Mick Hartley

Now, on the subject of the Stanford Prison Experiment, comes this review in the Sunday Times of Philip Zimbardo’s new book:

Imagine a world in which doctors knew the underlying causes of many diseases and had a pretty good idea about most. They could cure many, alleviate more and were working on the rest.

But imagine, too, that in this world the media and politicians devoted their discourse to philtres and quackery. Scientific medicine, when mentioned at all, was presented as the preserve of bleeding-heart liberals, something that would never work. Unthinkable that we might live in such a world.

Now turn from medicine to human society. The social sciences (as important for the body politic as medicine is for the body physiological) are regularly passed over in favour of a monochrome absolutism as daft as any swivel-eyed fundamentalist babbling of the Devil.

Google “evil” – a word so empty that it should surely have withered away – and up come 136m hits in a third of a second. Tony Blair swore to confront evil wherever he found it. George W Bush would be lost without the word: his name is co-googled with it more than 2m times.

Both men – indeed all politicians and social commentators – should read this book by Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. Zimbardo’s central thesis is that evil is not just about those who inflict it, but the situations and systems that promote it. Take the scandal of the American guards-turned-torturers at Abu Ghraib. The standard line on the case (backed up by the guards’ trials) is that a few rotten apples can taint the whole barrel. In other words, the way to prevent future Abu Ghraibs is simple: when giving men and women absolute power over others, we should screen them carefully for the job. The alternative is embarrassing: serious misconduct, wholly unacceptable, few rotten apples, let down the regiment, steps taken, won’t happen again, mmph, dealt with, move on.

But Zimbardo knows better and can prove it. At the core of The Lucifer Effect lies a detailed reexamination of his notorious 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. In the SPE, two dozen young men were paid $15 a day to take the roles of “prisoners” and “guards” in a mock jail in a Stanford faculty basement. Their roles were assigned on the toss of a coin. Within 48 hours, the “guards” were showing signs of sadistic bullying, and the “prisoners” of terrified, impotent submission. SPE, which was meant to last a fortnight, had to stop after six days, so out-of-control had it become.

Isn’t it wonderful what calling yourself a psychologist and donning a white coat can do for you? We’ve had millennia of human history during which time we’ve had more than ample opportunity to study human behaviour at its best and at its worst. We might, perhaps, have noticed that certain situations bring out the best in certain people, and then again other situations bring out the worst in certain people. For instance, to take a fairly trivial example, football matches can turn otherwise decent individuals into ranting idiots chanting mindless obscenities, or worse. Then again, if there was, say, a panic in the crowd and people were being crushed, some of those mindless idiots would perform heroically to rescue others, including fans of the opposing teams. Others, including no doubt some of those horrified at the obscene chants, wouldn’t. It’s a complicated old business, this human behaviour.

But now, because a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University got together some undergraduates, called some of them prisoners and some of them guards, and made them do some role playing which got out of hand, there’s no more room for doubt or nuance. It’s been proved that there’s no such thing as evil. This is science: just like medicine, just like, say, Ronald Ross and his discovery that malaria is transmitted by mosquitos. Right there in that mock-up jail in Stanford, Zimbardo, the Ronald Ross of psychology, discovered that the causes of human behaviour lie not in some intrinsic character but in the situations in which people find themselves. What a breakthrough! So all that complicated stuff about the interaction between character and environment that’s so engrossed historians, novelists and philosophers for so long turns out to have been a complete waste of time. Science has, finally, given us the answer.

It is, unsurprisingly, on Abu Ghraib that the reviewer, Michael Bywater, concentrates. Not, that is, the Abu Ghraib of Saddam, with its blood-drenched walls, where people were invited to see their children tortured, or their pregnant wives have their babies ripped from their bellies, but the Abu Ghraib where US soldiers humiliated prisoners. Which is fair enough, I suppose. After all, these scientific findings, as we know, only apply to decent middle-class Westerners.

What of the rest of the world? Yes, there are a few brave souls out there willing to push back the barriers of psychological research. Take, for instance, the director of Jamia Hafsa Madrassah (below). To get those women all dressed up like that, in a state of righteous indignation that only serves to consolidate their subjugation, well, that’s some powerful little experiment he’s got going there. And this cleric, persuading people to kill themselves, and others, to preserve his own power – persuading them that it doesn’t get much peachier than blowing other people into little bits – with the notion that, after death, they’ll be given 70 (or is it 72?) beautiful virgins to have their way with – well, you’d think a reasonably intelligent four-year-old would be able to see through that, but there are thousands, maybe even millions, who believe it. Oh yes, the West has no monopoly on exciting psychological experiments.