"What Went Wrong?"

READING

When Philip Zimbardo was a young psychology professor at Stanford University back in 1971, he launched an experiment to explore the dynamics of the prison experience. Using students as volunteers, he simulated a prison in the basement of a campus building. Some students served as guards, others as inmates. Despite the fact that they were playing roles, a drama of sadism and abuse rapidly unfolded in the short time they spent confined together. Zimbardo halted the experiment after five days.

The Stanford Prison Experiment became a famous case study; as Zimbardo describes it, a "powerful illustration of the potentially toxic impact of bad systems and bad situations in making good people behave in pathological ways that are alien to their nature. . . . The line between Good and Evil, once thought to be impermeable, proved instead to be quite permeable."

Now over thirty-five years later, Zimbardo has returned to the Stanford Prison Experiment, his role in it, its relationship to real life abuse and criminality, and most of all, to what it says about each of us. Here is an excerpt from his book, "The Lucifer Effect."

"Good people can be induced, seduced, and initiated into behaving in evil ways. They can also be led to act in irrational, stupid, self-destructive, antisocial, and mindless ways when they are immersed in "total situations" that impact human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and consistency of individual personality, of character, and of morality.

"We want to believe in the essential, unchanging goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures, in their rational appraisal and then rejection of situational temptations. We invest human nature with God-like qualities, with moral and rational faculties that make us both just and wise. We simplify the complexity of human experience by erecting a seemingly impermeable boundary between Good and Evil. On one side are Us, Our Kin, and Our Kind; on the other side of that line we cast Them, Their Different Kin, and Other Kind. Paradoxically, by creating this myth of our invulnerability to situational forces, we set ourselves up for a fall by not being sufficiently vigilant to situational forces. . . .

"This lesson should have been taught repeatedly by the behavioral transformation of Nazi concentration camp guards, and of those in destructive cults, such as Jim Jones's Peoples Temple, and more recently by the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult. The genocide and atrocities committed in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Burundi, and recently in Sudan's Darfur region also provide strong evidence of people surrendering their humanity and compassion to social power and abstract ideologies of conquest and national security.

"Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us - under the right or wrong situational circumstances. That knowledge does not excuse evil; rather, it democratizes it, sharing its blame among ordinary actors rather than declaring it the province only of deviants and despots - of Them but not Us."

SERMON

Whenever we learn - once again - that human beings are capable of a vast and imaginative range of inhuman acts, we have to ask - once again - how we explain such horrors. Who or what is to blame for the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the criminal neglect of the survivors of Hurricane Katrina, the calculated suicide bombs and 9/11 attacks, the genocides, the hate crimes, the pervasiveness of domestic violence?

Official reactions are typically superficial or self-serving: there are "bad apples;" "mistakes were made." Nobody really believes such explanations, but the truth is sobering and comes with a heavy burden that is difficult to accept. It is easier and more consoling, in a mindless sort of way, to blame those we do not know. Whether they are religious fanatics, politicians, Blackwater security guards, or warring ethnic groups whose boundaries we'll never understand, we don't identify with them at all. Then we don't have to examine too closely our comfortable ideas of who we are and why we are all right.

That is why the Stanford Prison Experiment shocked the American public when it came to light in the mainstream media a year or two after it was enacted. Here were young men at one of the best universities in the world, in an environment of learning, opportunity, and hope, yet were reduced to sadistic guards and groveling inmates in a matter of days. What caused normal, healthy young adults to transform themselves in this way? Who or what was to blame?

When Philip Zimbardo halted the experiment in less than a week, he knew that much of the blame belonged to him. He had conceived and orchestrated this scenario. Even as it began to spiral out of control and get ugly, he remained an observer, taking notes. A graduate student finally intervened, bravely confronting him and insisting that he put an end to the suffering. Professor Zimbardo reluctantly sent everyone home.

The Stanford Prison Experiment took place at a time when the public was caught up in the moral debate around the Vietnam War. Students everywhere, including at Stanford, were protesting the war and resisting the draft. The atrocity of the My Lai massacre and its subsequent cover-up haunted the minds of American citizens, who had difficulty imagining our military involved in anything but a good cause. Veterans were coming home changed forever by what they had seen and what they had done.

So the lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment emerged against a backdrop of unsettling revelations about how Charlie Company got out of hand and killed more than five hundred innocent civilians.[i] It was one more confirmation of how ordinary people were capable of extraordinary cruelty. And it offered an explanation.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, short-lived as it was, demonstrated how acutely people respond to the conditions around them. Young male student volunteers were subjected to a surprise "arrest," clothed in immodest smocks, and taken blindfolded to their basement jail. Student guards - their roles were assigned randomly - read them the rules, which were extremely restrictive and easy to break. The most important rule, number seventeen, lay the foundation for what was to come: "Failure to obey any of the . . . rules may result in punishment."[ii] This resulted in an atmosphere of fear and confusion, with guards capriciously assigning punishment for imaginary infractions.

The worst was the night shift. The guards woke the prisoners at all hours, required them to sing their identification numbers, and spent their free time thinking up new ways of humiliating them. All this simply role playing! It sounds eerily familiar.

In 2004, Philip Zimbardo became an expert witness in the court-martial hearings of the American Army Reservists accused of abuses in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He came to understand - once again - how situations transform people for the worse, as we have all witnessed in the gruesome pictures from there. "Some situations," Zimbardo writes, "can exert such powerful influence over us that we can be led to behave in ways we would not, could not, predict was possible in advance."[iii]

Of course, not everyone behaves badly. Some very ugly situations, such as Abu Ghraib prison, produced a few heroes too. That is also why it is important to understand what is going on, both inside and outside the people involved.

Zimbardo learned how the same situation that produced atrocities brought out the best in one person. "The young soldier," Zimbardo remembers, "who blew the whistle on that 'little shop of horrors' [at Abu Ghraib] and exposed its dark deeds to public scrutiny was a twenty-four-year-old Army Reservist, Joe Darby,"[iv] [who also served at the prison]." When Corporal Charles Graner gave Darby a CD "filled with hundreds of digital images and video clips that he and the other guards had taken," Darby was amused at first.[v] But he soon became uncomfortable, then distressed.

After agonizing over what to do, Darby decided to turn the CD in to the authorities. He knew this would make trouble for his buddies. He couldn't have known that he, someone whose "military status was at the bottom rung, a specialist in the Army Reserve," would set off an investigation that would lead all the way to the Secretary of Defense.[vi]

Another discovery that Zimbardo made in his work in the court-martial is that it isn't just a terrible situation that can bring out the worst in people. The conditions at Abu Ghraib were bad for prisoners; they were also bad for the guards. Everyone lived in squalor and constant fear. But it was the "culture of abuse," indicated by the ratcheting up of interrogation methods, instructed and condoned by those who had real power, and who lived far from Iraq, that caused the soldiers to snap.

One elite soldier, Captain Ian Fishback, wrote in a letter to Senator John McCain, "I am a graduate of West Point currently serving as a Captain in the Army Infantry. I have served two combat tours with the 82nd Airborne Division, one each in Afghanistan and Iraq. While I served in the Global War on Terror, the actions and statements of my leadership led me to believe that United States policy did not require application of the Geneva Conventions in Afghanistan or Iraq."[vii]

The culture of abuse that permitted the atrocities at Abu Ghraib did not simply grow out of the deprivation and confinement of that environment, bad as it was. It trickled down from the top. And not just in this one case, but everywhere.

People get into trouble when they suffer from inordinate stress; when they sense that the rules have changed and lose their orientation to right and wrong; when they feel powerless yet have power over those they fear. Put all that emotional chaos in a strange place, take the lid off the Geneva Conventions or the rules of civility, and you have created a crucible for cruelty and degradation. Such abuses don't happen in a vacuum. They belong to a social reality in which we all have a role.

What went wrong at Stanford and at Abu Ghraib is not some freakish case of deviant behavior. Rather it is ordinary people, confronted with an extreme situation, and immersed in a system that has distorted right and wrong. Some resist, but others lose ground. They weaken, they forget who they are. It could happen to any of us.

Philip Zimbardo draws two conclusions from the Stanford Prison Experiment and Abu Ghraib. It is true that "any deed that any human being has committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us."[viii] At the same time, "for reasons we do not yet fully understand, thousands of ordinary people in every country around the world, when they are placed in special circumstances, make the decision to act heroically."[ix]

We have much to learn about ourselves from these examples as well. The self-knowledge of our capacity for good and for evil is a first step. Rather than tell ourselves that we have nothing in common with those who do wrong, we can acknowledge that everything we share - our nature and our culture, can cause us to act as they did. A little vigilance might come in handy. Extending our compassion to those who have done wrong is more challenging for most of us. It helps to understand that we're all in this together; that every one of us is capable of things we find hard to imagine. Compassion for others is an expression of civility, the realization that all human behavior is connected. Ultimately it is the only thing that keeps us safe.

This week's news brought us more debate about torture, as the nominee for Attorney General faced the Senate Judiciary Committee. We may wonder how this came to be the issue of the day, and if Zimbardo is on to something important, we need to find out. Such horror may seem distant, but it comes closer than we think. Our only defense is decency and civility, carefully cultivated so that they are always there, wherever we end up. Let us ask nothing less of ourselves or those who lead us.

[i] Philip Zimbardo, "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" (New York: Random House, 2007), p. 373.
[ii] Ibid., p. 45.
[iii] Ibid., p. 212.
[iv] Ibid., p. 330.
[v] Ibid., p. 330.
[vi] Ibid., p. 331.
[vii] Ibid., p. 424.
[viii] Ibid., p. 211.
[ix] Ibid., p. 488.