In 1971 Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo came up with the idea for a radical experiment to investigate the effects of prison conditions on the behaviour of inmates and prison guards. He advertised for paid volunteers to take part in the study. These volunteers underwent psychological tests to root out all but the most "normal" subjects. Those selected were then denoted as either guards or prisoners on a random basis.

The prison was constructed in the basement of Stanford University's psychology department building, complete with cells, communal area and solitary confinement cell.

Those designated as prisoners were picked up by real police officers, booked, fingerprinted, strip-searched, deloused and made to wear gowns with their numbers sewn into them with no underclothes. On their heads they wore stockings, on their feet rubber sandals, and a chain was bolted to their ankles to remind them of their status at all times.

The guards had to wear identical khaki uniforms with mirrored sunglasses. They were told to keep the prisoners in line but given little advice on how to achieve this. Guards referred to prisoners by their numbers, prisoners addressed all guards as "Mr. Correctional Officer". The activities of the participants were observed using hidden video cameras.

Within less than 24 hours of the start of the experiment the prisoners had started a riot, and the guards had responded with physical and psychological force. They tamed the prisoners using icy blasts from CO2 fire extinguishers, taking their gowns, blankets and beds from them as a punishment. It was no longer a game.

The first prisoner broke down on the second day, and further days brought similar psychological collapse from one inmate a day, until the experiment broke down on only the sixth day of a proposed two weeks. All the prisoners were glad the ordeal was over. The guards wanted to carry on. The reason Zimbardo felt compelled to terminate the experiment lay in what he had seen on the video tapes recorded on the hidden cameras during the night shifts.

Guards were submitting the inmates to acts of psychological humiliation. Bags were placed over their heads. They were made to play leap-frog with each other, causing the jumper's genitals to come into contact with the head of the inmate he was jumping over. They were made to simulate acts of gay sex with each other. Sound familiar?





Over thirty years later, echoes of the experiment came back to haunt Zimbardo when it was found that American army reservists at Abu Ghraib had resorted to uncannily similar methods of humiliation with Iraqi prisoners. He could not have been totally surprised when he was called upon to act as an expert witness for the defense of one of the Abu Ghraib guards. This gave Zimbardo full access to the documentation and photos relating to the abuse, as well as the opportunity to interview the defendant regarding what had happened in the prison. His thoughts on the subject are recorded on the Edge.org website.

These terrible deeds form an interesting analog in America, because there are two things we are curious to understand about Abu Ghraib. First, how did the soldiers get so far out of hand? And secondly, why would the soldiers take pictures of themselves in positions that make them legally culpable? The ones that are on trial now are the ones in those pictures, although obviously there are many more people involved in various ways. We can understand why they did so not only by applying the basic social-psychological processes from the Stanford prison study, but also by analyzing what was unique in Abu Ghraib.

There are several important concepts. First, in both cases there's the deindividuation, the sense of anonymity. The CIA agents, the civilian interrogators, never wore uniforms or showed identification. In all of the pictures the soldiers were typically not wearing uniforms. They often had their tops off. That's a violation of military protocol, because even in a prison you're supposed to be wearing your uniform. In the 1970s the police would do that during student riots against the Vietnam War. They would take off their jackets with their names and ID numbers. I was at Columbia University in a police riot, and I was at Stanford in a police riot, and the first thing the cops did was to take off anything that identified themselves, or put on gas masks when there was no gassing, only to create a state of anonymity.

At Abu Ghraib you had the social modeling in which somebody takes the lead in doing something. You had the dehumanization, the use of labels of the other as inferior, as worthless. There was a diffusion of responsibility such that nobody was personally accountable. The Stanford prison study identified a whole set of principles, all of which you can see are totally applicable in this setting.

The other thing, of course, is that you had low-level army reservists who had no "mission-specific" training in how to do this difficult, new job. There was little or no supervision of them on the night and there was literally no accountability. This went on for months in which the abuses escalated over time. This also happened in my study. Each day it got worse and worse.

And then there is the hidden factor of boredom. One of the main contributors to evil, violence, and hostility in all prisons that we underplay is the boredom factor. In fact, the worst things that happened in our prisons occurred during the night shifts. Guards came on at ten o'clock and had eight hours to kill when nothing was happening. They made things happen by turning the prisoners into their playthings, not out of evil motives, but because this was what was available to break through the boredom. Also at play in the prison in Abu Ghraib was extreme fear among the guards because of the constant mortar attacks that had killed soldiers and prisoners, and escape attempts.

Dehumanization also occurred because the prisoners often had no prison clothes available, or were forced to be naked as a humiliation tactic by the military police and higher ups. There were too many of them, in a few months the number soared from 400 to over a thousand. They didn't have regular showers, did not speak English, and they stank. Under these conditions it's easy for guards to come to think of the prisoners as animals, and dehumanization processes set in.

When you put that set of horrendous work conditions and external factors together, it creates an evil barrel. You could put virtually anybody in it and you're going to get this kind of evil behavior. The Pentagon and the military say that the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise good barrel. That's the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental social psychology, says that's the wrong analysis. It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that 'little shop of horrors.'

Coming from New York, I know that if you go by a delicatessen, and you put a sweet cucumber in the vinegar barrel, the cucumber might say, "No, I want to retain my sweetness." But it's hopeless. The barrel will turn the sweet cucumber into a pickle. You can't be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel. My sense is that we have the evil barrel of war, into which we've put this evil barrel of this prison—it turns out actually all of the military prisons have had similar kinds of abuses—and what you get is the corruption of otherwise good people.

I was recently engaged as an expert witness for the defense of one of the Abu Ghraib night shift guards in his court martial trial. As such, I had access to all of the horror images that various soldiers took of their infamous deeds in action, along with most of the reports of the official investigations, spending a day with the defendant and his wife, arranging to have various psychological assessments made, and checking on his background and army reserve record.

In addition to realizing the relevance of my earlier research to understanding some of the forces acting on him and the other night shift soldiers, it became apparent that he was also totally abused by the situation that the military had thrust upon him. Image the cumulative stress of working 12 hour night shifts, 7 days a week, with not a day off for 40 days! Also regularly missing breakfast and lunch because he slept through them having finished his tour of duty at 4AM and sleeping in a small cell in another part of the prison that he rarely left. When he complained about children mixed with adult inmates or mentally ill or those with contagious TB among the prisoners, he was reprimanded, but rewarded for helping to get confessions by softening up the inmates. Not once was there any official supervision on his night shift that he could rely on. There were insufficient guards, 8 for 1000 inmates and none had been adequately trained for this tough job. His psychological testing and my interview revealed a young man who had not a single symptom of pathology that he brought into that prison; the situation was the pathological ingredient that infected his reason and judgment. Indeed, in many ways, this soldier is an American iconógood husband, father, worker, patriotic, religious, with many friends and a long history of having lived a most normal, moral small town life.

Despite my detailed trial testimony about all situational and systemic forces influencing his distorted group mentality, the judge threw the book at him, giving him 8 years in prison and many other penalties. He refused to acknowledge what many of the official investigations clearly revealed, that the abuses at Abu Ghraib could have prevented or would not have occurred were it not for "a failure or lack of leadership." Some reports list the officers and agencies responsible by name, but they are likely never to be considered bad apples, but only the custodians of a barrel that had some defects. The judge, and juries, in recent military jury trials, minimized the powerful situational and systemic factors that engulfed these young men and women. Their actions were assumed to be products of free will, rational choice and personal accountability. I argue not so when deindividuation, group mind and the host of stress, exhaustion, sleep deprivation and other psychological states are at play. They become transformed, just as the good angel, Lucifer, was transformed into the devil. Situations matter much more than most people realize or can acknowledge.

I've been teaching bright college students for nearly 50 years, and it's hard to get them to appreciate the situationist's analysis of evil, prejudice, or any kind of pathological behavior because our whole society is so wedded to the dispositional perspective: Good people do good deeds, and bad people do bad deeds. It's part of our institutional thinking. It's what psychiatry is all about. It's what medicine is all about. It's what the legal system is all about. And it's what religious systems are all about. We put good inside of people, and we put bad inside of people. It's so ingrained in the way we think, but the situationist's perspective says that although that may sometimes be true, we need to acknowledge that there can be powerful, yet subtle social forces in given settings that have potentially transformative power over us.

That's why Lord of the Flies had such a big impact. How could it be that just changing your appearance could make you kills when such an activity was previously alien to you? That's still a very difficult message to get across. You can tell students that the majority of subjects in the Milgram experiment went all the way. How likely is it that you would do it? "Oh no, I'm not that kind of person," they say. Well, the majority of guards in my study did brutal things. If you were a guard what would you do? "I would be a good guard," they answer.

It's partly a self-serving bias. We want to believe we are good, we are different, we are better, or we are superior. But this body of social-psychological research—and there are obviously many more experiments in addition to mine and Milgram's—shows that the majority of good, ordinary, normal people can be easily seduced, tempted, or initiated into behaving in ways that they say they never would. In 30 minutes we got them stepping across that line. I don't know, but I would bet that if you went to more collectivist cultures, cultures that focus on the community or the group as the unit rather than the individual, they might buy into a situationalist approach more freely.

The other important thing is to see this as a progression. If the Stanford prison study had continued on for three months then I'd have to predict that there would have been a steady increase in the level of dehumanization and degradation that might have rivaled the abuses at Abu Ghraib.