Dave Viner's Weblog

Abu Ghraib in 1971?

Until recently, I felt pretty confident that Abu Ghraib was an anomoly. At least, something of an anomoly. Bad things happen during wars and intelligence sure seems like a dirty business. Surely the horrific events that occured in that prison in Iraq were rare, out of the ordinary... even unpredictable. I mean, who would have thought that people, Americans no less, could have done such brutally demeaning acts?

Well, as it turns out, there was a social experiment in 1971 called the Stanford Prison Experiment which was designed to study the impact of imprisonment on the prisoners *and* the guards. In this experiment, Phil Zimbardo and his colleagues conducted a social simulation with 20 college males from Palo Alto. All people were screened for psychological abnormalities... essentially, they picked 20 completely normal people to participate in the study. Then, they split the people into 2 groups by flipping a coin, one set were guards, the other prisoners. Then, the prisoners were imprisoned in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford, and the guards were assigned to watch over them and ensure order.

What do you think happened?

Well, the study was planned to run for 2 weeks, but they had to stop it after 6 days because everyone began experiencing substantial problems. Several prisoners had to be released because of psychological problems and psychosomatic ailments. Several guards began treating prisoners in completely inhumane ways.

How inhumane? Well, they made the prisoners do push-ups while guards sat on their backs. They subjected prisoners to routine strip-searches. They thought up ways to pit prisoners against each other. They used nudity and feigned sodomy to enforce their control over the prisoners.

Sound familiar?

This experiment was really mind-blowing for me, in a lot of ways. Clearly, there are massive ethical questions about such an experiment. (Apparently, after this experiment, academia revised it's ethical guidelines for conducting real-life simulations in the US.) But, more importantly, the people in this experiment acted exactly like the soldiers at Abu Ghraib.

I couldn't believe that this happened. It's just amazing. The study suggests that horrific events like those of Abu Ghraib are *contextual*. That is, given the right set of circumstances, otherwise normal, sane, everyday people will commit such terrible acts. I find this to be shocking. I believe it, but I am just amazed.

I highly recommend that you read through the slide show on the SPE. Also, Prof. Zimbardo offers these links on the relationship between the SPE and the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal.

I'm still not really sure what to make of all of this information, but I thought it would be worth sharing. I believe that I'm fairly well-read and well-educated, and I had never heard of this before. So, maybe you haven't heard of it either. I guess human nature can really be a frightening thing.

Posted by dave at December 6, 2005 10:50 PM | TrackBack