The Lucifer Effect

On Monday night [2/11/2008] Stephen Colbert interviewed Dr. Zimbardo. They talked about Zimbardo's book "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how Good People Turn Evil". The book is based on the results of an experiment conducted in 1971. You can watch the interview here:

In 1971 Phillip Zimbardo of Stanford University conducted a psychological experiment. Taking 24 healthy, normal college students he conducted a prison experiment.

Our study of prison life began, then, with an average group of healthy, intelligent, middle-class males. These boys were arbitrarily divided into two groups by a flip of the coin. Half were randomly assigned to be guards, the other to be prisoners. It is important to remember that at the beginning of our experiment there were no differences between boys assigned to be a prisoner and boys assigned to be a guard.

The results of the experiment were astounding to say the least. In the space of 6 days, not only the "subjects" (the students assigned to the roles of Guards and Prisoners) were completely absorbed in the role playing, but also Dr. Zimbardo.

I briefly described what we were up to, and Gordon asked me a very simple question: "Say, what's the independent variable in this study?"

To my surprise, I got really angry at him. Here I had a prison break on my hands. The security of my men and the stability of my prison was at stake, and now, I had to deal with this bleeding-heart, liberal, academic, effete dingdong who was concerned about the independent variable! It wasn't until much later that I realized how far into my prison role I was at that point -- that I was thinking like a prison superintendent rather than a research psychologist.

The experiment was stopped less than half-way through the planned time because the "guards" had become so brutal and the prisoners had completely lost their sense of identity. Torture and Imprisonment The slideshow is well worth watching and the discussion questions are well worth pondering. On slide 33 the discussion question asks:

In 2003 U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners held at Abu Ghraib, 20 miles west of Baghdad. The prisoners were stripped, made to wear bags over their heads, and sexually humiliated while the guards laughed and took photographs. How is this abuse similar to or different from what took place in the Stanford Prison Experiment?

It appears it is "human nature" to exploit a position of power. This goes a long way towards explaining what happened at Abu Ghraib and provides a good foundation to exploring the true meaning of "humanity". The websites linked to in this commentary provide a good overview of the experiment and Dr. Zimbardo's ongoing study of "evil".