Lessons from Zimbardo

Last week, my friend Carol was talking about the infamous photos from Iraq and she said, “It’s just like Zimbardo!” I said, “What’s Zimbardo?” And she told me about this experiment that they did at Stanford many years ago where they randomly assigned some students to be prisoners and others to be guards, and they had to cut short the experiment because of the real abuse that the “guards” were inflicting on the “prisoners.” Today in the Boston Globe, Philip Zimbardo himself wrote an op-ed piece on the similarities between his experiment and what happened at Abu Ghraib. It’s well worth reading the entire piece. Here’s some of it:

Human behavior is much more under the control of situational forces than most of us recognize or want to acknowledge. In a situation that implicitly gives permission for suspending moral values, many of us can be morphed into creatures alien to our usual natures. My research and that of my colleagues has catalogued the conditions for stirring the crucible of human nature in negative directions. Some of the necessary ingredients are: diffusion of responsibility, anonymity, dehumanization, peers who model harmful behavior, bystanders who do not intervene, and a setting of power differentials.

 

Those factors were apparently also operating in Iraq. But in addition there was secrecy, no accountability, no visible chain of command, conflicting demands on the guards from the CIA and civilian interrogators, no rules enforced for prohibited acts, encouragement for breaking the will of the detainees, and no challenges by many bystanders who observed the evil but did not blow the whistle.

He concludes with:

It is time for all Americans to reflect on the justification for continuing the war in Iraq that is killing, maiming, and demeaning our young men and women who have been put in harm's way for spurious reasons. Before more of our youth are corrupted, perhaps the time has come to empty out the vinegar of needless war that has filled that evil barrel.

Also, check out this piece in The Guardian if you haven't seen it (Josh Marshall linked to it last week). Truly frightening and disgusting. Here's a bit, from a witness in Iraq:

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