward care. When we find ourselves in situations where we're asked to dehumanize someone, to cause someone harm, we now know what to do. When psychologists peeked into the actual archives of these famous experiments, that was the truth that was revealed.
As Trump's administration invents cruel ways to tear apart our communities, as they bomb Iran to distract us from domestic cruelties, as they tell us that entire populations are threats to justify dragging us into wars, we must remember the true lessons of these experiments. Powerful men will mislead us and try to convince us to act against our nature. Elon Musk and others who hoard wealth and power tell us that empathy is weakness, that caring is "civilizational suicide," that we must choose between compassion and survival. But the protesters and a few brave lawmakers standing between ICE agents and families know better. They understand what those manipulated experiments actually prove: that our instinct is to refuse to cause harm, to protect each other, to resist when asked to participate in cruelty.
Taking a lesson from the real truth behind these experiments, we must always reach out to those who are being hurt, know them, see them as fully human, refuse to let anyone talk us into dehumanizing our fellow community members. We must relentlessly remind those in power of their responsibility to the collective good. And we must refuse, refuse, refuse to be complicit in systems of harm, no matter how they're justified to us.
Now is the time to reach out to our trans community members under attack. Now is the time to create mutual aid networks and join ICE watches in our communities. Now is the time to call our senators and refuse to let this country be dragged into war with Iran. Now is the time to refuse to give up our democracy, to refuse to turn on our immigrant community members, to hold on tight to our LGBTQ beloveds. Keep protesting. Keep refusing. Keep holding on to one another. Keep being true to our human nature.
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How the Vietnam and Gaza Wars Shattered Young Illusions About US Leaders
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington.
Apr 30, 2025
Eight years before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed, I stood with high school friends at Manhattan’s Penn Station on the night of April 15, 1967, waiting for a train back to Washington after attending the era’s largest anti-war protest so far. An early edition of the next day’s New York Times arrived on newsstands with a big headline at the top of the front page that said “100,000 Rally at U.N. Against Vietnam War.” I heard someone say, “Johnson will have to listen to us now.”
But President Lyndon Johnson dashed the hopes of those who marched from Central Park to the United Nations that day (with an actual turnout later estimated at 400,000). He kept escalating the war in Vietnam, while secretly also bombing Laos and Cambodia.
During the years that followed, anti-war demonstrations grew in thousands of communities across the United States. The decentralized Moratorium Day events on October 15, 1969 drew upward of 2 million people. But all forms of protest fell on deaf official ears. A song by the folksinger Donovan, recorded midway through the decade, became more accurate and powerful with each passing year: “The War Drags On.”
By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
As the war continued, so did the fading of trust in the wisdom and morality of Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon. Gallup polls gauged the steep credibility drop. In 1965, just 24% of Americans said involvement in the Vietnam War had been a mistake. By the spring of 1971, the figure was 61%.
The number of U.S. troops in Vietnam gradually diminished from the peak of 536,100 in 1968, but ground operations and massive U.S. bombing persisted until the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in late January 1973. American forces withdrew from Vietnam, but the war went on with U.S. support for 27 more months, until—on April 30, 1975—the final helicopter liftoff from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon signaled that the Vietnam War was indeed over.
By then, most Americans were majorly disillusioned. Optimism that public opinion would sway their government’s leaders on matters of war and peace had been steadily crushed while carnage in Southeast Asia continued. To many citizens, democracy had failed—and the failure seemed especially acute to students, whose views on the war had evolved way ahead of overall opinion.
At the end of the 1960s, Gallup found “significantly more opposition to President Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policies” among students at public and private colleges than in “a parallel survey of the U.S. general public: 44% vs. 25%, respectively.” The same poll “showed 69% of students in favor of slowing down or halting the fighting in Vietnam, while only 20% favored escalation. This was a sharp change from 1967, when more students favored escalation (49%) than deescalation (35%).”
Six decades later, it took much less time for young Americans to turn decisively against their government’s key role of arming Israel’s war on Gaza. By a wide margin, continuous huge shipments of weapons to the Israeli military swiftly convinced most young adults that the U.S. government was complicit in a relentless siege taking the lives of Palestinian civilians on a large scale.
A CBS News/YouGov poll in June 2024 found that Americans opposed sending “weapons and supplies to Israel” by 61-39%. Opposition to the arms shipments was even higher among young people. For adults under age 30, the ratio was 77-23.
Emerging generations learned that moral concerns about their country’s engagement in faraway wars meant little to policymakers in Washington. No civics textbook could prepare students for the realities of power that kept the nation’s war machine on a rampage, taking several million lives in Southeast Asia or supplying weapons making possible genocide in Gaza.
For vast numbers of Americans, disproportionately young, the monstrous warfare overseen by Presidents Johnson and Nixon caused the scales to fall from their eyes about the character of U.S. leadership. And like President Donald Trump now, President Joe Biden showed that nice-sounding rhetoric could serve as a tidy cover story for choosing to enable nonstop horrors without letup.
No campaign-trail platitudes about caring and joy could make up for a lack of decency. By remaining faithful to the war policies of the president they served, while discounting the opinions of young voters, two Democratic vice presidents—Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris—damaged their efforts to win the White House.
A pair of exchanges on network television, 56 years apart, are eerily similar.
In August 1968, appearing on the NBC program “Meet the Press,” Humphrey was asked, “On what points, if any, do you disagree with the Vietnam policies of President Johnson?”
“I think that the policies that the president has pursued are basically sound,” Humphrey replied.
In October 2024, appearing on the ABC program “The View,” Harris was asked: “Would you have done something differently than President Biden during the past four years?”
“There is not a thing that comes to mind,” Harris replied.
Young people’s votes for Harris last fall were just 54%, compared with 60% that they provided to Biden four years earlier.
Many young eyes recognized the war policy positions of Hubert Humphrey and Kamala Harris as immoral. Their decisions to stay on a war train clashed with youthful idealism. And while hardboiled political strategists opted to discount such idealism as beside the electoral point, the consequences have been truly tragic—and largely foreseeable.
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The Vietnam War Ended 50 Years Ago. People Still Get It Wrong.
Based on subsequent events, sadly it appears that America did not learn much from the Vietnam experience.
Apr 30, 2025
April 30th marks the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War's end when Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon, soon to be renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The war was a terrible experience for the United States, but even more so for the people of Vietnam and much of the rest of Southeast Asia. Estimates are that up to 3 million Vietnamese perished, as well many many thousands of Cambodians and Laotians. Fifty-eight thousand American died, and a trillion American tax dollars were wasted.
Many of us who were there are still trying to understand and come to grips with it. Based on years of study, here is what I think people still get wrong about the war. What I write will be controversial, but it is based on what I saw and learned. If I seem angry, it is because I still am.
In nearly all wars, the other side is demonized and made into evil caricatures of human beings; doing so makes it easier to kill them. From the U.S. perspective, the Vietnam War was no exception. Even the Vietnamese who were supposedly on our side were commonly referred to as gooks, zips (Zero Intelligence Personnel), slants, slopes and more, often to their faces. In my experience, the U.S. military chain of command made no effort to correct this. Given the pervasive racism among American troops, it should come as no surprise that violence against Vietnamese civilians was common. It is hard to understand how anyone thought the Vietnamese people would rally to the U.S. side while being badly treated.
The lesson to be learned is that U.S. military leaders, if they care about the troops at all, should do all they can to prevent war crimes through training, clear orders, and prosecutions.
In Vietnam many of us learned to be quite skeptical of the media and the U.S. government. To cite just one example out of hundreds, as the advancing NVA/VC forces began to overrun the South (mid-1970's), U.S. officials and media warned of a bloodbath to come. Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger warned that 200,000 would be killed if the communists won. The American armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes, in one of the last issues to arrive in Saigon, carried a headline: "At Least a Million Vietnamese Will Be Slaughtered." But that never happened. When it came to allegations of massacres, whether by the enemy in Hue during Tet, or the Americans at My Lai, the truth was regularly mangled by the U.S. government and media.
The leak of the Pentagon Papers, which so infuriated then-President Richard Nixon, revealed many other falsehoods, even as to when the war started. The Papers show that it was in 1945 that the French government decided to reclaim its Vietnam colony from the Japanese occupiers. Then the U.S. got involved under President Harry Truman. From that time the U.S. provided air transport, weapons, advisers, and funding without which the French reoccupation would not have been possible. So the Vietnamese are correct in calling it the Ten Thousand Day War—the 30 years from 1945 to 1975.
The Pentagon Papers also reveal that U.S. leaders all the way from Truman to Nixon and Gerald Ford were advised that the U.S. could not win the war. They all knew that defeat was on the horizon, or perhaps just over the horizon. But except for Ford, all the presidents decided that, while the war was a lost cause, it would not be lost on their watch—so they kept it going by kicking the can down the road to the next president. So the death and destruction continued.
In 1968, Richard Nixon ran for president declaring that he had a "secret plan" to end the war. In actuality, his secret was to covertly sabotage ongoing peace talks to prolong the war. It went on for four more years, and another 25,000 U.S. soldiers died in a war Nixon knew could not be won.
During and after the war we learned a good deal about war-related post traumatic stress. Tens of thousands of returning Vietnam veterans began showing alarming signs of acute mental distress, often leading to harming others or themselves. Thanks to cutting edge research by Veterans Affairs, we learned that troops serving in support roles (which is most of them) had rates of PTSD about the same as the general population, around 6%. On the other hand, troops who were involved in abusing civilians or prisoners had rates of PTSD of over 50%. There are treatments available, but none seem to be especially effective. The lesson to be learned is that U.S. military leaders, if they care about the troops at all, should do all they can to prevent war crimes through training, clear orders, and prosecutions.
Today, most Americans think of the anti-war movement as mostly long-haired, pot-smoking hippies—with a Doctor Spock or a Jane Fonda occasionally thrown in. But that was not the reality. Instead, by 1967 thousands of veterans who had served in Vietnam returned home and eagerly joined the anti-war movement, especially on college campuses, quickly taking leadership positions. Tom Grace, in his book on the Kent State shootings, carefully documents that the leadership of the campus protesters there was almost entirely made up of returned working class veterans. This was typical. The largest of the veteran anti-war groups was the Vietnam Veterans Against the War with 20,000 to 50,000 members at its height. They were active in colleges and universities across the country.
There were also protests and some sabotage from within the active duty forces. In the face of widespread refusals to obey, ships could not put to sea, and aircraft could not fly. Racial tensions ran high.
Even with a half million troops in Vietnam, the U.S. could not prevail against a rising tide of nationalism in Vietnam, or even control most of the country. As the Pentagon Papers explained, the U.S. never had a chance.
Based on subsequent events, sadly it appears that America did not learn much from the Vietnam experience.
Anger alone solves little. If you want peace, you will have to organize to get it.
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