Stirring the beast within - USA/Torture/Terrorism
Tamas Pataki; 6/2/08;
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil; By Philip Zimbardo; Rider and Co, 576pp,
In the summer of 1971 Philip Zimbardo, a social psychologist at Stanford University in California, conducted a remarkable experiment. His team constructed an artificial prison — cells, canteen, isolation hole and so on — in the basement of a campus building. Student volunteers were recruited, vetted for normality on a number of personality measures and randomly assigned as prisoners and guards. The students were paid $US15 a day. The experiment was designed to de-individualise the participants: the guards wore uniforms and mirror sunglasses; the prisoners wore identical white smocks and had stockings over their hair. To start it rolling, the local police were cajoled into arresting the students who were to be prisoners at their homes.
See: The Australian Literary Review; No Internet Text
The aim of the experiment was to determine the extent to which “external features of an institutional setting could override the internal dispositions of the actors in that environment”. Given the researchers’ expectations of prison environments, their aim was, in effect, to explore how good people turn evil. The Stanford prison experiment was intended to last two weeks.
The theoretical backdrop to the experiment is a misty dispute about the springs of human behaviour. As Zimbardo writes in his prolix yet curiously fascinating book, the dispute is between dispositionalists and situationists. The former appeal principally to such factors as genetic constitution, enduring personality traits or character. Thus, John always tells the truth because he is honest and Philip behaves cruelly
because he is a sadist. The situationists, in whose camp Zimbardo sits, are sceptical about the continuity, consistency and causality of character, and emphasise instead determination by the immediate social environment, the circumstances and social systems in which people find themselves. The considerable behavioural regularity that we do observe, according to situationists, is not due to the consistency or integrity of character, to our consistent display of virtues and vices, but to the fact that most of us experience monotonous situational regularity.
The dispute is misty partly because any plausible explanation of human action must take into account disposition and circumstance. So, the only seriously moot issues concern the relative causal contributions of the situation and what we bring to it. However, the disputants, including Zimbardo, do not always see disagreement in quite that clear, irenic light.
The dispute is also immensely important: it broaches our fundamental understanding of agency and moral responsibility. Zimbardo observes that much of modern psychiatry, law and moral evaluation are predicated on dispositionalist conceptions of character: it is on the assumption of autonomous, integrated and enduring character that we mete out personal responsibility and
blame. But if situation is determinative, then it seems that personal responsibility is attenuated or even eliminated. And it happens that a mass of impressive experimental work in the second half of the previous century appears to support the situationists.
Experiments by American psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated the willingness of “honest” subjects to lie in order to conform to group opinion; and his compatriot Stanley Milgram demonstrated, alarmingly, that ordinary people were quite willing to inflict intolerable pain, as it seemed to them, on others, in obedience to authoritative directions. The Stanford experiment was a further dramatic demonstration of the power of situation over disposition.
So, what happened in the Stanford prison? Within two days the participants were seized by their roles. Most of the guards became cruel, more so on night shift than during the day, taunting and humiliating the prisoners. One guard reflected in his diary: “The guard role promotes sadism. The prisoner role promotes confusion and shame. Anybody can be a guard. It’s harder to be on guard against the impulse to be sadistic. It’s a quiet rage, malevolence, you can keep it down but there’s nowhere for it to go.”
Soon the sadism acquired homoerotic features. Half-naked, prisoners were forced to play camels and to mount each other to simulate sodomy and so on. The prisoners’ rapid transition into a kind of delusory institutional dependency was even more remarkable. Some rebelled, and some broke down and had to be removed but, amazingly, the majority remained obstinately obedient to the illusion of their imprisonment. Another guard noted: “They don’t see it as an experiment. It is real and they are fighting to keep their dignity.”
The prisoners’ suffering was real and several were prepared to leave the prison and to forfeit pay — but only if paroled.
Not only the inmates and guards were affected. Playing adjuncts such as prison superintendent and parole board members, Zimbardo and his researchers were also drawn into the experiment’s pernicious social reality. Very few, he remarks, were “able to resist the situational temptations to yield to power and dominance”.
Zimbardo, unfortunately a victim of fashionable phraseology, describes himself as a penitent “architect of evil”. Only the fortuitous intervention of an outsider, his girlfriend, managed to restore him to reality. “What you are doing to those boys is a terrible thing,” she told him.
The experiment was halted after just one week, but it had delivered two important lessons.
First, that situations and the systems that create them are highly determinative of behaviour: “Ordinary people, even good ones,” Zimbardo writes, “can be seduced, recruited, initiated into behaving in evil ways under the sway of powerful systematic and situational forces.” Sometimes Zimbardo affirms a still stronger form of the thesis: “Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us, under the right or wrong situational circumstances.” Second, that situations and systems quickly engulf their creators.
The Lucifer Effect divides naturally into four parts.
The first and longest is a microscopic commentary on the Stanford experiment.
The second is a theoretical discussion of the psychological and social mechanisms underlying situational causation.
The third part, “the driving force” behind the book, concerns the circumstances and nature of the physical and psychological abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Finally, interpolated somewhat artificially, are sections that bring us up to speed with Zimbardo’s latest work in social psychology and on the situational nature of heroism in particular.
The tome is a summary of a life’s work, an overview and integration. But what leaps out immediately is the unresolved problematic that courses through it. Zimbardo embraces the empirical findings but insists they do not imply, as he infelicitously puts it, an “excusiology” for wicked behaviour. Evildoers, he insists, are responsible for the evil they do.
The trouble is that his empirical evidence doesn’t square with this view. It suggests that behaviour is profoundly keyed to the impact of local situations over which the agent usually has no control; and this circumstance threatens to undermine the overarching polemical aims of the book.
In his extensive discussion of abuse, torture and homicide at Abu Ghraib, Zimbardo works hard to mitigate the culpability of the junior military police directly involved in the crimes, while ramping up the condemnation of the senior political, military intelligence and CIA officials who created the systems and circumstances in which the crimes occurred.
But what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, for the gander, too, is situationally motivated. Zimbardo doesn’t resolve this dilemma, but that is scarcely reprehensible because nobody else has either. However, his failure fully to comprehend the depth of the dilemma seriously compromises his argument.
If you were alert for any time during April-May 2004, the antics in the Stanford University basement will appear grotesquely familiar. The graphic exposure of nightlife in Abu Ghraib and of intelligence-gathering activities in similar places certainly wasn’t lost on Zimbardo. He contemplates the distressing but likely possibility that the policies and systems governing the conduct of interrogations were influenced by the lessons of the Stanford experiment: it is unnecessary to instruct guards to abuse and humiliate their charges; it is sufficient to get the
settings of the systems right and the desired ends will follow.
Meticulously and passionately, Zimbardo puts on trial those who created the systems and circumstances that engendered the abuses. “The seeds for the flower of evil that blossomed in the dark dungeon of Abu Ghraib,” he avers, “were planted by the Bush administration.” The policy decisions of George W. Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld and CIA chief George Tenet, the specious interpretation and sidelining of the Geneva protections by administration lawyers such as Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo, and the willing implementation of evidently illicit procedures by the generals created situations in which the crimes of the junior military police, intelligence officers and interrogation contractors were all but inevitable.
Close examination of the many investigations into the systemic and command failures at the military detention centres leads Zimbardo to conclude not only that there were serious failures in command responsibility by senior officers, but direct intent and liability for criminal offences. Yet, as of April 2006, of the 600 accusations of abuse since October 2001, 190 remain un-investigated, 260 have been closed and 150 lower-level personnel have been mildly disciplined. A handful of low-level operatives, “the bad apples” scapegoated by the Bush administration, such as Chip Frederick and Charles Graner, have received the severest punishments. CIA personnel and interrogation contractors directly implicated in murder have gone scot free.
As of April 2006, there has not been a single attempt to prosecute an officer under the doctrine of command responsibility. As for the architects most responsible for designing the conditions and rationale for torture, Rumsfeld and Gonzales, they have departed the Bush administration, impugned but unpunished.
Frederick was one of the guards who took the lead in prisoner abuse and Zimbardo appeared as an expert defence witness at his trial. He had assessed Frederick extensively and found a regular churchgoing guy, super-patriotic, well-regarded by his superiors, efficient, somewhat obsessively neat and evidencing no traces of “sadistic or pathological tendencies” on standard personality tests.
This was no surprise to Zimbardo. The students who participated in the Stanford experiment were also free of pathology; and studies of torturers and death squad executioners in South America and Greece had revealed nothing unusual or deviant in them prior to plying their trade.
It was clear also that Frederick thought he was breaking down prisoners at the behest of military intelligence and CIA officials.
Well before the waves broke, he wrote home ingenuously that “military intelligence had encouraged us and told us, ‘Great job”. Zimbardo argued at the trial that the situation had brought out Frederick’s aberrant behaviours: “Chip’s level of cognitive capacities was indeed overwhelmed by the inordinate load imposed on him by the situational demands he faced nightly at his new, overwhelming job.” The court did not agree: Frederick knew right from wrong and made a rational decision to abuse detainees.
And there is the rub. Situationists have demonstrated that local circumstances exercise a significant influence on personal decision-making: engrossment in a role can master the man; anonymity in aggressor and victim dehumanises both; obedience to authority and the need to belong and to conform to a group can send morality on holiday. But in the end we still seem saddled with the personal executive decision to do wrong, knowing (at some level) that it is wrong. Situational forces seem to create the freedom to err but not the necessity for it.
Zimbardo argues for mitigation: “Individuals and groups who behave immorally or illegally must still be held responsible and legally accountable for their complicity and crimes. However, in determining the severity of their sentence, the situational and systemic factors that caused their behaviour must be taken into account.” But why? Zimbardo provides no principled argument showing situation prevails, in the end, over executive decision-making.
Of course, had Zimbardo argued that situational forces excuse all wickedness, his case against Bush and his senior advisers would collapse, for they too are enmeshed in systems and subject to their influence. In their case Zimbardo does not countenance mitigation or excuse for a moment.
To get to this dead end requires several wrong turns. Zimbardo seriously undervalues the dispositionalist case because he equates evildoing with pathology. Finding no psycho-logical abnormality in his Stanford subjects, in Frederick or in other torturers, he concludes that they could not have brought the disposition to evil with them. Adolf Eichmann, he notes, also was found normal by a dozen psychiatrists: “More normal, at any rate, than I am after having examined him,” quipped one of them.
So Zimbardo wrongly concludes that evil can only be generated by the ambient situation. But the capacity to do evil, and abnormality as measured on standard personality tests are conceptions that mostly pass each other by. Zimbardo’s error is curious because sometimes he is receptive to dispositional forces. He recognises, for example, the “anger, revenge, and outrage at perceived injustice” that motivates some suicide bombers. And he could have listened for that “quiet rage”, noticed by one of the Stanford student guards, that wells up from the past.