Bad Apples, Bad Barrels, Bad Barrel Makers
By Mimikatz
If you know of Philip Zimbardo, it is probably in connection with the
Stanford Prison Experiment, undertaken in 1971. In that experiment,
Zimbardo and others took carefully screened, normal college students
and randomly assigned them to be guards or prisoners in a mock prison
set up in the basement of the Stanford Psych Department. Nothing
happened at first, but after 36 hours the prisoners revolted. The
guards asked Zimbardo what to do. He responded, "It's your prison," but
cautioned them against using violence. After 6 days the situation
became completely out of control, with brutality by the guards and
psychological breakdown among the prisoners. But only when one of his
former graduate students, after seeing what was happening, tearfully
told him she was not sure she wanted to have anything more to do with
him did he decide to stop the experiment.
Fast forward to 2004. Zimbardo became an expert witness in the trial
of Ivan "Chip" Frederick, one of the MPs accused of abuses at Abu
Ghraib, where the Stanford Prison Experiment was in effect replicated
in real life. This gave Zimbardo access to documents, photos and
reports about Abu Ghraib and caused him to ponder the lessons that were
not learned from the Stanford Experiment.
The result is The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn
Evil. In this long, difficult but very informative book Zimbardo
explains both how good people come to do incredibly evil acts but why.
The core of the book is a very detailed description of the Stanford
Experiment, but Zimbardo also looks at situations such as Rwanda and
the Holocaust, along with Abu Ghraib. In a nutshell, Zimbardo argues
that we do not have the stable personalities we often think we have;
our actions are in fact much more dependent on the situations we find
ourselves in. Under the "right" conditions, almost anyone can perform
evil acts. Contrary to the typical medical and legal model, such
things as Abu Ghraib are not the result of a few "bad apples," but
happen because of "bad barrels." As the Stanford Experiment had shown,
combining absolute power, secrecy, lack of clear rules and supervision,
and boredom could create a situation in which pacifists became brutal
guards.
But are "bad barrels" accidental happenings? Zimbardo pushes his
analysis further to ask questions about the "barrel makers" (himself
included) who allow such conditions to exist. Do certain types of
systems encourage "bad barrels?" In the next to last chapter he
essentially puts the Bush Administration on trial for the conditions at
Abu Ghraib.
But if commission of evil acts is at least as much situational as
dispositional (based on the individual personality), what can be done
to resist evil? As Zimbardo shows through his own and his colleagues'
avid participation in the Stanford Experiment until challenged by a
former student, this is a very complex issue. He and all of the other
researchers got sucked into the experiment, as it deteriorated slowly
over time, thrilled at the behavioral changes they were witnessing.
She came in as a substitute on Day 6 when another researcher had to
leave for a family emergency. Moreover, she had become romantically
involved with Zimbardo once she finished her PhD. Coming into the
experiment somewhat unwillingly, suddenly exposed to the degradation
that had built up over days, she was horrified both at what she saw and
at Zimbardo's reaction when she confronted him. (He told her she would
never make a good researcher if she got so emotional.) Ultimately he
realized that she was right, that he and the others had also
internalized the institutional values of the experiment to the
exclusion of their humanitarian values, and he called a halt to the
experiment. (Their relationship survived and they are evidently still
married.)
The implications of this book, especially his observations on what
makes and what prevents situations like Abu Ghraib, and how it relates
to our resistance to the Bush Administration and the evil in our
society, are considerable. Delineating the positive lessons will take
another post. Suffice it to say that no one can look at himself or
herself with quite the same smugness after reading this book.
