Warning: Triggers
How did we get to the abuses at Abu Ghraib? Or to torturing prisoners in the US, whether by waterboarding at Guantanamo, or years of aggravated solitary confinement, or horrific executions? Let's try it and see.
Put some bright but otherwise ordinary college students to playing guards and prisoners in a basement fixed up with makeshift cells at Stanford for a few days, choosing randomly who will be which. What could go wrong? Well, it's so horrific you have to cancel the experiment in the middle. Now what happens to real warders and prisoners who do it for years at a time, even for decades? What happens to a society that routinely does that to people?
It's called being tough on crime, or on terrorism. It is a major mental health epidemic in the US, not only among guards and prisoners, but in our religion and politics.
This week we get to look at horrors much worse than the Yale electric shock experiments that I Diaried a month ago, where there were no shocks. In the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) there were no physical assaults, but real people broke down as a result of psychological assaults. More than thirty years later, in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Philip Zimbardo explained what went wrong, what should have happened, what was learned, and what good came out of it.
Here is another question. How did the advocates for evil, even torture, in our prisons, get that way? Is it something about how they were treated as children? Obviously so, in ways we have only partial knowledge of, but that is only part of the answer. What else is there, and what can we do about that?
I'm glad you asked.
Once more: Lots of triggers
Had I written this book shortly after the end of the Stanford Prison Experiment, I would have been content to detail the ways in which situational forces are more powerful than we think, or that we acknowledge, in shaping our behavior in many contexts. However, I would have missed the big picture, the bigger power for creating evil out of good—that of the System, the complex of powerful forces that create the Situation…However, until we become sensitive to the real power of the System, which is invariably hidden behind a veil of secrecy, and fully understand its own set of rules and regulations, behavioral change will be transient and situational change illusory.
In fact, Philip Zimbardo, his students, and many others have applied the lessons of the SPE to many prisons in the US and to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and have even been able to get a few laws and policies changed. It isn't anywhere near enough, but it is a start. If you care about mistreatment of prisoners by guards and police forces and the military, and the cowboys who pretend to protect us by recruiting more terrorists to the cause, or about the degradation visited on guards and police and the military by our system, or if you care about
The New Jim Crow system of using courts and prisons for voter suppression, as explained by Michelle Alexander, you have to know about this stuff.
I cannot summarize the SPE adequately. That part of the tale occupies nearly 200 pages in the book, and then the analysis and accounts of further research and of real-world interventions take up almost another 300 pages. You have to read the book, or watch one of the movies or TV shows made about the experiment, at a minimum. There are a lot of them. I have provided some links below.
What can we do in just a Diary? Well, we can extract a summary of the bad and the good that resulted in and from the SPE, and we can ask a few questions.
First, the bad.
Nine volunteers were assigned to be prisoners, with some in reserve in case any dropped out. Three shifts of guards were assigned, given very limited training, and issued uniforms, billy clubs, and reflecting glasses. As soon as the prisoners went through mock arrests by real police and were delivered to the basement of Jordan Hall at Stanford, the guards immediately began devising humiliating and degrading rituals. For example, they made prisoners get up in the middle of every night for an hour of drill on their prisoner numbers and the prison rules, punctuated with pushups and forced shouting of compliments to the guards, and increasingly insults to each other. Then the punishments, individual and collective, and increasing stints in solitary confinement began, for every real or imagined slight to the authority of the guards.
Some prisoners rebelled, one with a hunger strike, and several with escape attempts. Refusing to curse another prisoner was viciously punished. Prisoners forgot that they had the right to withdraw from the experiment at any time. Some broke down.
A former convict turned teacher and a Catholic priest got sucked into their roles as parole officer and prison chaplain, and failed to offer "prisoners" any real help. Zimbardo, in his dual role as experimenter and prison superintendent, got sucked in and forgot his duty to monitor the ethics of the experiment. He had to be told, quite forcefully, that he needed to shut down the experiment due to breakdowns suffered by several prisoners before he started to come back to himself.
It was just after Zimbardo decided to end the experiment but before he did so that the abuse by guards peaked with one demanding forced sexual degradation exercises quite similar to what we saw much later at Abu Ghraib, and the other guards present helping out.
Tell him he's a prick!
See that hole in the ground? Now do twenty-five pushups, fucking the hole! You hear me!
Okay, now pay attention. You three are going to be female camels. Get over here and bend over touching your hands to the floor.
Now you two, you're male camels. Stand behind the female camels and hump them.
The prisoners were not required to make physical contact, just to go to through the motions. Zimbardo commented
My nightmare from last night is coming true. I am glad that now I can control it by ending it all tomorrow.
Fortunately, the psychological damage to prisoners, guards, and staff was transitory, as measured on the same psychological tests given before the experiment, and their own personal accounts in later interviews. But it did persist for a while after the end of the experiment.
More fortunately, a number of participants, including prisoners, guards, and staff, and also Zimbardo as prison superintendent and chief investigator, took what they learned from the experiment as the basis of a career in doing something about it in research, practical action, and educating the public. Zimbardo devoted a chapter of the book to such results. I cannot even list them all here. One of the many results was the law pushed through by Senator Birch Bayh in the 1970s forbidding putting juvenile suspects in adult prisons. Obviously, we have barely dented the evils of the prison system in such ways, but the conversation opened in 1970 continues and spreads. It has become a major issue between authoritarians, mostly Republicans, and in varying degrees Libertarians and Progressives.
It is not only participants in the SPE, of course, who have carried out further research on the questions it raises. One of the most important for the purpose of getting More and Better Democrats was carried out in France. Researchers created simulations of jury deliberations, with the jury split between two views of the case.
The minority group was never well-liked, and its persuasiveness, when it occurred, worked only gradually, over time. The vocal minority was most influential when it had four qualities:
- it persisted in affirming a consistent position,
- appeared confident,
- avoided seeming rigid and dogmatic,
- and was skilled in social influence.
[I rearranged that last sentence into a list.]
We can look back at every successful social innovation and see those four factors at work. We can also see our enemies trying to deny us all four, claiming that we are inconsistent, intent on lying, ideological, and determined to force our beliefs on innocent victims.
Zimbardo reviewed a lot of other research, including the Stanley Milgram study on obedience at Yale. (Milgram and Zimbardo had been high school classmates, and met up again at Yale when both were assistant professors.) In addition, Zimbardo reviewed research that followed after Milgram's demonstrating how malleable obedience to authority is in a wide range of situations, and how it can have deadly effects in, for instance, a hospital where nurses do not challenge obviously dangerous prescriptions by doctors, or airline cockpits where first officers and fliight engineers do not challenge dangerous orders by pilots. One study estimated that 25% of airplane crashes result from such errors and failures to challenge them.
The research also applies to date rape and domestic abuse, and to a bizarre strip-search scam in which a con man pretending to a policeman calls a restaurant and gets a manager to strip search an employee and then sexually degrade her for hours while the con man got his jollies. Zimbardo was an expert witness in such a case, after the con man was caught. Most people do not believe that they or anyone would fall for something so sick, but it was carried out 68 times that we know of.
There have been classroom experiments demonstrating that Nazi levels of obedience and oppression can be set up in a few minutes starting with Let's pretend, taking firm hold in just a few days. In one, an elementary school teacher declared children with blue eyes superior to those with brown eyes. The oppressions began immediately. Then she said that that was a mistake, it was those with brown eyes who were superior. Immediately the oppressed became the oppressors, without the slightest objection or thought of what they had just gone through. Whichever group was declared inferior started doing worse academically. I know a lot of people that felt that effect.
Another experiment, known as The Third Wave, turned high school students into frightening approximations of Hitler Youth, again almost immediately. It started in one classroom of 20 children, but soon more than 100 had joined in, including children and staff.
In an experiment at the University of Hawaii, shocking numbers signed on to a hypothetical eugenics program presented as an urgent national security matter, wanting to choose the unfit who would die, and also wanting to carry out the killings.
The SPE and other such experimental results have been applied directly to the original question, how the Nazis got so much willing assistance in killing millions of Jews and millions of other designated Enemies of the State. We have mountains of documentary evidence on specific units and even specific individuals assigned to these duties, many of them ordinary Germans judged unfit for service on the Russian Front, but adequate for the killings in Poland and across Eastern Europe. The 500 or so men of Reserve Battalion 101 make up one of the clearest examples. They were responsible for killing 38,000 Jews and sending 45,000 more to the Treblinka death camp in only four months. This in spite of the fact that their commander had explicitly stated before they began that nobody would be required to participate, and half had initially refused. Peer pressure brought obedience up to more than 90%, with soldiers having trophy photos taken of them with their victims. The distribution of behavior from inventing cruelties through following the rules to trying to help the victims (but not to stop the oppressions) was found to tally perfectly with the guards in the SPE.
Interviews with former SS officers and men revealed a different pattern, of high scores on authoritarian scales such as we looked at in discussing Robert Altemeyer's The Authoritarians.
Similarly, Zimbardo and other researchers interviewed torturers and death squad members from former regimes in Latin America, the Greek military junta, and elsewhere. Again, most were ordinary people put in special situations and given special training in ideology, group cohesion, the supposed crimes of the enemies, and their own moral superiority. Sadists had to be selected out of the companies of torturers, because they wouldn't stop the torture or focus on the information sought. They just enjoyed torturing and killing too much.
A similar analysis has been done of suicide bombers. Many failed suicide bombers have been interviewed in prison. They tend to be fairly normal, middle or upper class, educated people, married, with children. They are also driven to despair by feelings of helplessness and disconnection from humanity. See Thomas Joiner, Why People Die by Suicide, and the film Suicide Killers, by Pierre Rehov, for more, including the techniques of recruiting vulnerable people, training them, and making it socially impossible for them to back out. We cannot interview the 9/11 terrorists, but we have been able to examine their backgrounds and talk to many people who knew them, as described in Perfect Soldiers, by Terry McDermott.
If you want to know what Zimbardo has to say about the Jim Jones cult all drinking poison, please read it yourself. Jones recorded everything, including many torture sessions, his final massively deluded speech demanding that parents kill their children and that everybody drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, and the deaths themselves, so if you can stand it, there is way more than enough material for getting an understanding of him and his followers. There are also survivors who were thrown out before that final day. Some of them still regard Jones as their father.
I did say that there would be triggers. There are actually more than I can cover here. More research, on more phenomena, revealing more factors leading to aggression or escalating it to extremes of oppression, torture, and murder.
Two particularly important factors are deindividuation, such as anonymity, and dehumanization. Anonymity takes many forms, such as putting on masks, putting bags on victims' heads, or hiding behind screens. Each leads to a greater willingness to harm others. Dehumanization comes in only one basic form, claiming that others are no better than animals or vermin, or that they are enemies of true humanity, whether of Nazis or of the Religious Right or of Capitalists. The detailed charges vary, but the effect is the same. Morality does not apply. If they are not human, then crimes against them cannot be crimes against humanity.
It works pretty well, but never completely. There remains a residual recognition of humanity of the enemy in most soldiers, even some members of extreme groups like the SS. It pops out at unlikely moments and sometimes leads to protest movements that can become surprisingly effective in environments that permit such things.
Reservist Joe Darby, the whistleblower at Abu Ghraib, is an instructive example, because the military threw the book at him. Zimbardo was giving a presentation at a psychology conference in Washington DC when the story broke, and was contacted by a former Stanford student working at NPR for an interview. He countered the "bad apples" meme coming from the top brass with the "bad barrel" of improper training and total lack of supervision, plus all of the illegalities of the Neo-Con leadership, the CIA, and so on. Zimbardo argues that the "bad apples" theory is completely false, and that everything that went wrong was situational, due to egregious failures of command, far to many for me to even list here.
In particular, guards were encouraged to regard prisoners as not really human, and nothing was done to suggest that they needed to be treated humanely. The guards then ramped up the mistreatment just as in the SPE, only far more so over a much longer time. I'll let you read it yourself. I can't do justice to the horrors endured by prisoners and guards alike.
I will just mention an episode seemingly out of Catch-22 except that it really happened. One officer in charge of interrogations, Colonel Thomas Pappas, lost it after a mortar attack that killed his driver, and never took off his flak jacket or helmet after that, even in the shower. He was eventually found not fit for combat and relieved of duty.
Zimbardo was widely quoted and widely interviewed, and then invited to assist in the defense of Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick II. This gave Zimbardo access to many of the documents about the case, and to apply what he had learned from the SPE and other studies. There is a whole chapter of such analysis in the book.
The book has two whole chapters on the massive abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, including threatened executions and sexual humiliations. Many phenomena were startlingly like those of the SPE, including the fact that the prisoners being abused were supposedly there only to be investigated, not as convicted criminals. But those found to be innocent were not released lest they join the insurgents.
The biggest problem was that the officers in charge were given complete impunity afterwards. Nothing that happened was held to be their fault, in complete contradiction of official military doctrine of command responsibility. The same thing had happened in Vietnam. That means that the same thing will happen again, and go on happening off and on as long as command impunity continues.
Of all the documents Zimbardo got to see while working on the Frederick case, only the Schlesinger report took any account of social psychology. It actually looked at similarities between Abu Ghraib and the SPE. It laid considerable blame on commanders, and disclosed that numerous Abu Ghraib photos were destroyed by other commanders. However, it lets commanders off the hook for doing so, claiming that they did not appreciate their importance as evidence at the time.
There were 300 incidents of alleged detainee "abuse" (never torture) and two dozen detainee deaths under investigation. So much for bad apples.
In contrast with the CYA attitude of almost all of the reports commissioned by the military and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Human Rights Watch was much more blunt, starting with its title, "Getting Away With Torture". It indicts all of the usual suspects. Again we do not have room for the gruesome details.
Army Colonel Larry James was assigned to fix Abu Ghraib. He consulted with Zimbardo, and watched the SPE DVD Quiet Rage many times through looking for points where harm could have been prevented. What he did at Abu Ghraib includes two pages of specific actions to create appropriate training, lay down clear rules, and make command responsibilities clear. James says that there were no reported abuses there between his interventions and the closing of the prison.
I wish that could be said of the multitude of other military prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, Guantanamo, and the black sites in other countries where the CIA secretly rendered prisoners for torture.
The last chapter of the book begins with some advice for those who want to be able to resist the social pressures revealed in the SPE and a multitude of other experiments that get people to do what they previously believed they would never do. It then gives some examples and analysis of those who stood up to enormous pressures, such as apartheid or McCarthyism. I have always been suspicious of advice on how to be good, because we do not know how we will behave before we are tested. Therefore when we look at a principle such as admitting our mistakes or rebelling against unjust authority, we have to try it regularly and observe fairly and clearly how we do. But it is just there that our perceptions are most likely to be clouded.
I don't have a solution for that. We do seem to make progress in that direction overall, but it is fitful, with long delays and many steps backwards.
Zimbardo suggests that we try to construct an anti-Milgram experiment in which people are pushed to be far more altruistic than they imagined possible. That is what many religious organizations aspire to on the grand scale, transforming whole lives. I think that Quakers and Buddhists have done the best at that. What about just getting people to vote? That would transform our whole nation. Well, that is what Moral Mondays, the Bannock Street Project, and many others are doing right now.
SPE on the Net
LuciferEffect.org
PrisonExp.org
Social Psychology Network, Philip G. Zimbardo page
The Heroic Imagination Project
[E]veryday heroism, the power of a situation, conformity, bystander effect, peer pressure, and more.
SPE in the Media
"I Almost Considered the Prisoners as Cattle", Life magazine, October 15, 1971
"Prisoner 819 Did a Bad Thing: The Stanford Prison Experiment" Chronolog NBC-TV, Nov. 26, 1971.
"The Mind is a Formidable Jailer: A Pirandellian Prison"[PDF], The New York Times Magazine, April 8, 1973
Documentary, Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment (1985), now on DVD.
PBS series Discovering Psychology, Program 19, The Power of the Situation
Carlo Prescott radio show, Carlo's Corner, on KGO San Francisco. Prescott is a former 17-year prisoner turned teacher and consultant on prisons and prisoners.
"Experimental Prison: The Zimbardo Effect", 60 Minutes, Aug. 30 1998
"The Stanford Prison Experiment Living Dangerously", National Geographic TV 2004
"Human Behavior Experiments", Jigsaw Productions, Sundance Channel, June 1, 2006.
Philip Zimbardo: The psychology of evil, TED Talk, 2008
There are many videos on the SPE on Youtube.
Tue Oct 07, 2014 at 8:46 AM PT: No Grokking Republicans Diary next week on Columbus Day. We resume on the 20th with Learned Helplessness. We will apply the experimental results on unlearning helplessness to ongoing GOTV to flip the House and create Democratic majorities in all former Confederate states. Yes, even Alabama.