In college I once sought to earn a little extra credit by
participating in a psychological research study. Six of us — three
male and three female sophomores — were taken into a conference
room and seated around a table. A researcher told us that we would
be asked true or false questions and if we got the questions wrong
we would be administered a mild shock. That’s right. Wrong answer?
Zap! He then asked if we still wanted to participate. The six of us
looked uneasily at one another. For a few seconds no one said
anything. I remember thinking anxiously that I didn’t want to be
shocked, but neither did I want to look like a wimp, especially in
front of three good-looking coeds. And I did need the extra credit.
Besides, how bad could it hurt? Finally a male student with a
pronounced rural accent said, “I don’t want to participate.” Asked
why not, he replied, “I don’t want to be shocked.” He was allowed
to leave the room. “Any one else?” the researcher asked. Well, I
didn’t want to be shocked either, but I felt it was too late to
back out now. I would look ridiculous. The researcher then closed
his file and said, “Okay. That’s it. We’re done.”
What a sense of relief. Yet I left the building with a burning
sense of shame. Had the student who backed out been a coward, or
had he been the only sensible one, the only one brave enough resist
peer pressure? Why was I about to allow these brutes to do
something to me I obviously didn’t want done to me? It wasn’t like
I had a chance of getting all the questions right. And if the
questions involved mathematics I probably wouldn’t get any right. I
would have been roasted like a Christmas goose.
That was in the early '80s. By then psychologists had been
trying to understand why ordinary men do beastly things to complete
strangers ever since reports came back from Poland about the Nazi
death camps. However, by the 1980s most of these experiments had
been deemed unethical or too inhumane, though they were seldom as
cruel as some of the hijinks that went on day and night at the frat
houses next door.
When we consider the two major textbook experiments of that
period we of course mean the 1963 Milgram Study (not coincidentally
conducted during the trial of Adolf Eichmann) where ordinary men
(called “teachers”) ostensibly participating in a study assessing
the effects of pain on learning, were told to administer shocks to
a “student” (in reality an actor) at near lethal volumes. Despite
horrible cries of pain from the “students,” the majority of
“teachers” pressed on with the experiment. Researchers concluded
that “relatively few people have the resources needed to resist
authority.”
The other experiment was Philip G. Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford
Prison Experiment in which 24 model college men were hired for a
two-week period and randomly assigned to role play guards and
prisoners. On the second day there was a revolt and the guards
cracked down. The guards had been warned against using physical
violence, so they quickly found ways to psychologically torment
their prisoners.
By the end of the first week the guards began engaging in
horrible mental cruelties, including forcing prisoners to simulate
sodomy. Zimbardo was forced to abandon the experiment after a mere
six days. God only knows what atrocities might have occurred had
the experiment gone on another week.
“I wanted to know who wins — good people or an evil situation
— when they were brought into direct confrontation,” Zimbardo
writes in his new book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People
Turn Evil. His conclusion is that “the Situation controls you.”
If the Stanford Prison Experiment taught one thing, he writes, it
is that we are all capable of being bad apples if placed in a bad
barrel. He even quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Prize address
during which the novelist stated that, “the line dividing good and
evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
Zimbardo was greatly annoyed at the Pentagon for blaming the
abuse at Abu Ghraib on “a few bad apples,” so irritated in fact
that he agreed to appear as an expert witness for one the accused.
He notes that the guards at Abu Ghraib were told to “take off the
gloves” and “soften them up,” which is exactly what they did.
Indeed, the behavior of guards and prisoners at the Stanford mock
prison and Abu Ghraib was eerily similar: prisoners were stripped
naked, hooded, chained, denied food or bedding privileges, put into
solitary confinement, and made to clean toilet bowls with their
bare hands.
TO BE FAIR, Zimbardo does not completely exonerate evildoers nor
does he exempt humans from taking personal responsibility for their
actions, though he maintains that we “exaggerate the extent to
which our actions are voluntary and rationally chosen — or to put
it differently, we all understate the power of the situation….The
situation and the system creating it also must share in the
responsibility for illegal and immoral behavior.”
To his fiercest critics, Zimbardo is a charlatan who manipulates
his research to fit his liberal theories in order to blame society,
rather than the individual. William Saletan of Slate put
it bluntly: “The point of the Stanford experiment…was to
discredit personal responsibility.” Indeed, follow-up studies have
found that the subjects who refused to continue participating in
Milgram or related experiments possessed a higher sense of personal
responsibility for their actions, while those who continued to
administer shocks felt little or no responsibility for their
actions. They were simply following orders. In a recent ABC
Primetime “low voltage” re-creation of the Milgram experiment,
one of the “teachers” is heard to ask a researcher who is to blame
if something goes wrong. The researcher says he will assume
responsibility. The “teacher” then says, “That’s all I need to
know,” and continues zapping his student.
Since the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, prison commander Gen. Janis
L. Karpinski has steadfastly refused to accept personal
responsibility for the abuses in her camp. Instead, Gen. Karpinski
blamed Sec. of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and anyone else she could
think of. If our top military generals refuse to accept
responsibility for their lack of oversight and for the conduct of
the guards under their command, how the hell can we expect their
underlings to stand up? It now seems the “missing resources” the
original Milgram subjects lacked was simply a highly developed
sense of personal responsibility.
