3/14/2007
An image taken psychologist Philip Zimbardo's 1971 Stanford prison experiment in which 24 male college students acted out the roles of guards or prisoners in a two-week study.
By Marilyn Elias, USA TODAY
Photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison sickened eminent psychologist Philip Zimbardo when he saw them on TV three years ago, but it wasn't the first time he had seen such sadism imposed by prison guards.
"It was eerie and all too familiar," he says.
In an experiment 33 years earlier on the Stanford University campus where he taught, Zimbardo created his own little prison of horrors. He randomly assigned 24 male college students to be guards or prisoners in a two-week study. He told the guards to keep order, to let nobody escape and to commit no violence.
Trouble started immediately. The guards began hitting captives with fists by Day 2. Soon they were stepping on prisoners' backs as they did pushups. Guards repeatedly awakened fellow students at night and took all blankets away. Prisoners were shut into a tiny dark closet for long periods.
Within a few days, partially nude captives were forced to simulate humiliating sex acts. The experiment was halted after six days; half the prisoners had been released early because of severe stress reactions, such as physical trembling, crying and screaming.
As for the guards, Zimbardo says they continued to resemble the all-American boys as they were profiled in the psychological tests they took before the experiment.
Zimbardo makes his case
In his new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, $27.95), Zimbardo argues:
•Nearly everyone would treat others viciously or look the other way at abuse under certain conditions, such as those in the Stanford experiment and at Abu Ghraib.
•So-called inner character seldom survives if familiar social guideposts, such as family and normal routines, fall away.
•Few people will challenge a widely accepted injustice.
Just as Lucifer turned from God's favorite angel into a devil, good people can turn evil if prompted by social influences, says Zimbardo in the book due in stores March 27.
Zimbardo sees key similarities in social circumstances at the Iraqi prison and the mock prison at Stanford. Abusive guards were relieved of individual identity and accountability at both places. Soldiers in the Iraqi photos often wore no uniforms or wore masks. At Stanford, guards were simply called "Mr. Correctional Officer," and they wore reflecting sunglasses. Supervision was lax in both places, and the worst abuses came at night when guards felt least observed.
Steps to dehumanize prisoners also preceded sadistic acts in both places. The college boys put bags on their prisoners' heads; hooded prisoners are shown at Abu Ghraib. Sanitary conditions were poor, hours long and boring, and neither the students nor guards in Iraq had special training.
Evil may be overstatement
One investigation ordered by the Defense Department mentions the Stanford experiment and calls the potential for abusive treatment at Abu Ghraib "entirely predictable."
"That doesn't mean everyone isn't responsible for their behavior," Zimbardo says. But he thinks even as most people are heavily swayed in bad situations, they'll return to their normal, decent selves once they're moored again in everyday routines.
Americans are hyper-vulnerable to social influences because we emphasize individualism, says theologian Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School. "Everyone is encouraged to be an individual, to deny the influence that communities have on us," Hauerwas says. "But that causes us to look around even more for cues on how we should be acting. It sets us up for extreme conformity and the kind of group scene we saw at Abu Ghraib."
Parents who want to raise truly autonomous kids shouldn't shield them from the atrocities of Nazi Germany and My Lai, says Robert Roberts, a Baylor University philosophy professor, who specializes in ethics. "Kids need to hear that very ordinary, upstanding citizens did this. If you're not on your guard, you could wind up doing these things. … They need to hear that heroes are rare, and that could inspire them to higher goals."
Others think Zimbardo is off-base. "He's overstating the case," says psychologist Everett Worthington of Virginia Commonwealth University.
People often do inhumane things because they're told it's for a higher good, not because they're evil, he says. For example, soldiers at Abu Ghraib said they were told by military intelligence to soften prisoners up for questioning. "They thought they were doing their duty, and that's how it starts, but then things got out of hand," Worthington says.
Zimbardo, an expert witness for Sgt. Ivan Frederick, a convicted Abu Ghraib guard, disputes the torturers were "a few bad apples," as the Pentagon said. He calls them good apples put in a "bad barrel" by the U.S. Army.
Army Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, a Pentagon spokesman, disagrees: "Out of the hundreds of thousands of service members who have deployed … a very small percentage have been found to have committed misconduct of any kind and an even smaller percentage involving detainees."
Also, tough, explicit rules to prevent abuse of detainees were set by the Defense Department last fall, he says.
Whether they'll prevent trouble is open to debate. "People can be very creative," Worthington says.
Whistle-blowers are important, but we know very little about people such as Army Reservist Joseph Darby, who turned in the Abu Ghraib guards, Zimbardo says. "We know enough about what causes people to abuse," he says. "We're overdue in learning about the heroes in our midst."
Thirty-Year Retrospective
Thirty Years Later, Stanford Prison Experiment Lives On
By Meredith Alexander
Stanford Report, August 22, 2001
Thirty years ago, a group of young men were rounded up by Palo Alto police and dropped off at a new jail -- in the Stanford Psychology Department. Strip searched, sprayed for lice and locked up with chains around their ankles, the "prisoners" were part of an experiment to test people's reactions to power dynamics in social situations. Other college student volunteers -- the "guards" -- were given authority to dictate 24-hour-a-day rules. They were soon humiliating the "prisoners" in an effort to break their will.
Psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment of August 1971 quickly became a classic. Using realistic methods, Zimbardo and others were able to create a prison atmosphere that transformed its participants. The young men who played prisoners and guards revealed how much circumstances can distort individual personalities -- and how anyone, when given complete control over others, can act like a monster.
"In a few days, the role dominated the person," Zimbardo -- now president-elect of the American Psychological Association -- recalled. "They became guards and prisoners." So disturbing was the transformation that Zimbardo ordered the experiment abruptly ended.
Its story, however, endures, achieving a level of recognition shared by few other psychological experiments.
"The study is now more in the popular consciousness than it has ever been before," Zimbardo said, attributing part of the recent surge in interest to "reality TV" shows such as Survivor and Big Brother. Because he videotaped many hours of prisoner-guard interaction, Zimbardo has a record of how the individuals changed over time. "It represents a forerunner of reality TV," Zimbardo said.
Website an International Hit
Steadily increasing levels of incarceration in the United States also have fueled interest in the experiment. Between 1986 and 1997 alone, the male adult prison population increased by over two-thirds and the female population doubled.
Zimbardo has strong opinions on the harmful effects of harsh prison sentences. "Prisons are evil places that demean humanity. ... They are as bad for the guards as they are for the prisoners," he said, pointing to results of his experiment showing that both guards' and prisoners' personalities were warped by their given roles.
Now students, scholars and activists who want a closer look at those roles have a new resource. While he has been selling an educational video, Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment, since 1992, Zimbardo recently has taken some of the photos and video captured during those tense days of 1971 and combined them with text to create a dedicated website,
The site has garnered over 2.4 million page views since its launch in December 1999. On average, people at nearly 330 computers a day view the site. And these viewers stay a long time at the site, many paging through 10 or more screens filled with photos, text and video clips. Scott Plous, a doctoral student of Zimbardo's who is now a psychology professor at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Conn., manages the site along with several other social psychology sites housed on a Wesleyan server with funding from the National Science Foundation.
Plous points to the experiment's lessons about incarceration as particularly valuable. "Globally, many prison systems would benefit from reform. Phil's research has a lot to offer those countries as well as the U.S."
Popular Fascination, Distortion
What drives much of the fascination with the experiment is the sense that any individual could become a brutal dictator if given the chance. Zimbardo is still surprised at how quickly the participants changed their stripes.
"These guys were all peaceniks," he recalled of the students chosen to be guards. "They became like Nazis.
"It shows how easy it is for good people to become perpetrators of evil."
The experiment has drawn intense interest from the news media, including a 1998 60 Minutes segment.
The dramatic potential of the story -- average men turning into monsters -- has also been exploited in ways so extreme that they distort Zimbardo's work.
Zimbardo says that, without notifying him in advance, earlier this year a German production company released a film titled Das Experiment. It opens with the statement: "The story of this film is inspired by incidents that occurred during a psychological experiment at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California."
What angers Zimbardo is the way the movie's authors used specific elements of his experiment but turned its conclusion into a fictional nightmare. Without explaining that the film's climax deviated from Zimbardo's experiment, some viewers might be left confused about the psychologist's role. Instead of showing the abrupt end of the experiment -- Zimbardo halted it early after only six days -- the film shows guards attacking and raping a female psychologist and committing other fictional acts of mayhem.
Zimbardo said he has received hundreds of e-mails from Germans asking how he could have allowed such things to happen -- even though he didn't.
"It was very disheartening to have them take this story and twist it in a negative way," said Stanford's legal counsel, Deborah Zumwalt, whose office contacted the film's director and producers. "We were very concerned about it."
In response to Zimbardo's and Zumwalt's requests, the film's producers eventually agreed to include a very different disclaimer in future versions, something to tell people that "this is purely fiction," Zumwalt said. But the copies already in distribution haven't been changed.
Zimbardo hopes to block the U.S. distribution of the German movie. He also noted that he is "negotiating for an American made-for-TV movie" about the experiment.
An Experiment with Legs
"It's this old thing that has legs," Zimbardo remarked about the experiment. For him, those legs took him to the next level in his career. Zimbardo explained that his 1971 discoveries led him to examine another type of prisoner-guard situation: the voices that shy people hear when confronted with social situations. Shy people, he realized, act as their own guards. "The shy person is the quintessential combination of one's own prisoner and guard," said Zimbardo, who went on to found the Shyness Clinic at Stanford in 1975. (The clinic is now located in Menlo Park and is no longer affiliated with the university.)
Another reason the experiment remains fresh is that it would be taboo today.
Zimbardo maintains that the student-participants suffered no long-term harm -- even though some had symptoms of mental breakdown during the experiment. But now, the standards for using human subjects in research wouldn't permit such an experiment, Plous said. "Because of the rules, it's unlikely to ever be replicated," he said.
Do Good People Turn Evil?
We might have drawn the wrong conclusions from the Milgram and Zimbardo studies.
Post published by Adam Grant Ph.D. on Nov 20, 2013 in Give and Take
Half a century ago, Holocaust perpetrator Adolph Eichmann was on trial. The prosecutor called him “anew kind of killer, the kind that exercises his bloody craft behind adesk." Reporting on the trial, Hannah Arendt drew a different conclusion. She argued (link is external) that Eichmann was a plain bureaucrat, seeing himself as “a law-abiding citizen” who “did his duty” and “obeyed orders.” She called it “the banality of evil.”
The core claim was that if you put good people in a bad situation, bad things will happen. Soon, evidence emerged to support this chilling idea. At Yale, psychologist Stanley Milgram showed that ordinary men would inflict severe pain on others (link is external) simply because they were asked to do so by an authority figure in an experiment. When a man failed to learn a set of words, a scientist in a white coat told them to deliver increasingly harmful electric shocks. Many went all the way to 450 volts—even after the “victim” (an actor) complained of heart trouble. “It may be that we are puppets—puppets controlled by the strings of society,” Milgram lamented.
At Stanford, psychologist Philip Zimbardo randomly assigned students to play the roles of prisoners or prison guards (link is external). Cruelty ensued: The guards forced the prisoners to sleep on concrete and took away their clothes. “In only a few days, our guards became sadistic,” Zimbardo writes: the “power of a host of situational variables can dominate an individual’s will to resist.”
These were two of the most powerful demonstrations in social science, by two brilliant thinkers, and they’ve been taught to a generation of students. But what if we’ve drawn the wrong conclusions from them?
Although many people do underestimate the power of situations in driving behavior, more recent evidence shows that individual differences matter far more than we thought.
Who Signs Up For a Prison Study?
In the prison demonstration, Zimbardo claimed that ordinary people underwent a transformation. In his book, he calls it The Lucifer Effect (link is external), proposing to explain “how good people turn evil.”Yet the students who participated were recruited for “a psychological study of prison life.” What kind of person volunteers for such a study?
When psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland compared (link is external) people who signed up for a psychological study of prison life versus a general psychological study, the differences were stark. The people who volunteered for a prison study scored:
- 27% higher on aggression (tendency to attack or harm others)
- 10% higher on authoritarianism (expecting obedience from subordinates)
- 10% higher on Machiavellianism (willingness to manipulate others for personal gain)
- 12% higher on narcissism (seeing oneself as superior)
- 26% higher on social dominance (believing in the importance of hierarchy)
- 7% lower on empathy: (concern for others in need)
- 6% lower on altruism: (motivation to help others at a personal cost)
Psychologists have long described narcissism and Machiavellianism as two thirds of the dark triad of personality (link is external). The third is psychopathy (antisocial behavior and a lack of empathy and remorse), and now there’s a fourth dark trait (link is external) that parallels the behavior of the prison guards: sadism (the tendency to feel pleasure from inflicting pain).
When people with these types of dark traits signed up for a prison study and became prison guards, they were surrounded by others who shared their tendencies, and they expressed them. People “do not automatically assume roles given to them,” conclude (link is external) the psychologists Alexander Haslam and Stephen Reicher, after running their own prison experiment with cooperation from the BBC. Rather, “particular individuals with particular beliefs make tyranny possible.”
Who’s Willing to Deliver a Deadly Shock?
In Milgram’s original research, only 65% of participants delivered the maximum voltage of electric shocks. The psychologist Thomas Blass, author of The Man Who Shocked the World (link is external), was curious about the differences between people who obeyed and those who objected. When Blass analyzed (link is external) the 21 different variations of Milgram’s experiment, he found that certain personality traits and beliefs predicted who continued delivering the shocks.