You, Me and the Making of Evil

Tuesday’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross featured Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist who was responsible for the landmark Stanford prison experiment…” in which student volunteers in a mock prison transformed with startling speed into sadistic guards or emotionally broken prisoners.” Things got so bad that Zimbardo had to call off the experiment after six days, instead of letting it play out for the scheduled two weeks.

Like many of you, I’ve heard about the 1971 experiment for years, and still I found Zimbardo’s recounting of the details on radio to be startling.

He was on the show hawking his new book called “The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil” that talks about the psychological forces he has observed 36 years of research, from the Palo Alto-based experiment to a sociological analysis of the events at Abu Ghraib.

In the book and in Monday’s interview, Zimbardo makes one overriding and extremely important point: When people in positions of power are encouraged, either by the nature of the job, by their superiors, or by circumstances—to dehumanize those within their control, they too will become dehumanized and their behavior will reflect that dehumanization. It happens to prison guards, to police (most particularly those doing gang enforcement), to service men and woman—as demonstrated in circumstances like the Haditha massacre, and at Abu Ghraib (about which Zimbardo has much to say, on radio and in the book, as he got to some some of military police involved quite well).

It can happen to the best of us, says Zimbardo. It even happened to him in the course of the Stanford experiment. He confessed he might not have aborted the research had his girlfriend at the time not broken down sobbing, and pleaded with him to call the damned thing off, when he brought her to the research site. “It was the slap in the face I needed,” he said.

What Zimbardo’s work suggests is that, when we train guards and cops and soldiers, we need to build into the training an anti-dehumanization component—or there will always, always, always be hell to pay. (And hell is exactly what we’ve got in California prisons—where the cycle of dehumanization-–between guards and prisoners, and between prisoners themselves—has spiraled far out of control.)

This will require some sophisticated and nuanced thinking. Obviously, we can’t have combat soldiers getting all touchy-feely if they are to remain alive and effective. On the other hand, we can’t send our young men and women into harms way with no preparation for what may befall them psychologically, then be shocked when they murder houses full of civilians.

Ditto, cops. Ditto prison guards.

“Although it is often hard to read about evil up close and personal,” writes Zimbardo, “we must understand its causes in order to contain and transform it through wise decisions and innovative communal actions. Indeed, in my view, there is no more urgent task that faces us today.”

Well, yeah.