Recently, there was an excellent
post by freelixir on the Milgram Experiment, and the perils of conditioned obedience. This prompted thinking (and commenting) on my part about another shocking experiment that I believed to be even more relevant: Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment...
I had already been thinking about this parallel, when wiser minds confirmed it for me. The other day, I saw an interview with Professor Zimbardo on CNN in which he confirmed my line of thinking. After a bit of research, I found that the
BBC and the
Plaid Adder over at Democratic Underground had simliar thoughts (and both the articles are very very worthwhile reading). But it's a lesson that bears repeating here, especially if you've never heard of the experiment.
The basic backstory goes like this:
In August of 1971, a researcher at Stanford University signed up a group of 24 apparently healthy, defect-free young college students for an experiment into prison behavior. He randomly divided 24 into two groups, guards and prisoners, and thrust them abruptly into their roles, planning to leave them in their respective roles in a simulated prison for two weeks.
However, after a brief time in the "prison," all the participants, even Zimbardo, found themselves sucked further and further into the roles they were playing at the time. The treatment of the prisoners by the guards grew increasingly sadistic and brutal, including sexual abuse
remarkably similar to that found at Abu Ghraib. However, all the guards, the prisoners, even a local priest and the subjects families stayed willing participants. Eventually, the conduct grew so severe that the experiment was halted after merely six days.
For an invaluable summary of the experiment, with an easy to follow slide show (with video - designed for teaching, but not talking down to you so much that you feel awful), visit Zimbardo's website:
http://www.prisonexp.org
The point that Zimbardo made in his interview (agree with him or not), is that the abuse is a result of the system. As long as the system is secretive, non-transparent, and non-accountable, abuses of this kind will continue to occur. And I tend to agree.
Donald Rumsfeld called these abuses "un-American" and that is not true. They are human, and so just as American as Americans are human. And they are
uniquely American in the fact that they are created by an American flawed system.
I leave you with a quote from the much-better written article than mine, the
Plaid Adder's:
It could be us. That's the lesson of the Stanford prison experiment: that the average person does evil not because somehow he is intrinsically evil, but because he has been put in an evil situation. It's easy enough to sit there and say that you would never do a thing like that. The Milgram and Zimbardo experiments say that if you were put in the same environment, the chances are you would. The torturers of Abu Ghraib are no better or worse than their fellow-soldiers, no better or worse than you or me. We're all human, we're all weak, and we are all programmed to adapt for survival, and to learn to live with and even like obscene conditions if that's the only way we know to get home.
It's all essential reading.