I first learned about the
Stanford Prison Experiment in Psychology 100 back in college, and it profoundly affected my understanding of human nature. In 1971, Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo tested about 70 male college student volunteers and selected the 12 deemed to be most "normal, average and healthy". Randomly, six were assigned to be prisoners and six were assigned to be guards.
The guards subjected the prisoners to demeaning abuse, and the experiment had to be ended early.
This made me realize how easily some people can become sadistic given a starkly unequal power situation and a perception of impunity. It has made me attentive to the subject of abuse and rape in US prisons (often abetted by or even commited by guards). And it meant that the Abu Ghraib attrocities were no big surprise to me.
At the start of the experiment, the prisoners had been arrested in realistic fashion by actual policemen, booked in a jail, and taken blindfolded to a basement.
Those assigned to be guards were given uniforms and instructed that they were not to use violence but that their job was to maintain control of the prison.
From the perspective of the researchers, the experiment became exciting on day two when the prisoners staged a revolt. Once the guards had crushed the rebellion, "they steadily increased their coercive aggression tactics, humiliation and dehumanization of the prisoners," Zimbardo recalls.
"The staff had to frequently remind the guards to refrain from such tactics," he said, and the worst instances of abuse occurred in the middle of the night when the guards thought the staff was not watching. The guards' treatment of the prisoners such things as forcing them to clean out toilet bowls with their bare hands and act out degrading scenarios, or urging them to become snitches "resulted in extreme stress reactions that forced us to release five prisoners, one a day, prematurely."
Note that the "guards" were not actively encouraged to demean the prisoners (as the story goes), but they did think they were unwatched.
Other folks are making the connection between Abu Ghraib and the Stanford Prison Experiment, too. John Marshal of talkingpointsmemo mentioned it in a link today. And there was an article in the New York Times yesterday:
Philip Zimbardo, a leader of the Stanford prison study, said that, while the rest of the world was shocked by the images from Iraq, "I was not surprised that it happened.
"I have exact, parallel pictures of prisoners with bags over their heads," from the 1971 study, he said.
At one point, he said, the guards in the fake prison ordered their prisoners to strip and used a rudimentary sex joke to humiliate them.
The same article mentions another experiment in which researchers were able to persuade 65 percent of subjects to punish another person with what was labeled a potentially lethal electric shock.
Psy-Ops isn't only being carried out against our enemies; is also used on our own troops.