Mick Hartley

There have been a number of psychological experiments which purport to show what lowlife scum we humans really are. The most famous was Stanley Milgram’s, where a selection of unfortunates were encouraged to apply to others what they believed were painful electric shocks. I posted about that here and here, arguing that whatever the experiment may or may not have demonstrated about the extent to which we can become accomplices to torture, what it showed most clearly was the astonishing way in which the experimenters, by donning white coats and passing themselves off as dispassionate scientific observers, felt able to absolve themselves of any moral responsibility for the genuine anguish suffered by the poor dupes they’d set up, who were lied to, bullied, traumatised, and eventually dismissed as no better than little Adolf Eichmanns.

In 1971, ten years later, there was another famous experiment in similar vein. The man responsible, Philip G. Zimbardo, psychology professor and author of the forthcoming “The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil“, here describes his Stanford Prison Experiment:

I decided that what was needed was to create a situation in a controlled experimental setting in which we could array on one side a host of variables, such as role-playing, coercive rules, power differentials, anonymity, group dynamics, and dehumanization. On the other side, we lined up a collection of the “best and brightest” of young college men in collective opposition to the might of a dominant system. Thus in 1971 was born the Stanford prison experiment, more akin to Greek drama than to university psychology study. I wanted to know who wins — good people or an evil situation — when they were brought into direct confrontation.

First we established that all 24 participants were physically and mentally healthy, with no history of crime or violence, so as to be sure that initially they were all “good apples.” They were paid $15 a day to participate. Each of the student volunteers was randomly assigned to play the role of prisoner or guard in a setting designed to convey a sense of the psychology of imprisonment (in actuality, a mock prison set up in the basement of the Stanford psychology department). Dramatic realism infused the study. Palo Alto police agreed to “arrest” the prisoners and book them, and once at the prison, they were given identity numbers, stripped naked, and deloused. The prisoners wore large smocks with no underclothes and lived in the prison 24/7 for a planned two weeks; three sets of guards each patrolled eight-hour shifts. Throughout the experiment, I served as the prison “superintendent,” assisted by two graduate students.

Initially nothing much happened as the students awkwardly tried out their assigned roles in their new uniforms. However, all that changed suddenly on the morning of the second day following a rebellion, when the prisoners barricaded themselves inside the cells by putting their beds against the door. Suddenly the guards perceived the prisoners as “dangerous”; they had to be dealt with harshly to demonstrate who was boss and who was powerless. At first, guard abuses were retaliation for taunts and disobedience. Over time, the guards became ever more abusive, and some even delighted in sadistically tormenting their prisoners. Though physical punishment was restricted, the guards on each shift were free to make up their own rules, and they invented a variety of psychological tactics to demonstrate their dominance over their powerless charges.

Nakedness was a common punishment, as was placing prisoners’ heads in nylon stocking caps (to simulate shaved heads); chaining their legs; repeatedly waking them throughout the night for hourlong counts; and forcing them into humiliating “fun and games” activities.

From the Prison log, night 5:

The prisoners, who have not broken down emotionally under the incessant stress the guards have been subjecting them to since their aborted rebellion on Day 2, wearily line up against the wall to recite their ID numbers and to demonstrate that they remember all 17 prisoner rules of engagement. It is the 1 a.m. count, the last one of the night before the morning shift comes on at 2 a.m. No matter how well the prisoners do, one of them gets singled out for punishment. They are yelled at, cursed out, and made to say abusive things to each other. “Tell him he’s a prick,” yells one guard. And each prisoner says that to the next guy in line. Then the sexual harassment that had started to bubble up the night before resumes as the testosterone flows freely in every direction.

“See that hole in the ground? Now do 25 push-ups [expletive] that hole! You hear me!” One after another, the prisoners obey like automatons as the guard shoves them down. After a brief consultation, our toughest guard (nicknamed “John Wayne” by the prisoners) and his sidekick devise a new sexual game. “OK, now pay attention. You three are going to be female camels. Get over here and bend over, touching your hands to the floor.” When they do, their naked butts are exposed because they have no underwear beneath their smocks. John Wayne continues with obvious glee, “Now you two, you’re male camels. Stand behind the female camels and hump them.”

The guards all giggle at this double-entendre. Although their bodies never touch, the helpless prisoners begin to simulate sodomy by making thrusting motions. They are then dismissed back to their cells to get an hour of sleep before the next shift comes on, and the abuse continues.

By Day 5, five of the student prisoners have to be released early because of extreme stress. (Recall that each of them was physically healthy and psychologically stable less than a week before.) Most of those who remain adopt a zombielike attitude and posture, totally obedient to escalating guard demands.

By this time, one gathers, Zimbardo and his fellow psychologists must have been pretty damn well pleased with themselves. Who knew it was going to be so easy to bring out the sadist in someone? Here they were, pushing back the frontiers of psychological knowledge. This research was really going to make waves!

Then there was a curious, and interesting, intervention:

Dozens of people had come down to our “little shop of horrors,” seen some of the abuse or its effects, and said nothing. A prison chaplain, parents, and friends had visited the prisoners, and psychologists and others on the parole board saw a realistic prison simulation, an experiment in action, but did not challenge me to stop it. The one exception erupted just before the time of the prison-log notation on Night 5.

About halfway through the study, I had invited some psychologists who knew little about the experiment to interview the staff and participants, to get an outsiders’ evaluation of how it was going. A former doctoral student of mine, Christina Maslach, a new assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, came down late Thursday night to have dinner with me. We had started dating recently and were becoming romantically involved. When she saw the prisoners lined up with bags over their heads, their legs chained, and guards shouting abuses at them while herding them to the toilet, she got upset and refused my suggestion to observe what was happening in this “crucible of human nature.” Instead she ran out of the basement, and I followed, berating her for being overly sensitive and not realizing the important lessons taking place here.

“It is terrible what YOU are doing to those boys!” she yelled at me. Christina made evident in that one statement that human beings were suffering, not prisoners, not experimental subjects, not paid volunteers. And further, I was the one who was personally responsible for the horrors she had witnessed (and which she assumed were even worse when no outsider was looking). She also made clear that if this person I had become — the heartless superintendent of the Stanford prison — was the real me, not the caring, generous person she had come to like, she wanted nothing more to do with me.

That powerful jolt of reality snapped me back to my senses. I agreed that we had gone too far, that whatever was to be learned about situational power was already indelibly etched on our videos, data logs, and minds; there was no need to continue. I too had been transformed by my role in that situation to become a person that under any other circumstances I detest — an uncaring, authoritarian boss man. In retrospect, I believe that the main reason I did not end the study sooner resulted from the conflict created in me by my dual roles as principal investigator, and thus guardian of the research ethics of the experiment, and as the prison superintendent, eager to maintain the stability of my prison at all costs. I now realize that there should have been someone with authority above mine, someone in charge of oversight of the experiment, who surely would have blown the whistle earlier.

Zimbardo is, I suppose, to be commended for his honesty. Those last paragraphs don’t reflect particularly well on him: When she saw the prisoners lined up with bags over their heads, their legs chained, and guards shouting abuses at them while herding them to the toilet, she got upset and refused my suggestion to observe what was happening in this “crucible of human nature.” Instead she ran out of the basement, and I followed, berating her for being overly sensitive and not realizing the important lessons taking place here. That’s quite funny, really. But he makes nothing of it. He’s already got all the information he needs. From the others, that is; not from himself. This is psychology, remember: although behaviourism was supposedly dead and buried by now, its influence was still strong. You study people the same way you study rats – put them in mazes and see what happens.

Now, over 30 years later, here’s his book. As the book description at Amazon asks:

What makes good people do bad things? How can moral people be seduced to act immorally? Where is the line separating good from evil, and who is in danger of crossing it?…

By illuminating the psychological causes behind such disturbing metamorphoses, Zimbardo enables us to better understand a variety of harrowing phenomena, from corporate malfeasance to organized genocide to how once upstanding American soldiers came to abuse and torture Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib. He replaces the long-held notion of the “bad apple” with that of the “bad barrel”–the idea that the social setting and the system contaminate the individual, rather than the other way around.

This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are. While forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics, though, Zimbardo also offers hope. We are capable of resisting evil, he argues, and can even teach ourselves to act heroically.

There are no doubt many lessons to be learnt from the Stanford Prisoners Experiment. That people can be placed in circumstances that make them behave less well than usual strikes me as, well, less than revelatory, especially given the artificiality of the situation, but I suppose one can hardly blame Zimbardo for making the most of what is, after all, his one claim to fame, even if it was an experiment cut short. But surely the most obvious lesson is the one he himself has been kind enough to point out for us, without seeming to appreciate it: that donning a white coat and persuading oneself that it’s all for a higher purpose is a remarkably effective way of blinding oneself to the moral consequences of one’s actions. He set up a situation where people were suffering – seriously suffering – and yet he couldn’t see it, he couldn’t accept that he might be morally culpable until someone else (and whatever happened to him and the sensitive Christina Maslach, one wonders) pointed out quite how reprehensible his behaviour had been. So the question posed by the book: What makes good people do bad things?, has its clearest application in the case of Zimbardo himself. He is, no doubt, a good person, and yet there he was, setting up a situation which caused considerable pain to a considerable number of people. Why? For the scientific knowledge, he would no doubt answer. Well yes, maybe. But perhaps there was an element of careerism in his decisions? Or he enjoyed the power of being able to order all those people about? Whatever, we’re not going to find out, because that’s not where he’s looking. Psychologists don’t get where they are nowadays by indulging in introspection.

This is a book that dares to hold a mirror up to mankind, showing us that we might not be who we think we are…forcing us to reexamine what we are capable of doing when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics… Well exactly. As with Milgram, we see what psychologists are capable of when caught up in the crucible of behavioral dynamics, and it’s not a pretty sight.