A prof Zimbardo wrote a book entitled “The Lucifer Effect.” It was about an experiment he ran in 1971. He took 24 Stanford students and split them into 2 groups. Half became guards. Half became prisoners. The prisoners were arrested by the police ,handcuffed, fingerprinted at the police station to make the prisoners feel more like real prisoners.
The guards were given uniforms . Very quickly the prisoners began to feel like prisoners and guards like real guards. They were given free reign over the prisoners. Within a short time they were turning sadistic with their power.Stripping and head bags soon followed. The moral corruption of seemingly good people took place rapidly.Much was due to the team playing concept.
One prisoner started a hunger strike. The guards started punishing the other prisoners to get back at him. The prisoners soon tried to become “good” prisoners.They put pressure on other prisoners to act “right”. All this happened within 2 days. The experiment was abandoned during the third day.
Afterwards the guards were upset and could not believe they actually participated in the things they did. The prisoners were shocked to see how quickly a prisoner mentality took place.
These were Stanford students,in 1971 a time of protests and antiestablishment activities. Yet this happened.
But that experiment is now famous, and the tendency of even nice people to become brutal sadists when given to much control in prison settings is well known even to layman, nevermind people whose job it is to set up military prisons. So while it may be a defense of the actual soldiers who took most of the fall at Gahaib, it doesn’t really defend the people in charge. They no doubt knew about the “lucifer effect” and the methods that can be used to prevent it (lots of supervision, clear cut rules detailing acceptable methods of disiplining inmantes, etc), and yet we still ended up with a bunch of pictures of guards humiliating and scaring prisoners.
The Stanford experiment was a joke. Professor Philip Zimbardo, who was running it, was constantly interfering with the actions of the students, encouraging them to act in certain ways, and then interpreting their actions according to his own pre-existing beliefs. (As an example, Zimbardo concluded that the “guards” all wore sunglasses to dehumanize themselves - but he never mentioned that he had handed the sunglasses out nor did he offer any evidence of how he had determined what the students’ intents were.) When critics pointed out how poorly the experiment had been conducted, Zimbardo defending himself by saying the environment he created was so influential that it had influenced his behavior as well as the students.
Which is not to say the experiment didn’t produce some real insights. But what it showed was how easy it is for one person at the top of an organization to influence the way everybody in the organization acts. Zimbardo didn’t demonstrate that prisons are bad - he demonstrated that he was a bad warden.
While I do not approve, I have seen no evidence that the trophies were other than photographic.
Interesting that you should post this. I just read an interview with Zimbardo today. Read about it here
Zimbardo wasn’t out to demonstrate ‘prisons are bad’ so much as that people are changed by the circumstances they are in.
Real-life guards are supposed to be screened, trained and indoctrinated so they won’t abuse the prisoners. The guards at Abu Ghraib apparently were encouraged in it by their superiors.
The Prof suggested that during the night when supervision was most lax ,is when the atrocities started. 24 hour supervision is needed in prison conditions.
Could you elucidate on the above? What do you mean by “trophies” for instance? That no scalps were taken? Because, if I have it correctly the whole point was the torture and abuse of any number of prisoners – the majority of which went on to be released soon after the scandal broke out. IOW, they were innocent on top of everything else.
On, and BTW, wouldn’t this count as a “trophy” in your book?
Direct link to picture. Warning: gruesome.
The problem is that Zimbardo claims his experiment produced genuine insights into the way actual prisons are run despite the fact that he also admits that most of the conditions he invented for his experiment don’t exist in actual prisons. He assigned his students the roles of “guards” and “prisoners” but he could just as easily have called them “management” and “workers” or “officers” and “enlisted men” or “doctors” and “patients” or “teachers” and “students” and he would have “proven” that corporations, armed forces, hospitals, or schools are inherently bad. Zimbardo created an artifical environment that didn’t resemble any real world situation and so it had no direct information about any specific real world situation.
As I wrote above, Zimbardo did discover some interesting things about the way people will blindly follow a leader even when that leader is telling them to do things they believe are wrong and, more surprisingly, even when that leader is doing things that are harming the followers (because keep in mind the “prisoners” in Zimbardo’s experiment were following his lead as much as the “guards” were). But Zimbardo still refuses to see what the real outcome of his experiment was - he insists it was the situation that was controlling all of them (including himself) probably because it’s easier for him to say that a prison environment brought out the worst in people rather than an environment controlled by Philip Zimbardo brought out the worst in people.
So the answer is that Abu Ghraib isn’t the problem; Donald Rumsfeld and General Miller and Colonel Karpinski were the problems. Environments don’t change people - people create the environment.
cite, please
You might first wish to have a look at Human Rights Watch’s list of issues in American prisons.
You know, you’d be spot on if the end of that sentence was ‘which then changes people’, which is Zimbardo’s point.
That’s easy. Read Zimbardo’s own work.
Which doesn’t change my point. Prisons are not bad: poorly run prisons are bad.
Even in the short time the experiment went on, both the prisoners and guards were moved by the experience. There can be argument about the shortness of the test but the results closely mirrored those of Abu Gahraib and other prisons. In that sense it reveals something about humanity.
I am sure we all remember the shock experiment . A guy in a uniform gave a device to them and said it would deliver a shock to a person (who was acting as if he got hit by electricity0. Every single person delivered the shock even though they were told the individual receiving it was guilty of no crime. Every single person did it up to level they were told was dangerous.
Perhaps we are capable of worse things than we want to believe. Maybe we would have mistreated the Iraqi prisoners too.
The guards at Abu Gahaib are no more guilty than those in Japanese POW camps/Nazi death camps/Soviet gulags/ etc. :rolleyes:
alpha, I ask you this in all seriousness and I ask that you give it some thought before answering. Do you believe that there is any great depth of difference between you and the young people who were trained to be guards at Abu Gahaib? Are you that different from the German and Austrian citizens who did not protest when discriminatory laws were passed against the Jews in their communities?
I think I am not different.
How do we ever know if we would be one to shove someone into a cattle car or one to throw ourselves onto a granade?
Unless I’ve misunderstood, the OP seems to presuppose the Abu Ghraib abusers did what they did of their own violation, and in a vacuum- not only is that a nonsense, but they were simply the warm up act for the torture that followed. Feel free to refresh your memory of the original Seymour Hersh article in the New Yorker. Extract
Everyone didn’t participate at Abu Gahaib. In fact I don’t think the majority did. And there were whistle blowers.
If you’re saying everyone would participate the way some of the guards did or everyone would shove people into cattle cars, I just don’t buy it.
The scary part is you or I could have done the same thing in those circumstances. I am a big peacenik. I walked in demonstrations against VietNam war. Yet how can I be sure that I wouldn’t do what they did. Some of the students were student activists. Afterwards they were surprised to see what they had done. I wonder what the life lessons were for them.
gonzomax - you quote my post and yet don’t respond to the only point I make i.e. that the Abu Ghraib guards were acting entirely on instructions and within a framework of behaviour that was expressly condoned by direct superiors.
Unlike your 23 white and 1 oriental, male, middle class, undergrads from the relatively naive world of 35 years ago, these kids and pizza delivery people from rural West Virginia did not act of their own violation, nor in a vacuum.
@RedFury
In the light of further information, I have changed my mind. Thanks.