Is man essentially good or evil?

Tags: 1963, 1971, 2004, Abu Ghraib, Cruelty, Derren Brown, Disobedience, Evil, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Good, Milgram experiment, Obedience, Philip Zimbardo, Prison, Psychology, Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanford University, Stanley Milgram, War

The eternal question

The line between good and evil is permeable and almost anyone can be induced to cross it when pressured by situational forces.

- Philip Zimbardo

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evil doer; nothing more difficult than understanding him.

- Dostoevsky

Privileged people tend to think of good and evil as separate worlds, but Zimbardo argues that the boundaries between the world of good and evil is far more gradual.

Zimbardo notes that the prerequisite to evil is power – without it, evil cannot exercise itself and as a result rarely manifests in human behavior.

Three things appear to need to happen before evil can truly present itself in the general healthy human: permission (from group or higher authority), ability (power and a lack of fear of retaliation), an ‘us against them’ philosophy (dehumanization). Given these three conditions, the actor might not even view his or her behavior as evil, and be completely unaware of acting outside of a higher moral standard that is more inclusive of all beings.

The human capacity for evil deeds

Zimbardo illustrates his hypothesis by pointing at various psychological experiments.

The Milgram Experiment

First, he shows us the research of Stanley Milgram in 1963. Milgram wanted to find out if the holocaust could occur again in America. The question he asked was: “would you electrocute a stranger if Hitler asked you to?”

Disguising his research as an experiment to test peoples abilities to memorize, he published an ad and accepted 1,000 ordinary people to take part.

Milgram’s original ad:

In each session, three people take part in the experiment: the “experimenter”; the “learner” (“victim”); and the “teacher” (participant). Only the “teacher” is an actual participant, i.e., unaware about the actual setup, while the “learner” is a confederate of the experimenter. The role of the experimenter was played by a stern, impassive biology teacher dressed in a grey technician’s coat, and the victim (learner) was played by a 47-year-old Irish-American accountant trained to act for the role. The participant and the learner were told by the experimenter that they would be participating in an experiment helping his study of memory and learning in different situations.

The subject was given the title teacher, and the confederate, learner. The participants drew lots to ‘determine’ their roles. Unknown to them, both slips said “teacher”, and the actor claimed to have the slip that read “learner”, thus guaranteeing that the participant would always be the “teacher”. At this point, the “teacher” and “learner” were separated into different rooms where they could communicate but not see each other. In one version of the experiment, the confederate was sure to mention to the participant that he had a heart condition.

The “teacher” was given an electric shock from the electro-shock generator as a sample of the shock that the “learner” would supposedly receive during the experiment. The “teacher” was then given a list of word pairs which he was to teach the learner. The teacher began by reading the list of word pairs to the learner. The teacher would then read the first word of each pair and read four possible answers. The learner would press a button to indicate his response. If the answer was incorrect, the teacher would administer a shock to the learner, with the voltage increasing in 15-volt increments for each wrong answer. If correct, the teacher would read the next word pair.

The subjects believed that for each wrong answer, the learner was receiving actual shocks. In reality, there were no shocks. After the confederate was separated from the subject, the confederate set up a tape recorder integrated with the electro-shock generator, which played pre-recorded sounds for each shock level. After a number of voltage level increases, the actor started to bang on the wall that separated him from the subject. After several times banging on the wall and complaining about his heart condition, all responses by the learner would cease.

At this point, many people indicated their desire to stop the experiment and check on the learner. Some test subjects paused at 135 volts and began to question the purpose of the experiment. Most continued after being assured that they would not be held responsible. A few subjects began to laugh nervously or exhibit other signs of extreme stress once they heard the screams of pain coming from the learner.

If at any time the subject indicated his desire to halt the experiment, he was given a succession of verbal prods by the experimenter, in this order:

1. Please continue.
2. The experiment requires that you continue.
3. It is absolutely essential that you continue.
4. You have no other choice, you must go on.

If the subject still wished to stop after all four successive verbal prods, the experiment was halted. Otherwise, it was halted after the subject had given the maximum 450-volt shock three times in succession

The study is all about the power of institutions. What if all authority was handed to an authoritative few, how many would follow him?

Results of the Milgram Experiment

Before conducting the experiment, Milgram polled fourteen Yale University senior-year psychology majors as to what they thought would be the results. All of the poll respondents believed that only a few (average 1.2%) would be prepared to inflict the maximum voltage. Milgram also informally polled his colleagues and found that they, too, believed very few subjects would progress beyond a very strong shock.

In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40) of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment. Only one participant steadfastly refused to administer shocks below the 300-volt level.

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, “The Perils of Obedience”, writing:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Quoted from Milgram, Stanley. (1974), ”The Perils of Obedience.” Harper’s Magazine. Abridged and adapted from Obedience to Authority.

The BBC reprised the Milgram Experiment:

The Milgram Experiment in popular culture:

Derren Brown subconsciously influences middle management business men and women with no previous criminal record to pull an armed robbery without ever directly mentioning the idea to them.

The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard, conducted by Zimbardo himself in 1971. Twenty-four undergraduates were selected out of 70 to play the roles of both guards and prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Roles were assigned at random.

The “prison” itself was in the basement of Stanford’s Jordan Hall, which had been converted into a mock jail. An undergraduate research assistant was the “warden” and Zimbardo the “superintendent”. Zimbardo set up a number of specific conditions on the participants which he hoped would promote disorientation, depersonalisation and deindividualisation.

The researchers provided weapons—wooden batons — and clothing that simulated that of a prison guard—khaki shirt and pants from a local military surplus store. They were also given mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact.

Prisoners wore ill-fitting smocks and stocking caps, rendering them constantly uncomfortable. Guards called prisoners by their assigned numbers, sewn on their uniforms, instead of by name. A chain around their ankles reminded them of their roles as prisoners.

The researchers held an “orientation” session for guards the day before the experiment, during which they were told that they could not physically harm the prisoners. In The Stanford Prison Study video, quoted in Haslam & Reicher, 2003, Zimbardo is seen telling the guards, “You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they’ll have no privacy… We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we’ll have all the power and they’ll have none.”

The participants chosen to play the part of prisoners were “arrested” at their homes and “charged” with armed robbery. The local Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo with the arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners, which included fingerprinting and taking mug shots. At the prison, they were transported to the mock prison where they were strip-searched and given their new identities.

The experiment quickly grew out of hand. Prisoners suffered — and accepted — sadistic and humiliating treatment from the guards. The high level of stress progressively led them from rebellion to inhibition. By the experiment’s end, many showed severe emotional disturbances.

After a relatively uneventful first day, a riot broke out on the second day. The guards volunteered to work extra hours and worked together to break the prisoner revolt, attacking the prisoners with fire extinguishers without supervision from the research staff.

A false rumor spread that one of the prisoners, who asked to leave the experiment, would lead companions to free the rest of the prisoners. The guards dismantled the prison and moved the inmates to another secure location. When no breakout attempt occurred, the guards were angry about having to rebuild the prison, so they took it out on the prisoners.

Guards forced the prisoners to count off repeatedly as a way to learn their prison numbers, and to reinforce the idea that this was their new identity. Guards soon used these prisoner counts as another method to harass the prisoners, using physical punishment such as protracted exercise for errors in the prisoner count. Sanitary conditions declined rapidly, made worse by the guards refusing to allow some prisoners to urinate or defecate. As punishment, the guards would not let the prisoners empty the sanitation bucket. Mattresses were a valued item in the spartan prison, so the guards would punish prisoners by removing their mattresses, leaving them to sleep on concrete. Some prisoners were forced to go nude as a method of degradation, and some were subjected to sexual humiliation, including simulated sodomy.

Zimbardo cited his own absorption in the experiment he guided, and in which he actively participated as Prison Superintendent. On the fourth day, some prisoners were talking about trying to escape. Zimbardo and the guards attempted to move the prisoners to the more secure local police station, but officials there said they could no longer participate in Zimbardo’s experiment.

Several guards became increasingly cruel as the experiment continued. Experimenters said that approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early.

Zimbardo argued that the prisoner participants had internalized their roles, based on the fact that some had stated that they would accept parole even with the attached condition of forfeiting all of their experiment-participation pay. Yet, when their parole applications were all denied, none of the prisoner participants quit the experiment. Zimbardo argued they had no reason for continued participation in the experiment after having lost all monetary compensation, yet they did, because they had internalized the prisoner identity, they thought themselves prisoners, hence, they stayed.

Prisoner No. 416, a newly admitted stand-by prisoner, expressed concern over the treatment of the other prisoners. The guards responded with more abuse. When he refused to eat his sausages, saying he was on a hunger strike, guards confined him in a closet and called it solitary confinement. The guards used this incident to turn the other prisoners against No. 416, saying the only way he would be released from solitary confinement was if they gave up their blankets and slept on their bare mattresses, which all but one refused to do.

Zimbardo concluded the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student he was then dating (and later married), objected to the appalling conditions of the prison after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that of more than fifty outside persons who had seen the prison, Maslach was the only one who questioned its morality. After only six days of a planned two weeks’ duration, the Stanford Prison experiment was shut down.

The Stanford experiment ended on August 20, 1971, only six days after it began instead of the fourteen it was supposed to have lasted. The experiment’s result has been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. It is also used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority.

In psychology, the results of the experiment are said to support situational attribution of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants’ behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities. In this way, it is compatible with the results of the also-famous Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be damaging electric shocks to a confederate of the experimenter.

The entire experiment was filmed, with excerpts soon made publicly available, leaving some disturbed by the resulting film.

Correlations with terror in Abu Ghraib

When the Abu Ghraib military prisoner torture and abuse scandal was published in March 2004, many observers immediately were struck by its similarities to the Stanford Prison experiment — among them, Philip Zimbardo, who paid close attention to the details of the story. He was dismayed by official military and government efforts shifting the blame for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison on to “a few bad apples” rather than acknowledging it as possibly systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration system.

I must say, when I saw those pictures on 20/20—on 60 minutes, I, excuse me, the pictures of the abuse. I was shocked the way most people are. Of course I saw the parallels immediately with the Stanford Prison Experiment, visual images. And immediately what happened was, what always happens when there is a scandal in police departments, or in the military, they blame the individual, it’s a few bad apples. The fact that the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or I guess General Myers said we know it’s not systemic. Well, so I said maybe it’s not bad apples, maybe these are really good American soldiers and they were put in a bad barrel, but how would I know?

When I was invited to be on Chip Frederick’s Defense council—team, it meant I had access to him, I could find out everything there was to know about this young man, everything there was to know about the place and the psychological dynamics of the prison. I had access to all the investigative reports. And so in The Lucifer Effect, I have two whole chapters on what Abu Ghraib really was like and what the situation was like. What was the system? What was the military and Bush administration system that created those horrendous conditions? And so, I testified, essentially talking about how the situation he was in and the other seven soldiers were in, in the basement of that dungeon, how that corrupted him and made him lose his moral compass.

He was dishonorable discharged, he got eight years in prison, they send him to Kuwait in solitaire confinement. They took away 22 years of his retirement pay. This is an all American, super patriotic soldier; he had nine medals and awards, which he really prized. And they stripped him publicly to humiliate him. He’s now in a prison in Leavenworth.

I still have personal contact with him and his family. The sad thing is, the day before he went down to that prison, from everything I know, he was normal, healthy, exactly like one of the good guards in our study. Within a few days, maybe a few weeks actually, he and the other military army reservists. Now, these are not real soldiers, these are military police, these are army reservists, who have no mission specific training, they are not trained to do this job.

He was a guard in a small prison in the states. He now is in charge of a thousand prisoners. Sixty Iraqi police men who are smuggling in weapons, the place is under constant bombardment. Soldiers are dying, prisoners are dying. He’s working a 12-hour shift, seven days a week, 40 days without a day off. Incredible. How could anybody, how could any system allow American soldiers to be under that kind of stress? He and the other soldiers just gave in to the horrors of that situation.

Philip Zimbardo

Environmental conditions and personal responsibility

My analysis is, individuals are always ultimately personally responsible. He and most of the other military police said, I’m guilty—well, they had to say it, because they’re in the pictures, what I call the trophy photos. He is willing to accept punishment. The situational analysis says, we should limit the extent of the punishment, because these are extreme mitigating circumstances. And what I do in The Lucifer Effect, and I have a wonderful website, we just put up called www. lucifereffect.com, we put the system on trial. To say, if you’re going to put these soldiers, these good American soldiers on trial for what they did, my argument has been, the people who create this corrupting situation, they have to be put on trial, too. So, I have a virtual voting booth in which I put George Tenant on trial, the former Head of the CIA, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and President Bush. Because, in various ways, they created that situation which corrupted these good American young men and women.

Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Zimbardo outlines the 7 social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil:

• Mindlessly taking the first small step
• Dehumanization of Others
• De-individuation of the Self (anonymity)
• Diffusion of Personal Responsibility
• Blind obedience to authority
• Uncritical Conformity to group norms
• Passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference.

These 7 elements were applied in Abu Ghraib, and according to Zimbardo it can come as no surprise that the abuses occurred. They are applied in almost every major war.

He uses the Stanford Experiment to illustrate the point:

Well, there are two things about a prison. One is the physical aspects of it. So we took a basement, which were offices that students usually used. We took off the doors, put new doors on with bars. Took a closet and converted it to solitary confinement, meaning a small, tight, dark space, which had a label on “The Hole”. We had quarters where the guards came and changed. I was the superintendent of the prison. We had a warden, David Jaffe, a student in his office. We had a place where visitors could come. We had a place where we would have parole board hearings.

So we created a very—simulated physical environment. And at one end of the hall we had a little window that we could look through watching what was happening with a TV camera. It was covered with theatrical scrims, so they never knew when they were being observed and when they were being filmed. The psychology—psychological aspect of a prison is more subtle.

Before I began the experiment, I taught a summer course at Stanford called, The Psychology of Imprisonment with Carlo Prescott, he was both the consultant to my study and a young man who had just been released from prison after 17 years. So, he was our consultant, but also he was the head of the parole board. Ironically his parole had been denied for 17 previous years.

And what we wanted to do was create essential psychology of imprisonment, and that’s all about power. Every prison is about power. Guards have to assume more and more power and domination, and prisoners have to have their power stripped away. And so that is the ultimate evil of prison. It’s all about power, dominance, and mastery. And that was the same thing we found in Abu Ghraib prison.

But also—so the way that power evolves is, the prisoners have to be ultimately dehumanized. You have to think of them as not your kind, not your kin, as—ultimately you end up thinking of them as animals. And the guards have to be impersonal, distant. Whatever humanity they have when they are home, when they are with their families, that has to be suspended, put on a hook. Because, what they have to do is treat other people in ways that they don’t treat anyone else, those are the people being prisoners.

And so, we’re talking about playing a role, anonymity, dehumanization, and then of course there’s things like being a team member, the guards have to develop a sense of camaraderie. Most of the evil of the world comes about not out of evil motives, but somebody saying get with the program, be a team player, this is what we saw at Enron, this is what we saw in the Nixon administration with their scandal. And I think you are seeing it now, with the current administration.

So, it’s that set of social psychological variables. Oh, the key one is of course diffusion of responsibility. When a person feels, I am not personally responsible, I am not accountable, it’s the role I’m playing or these are the orders I’ve gotten, then you allow yourself to do things you would never do under ordinary circumstances.

So, it’s that mix of the physical environment, psychological environment, which came to be overwhelming. By overwhelming, I mean that, each day the guards would escalate their level of abuse, so that initially it was doing push ups, waking prisoners up in the middle of the night, long counts. Then it got to be personal humiliation. Cursing the guards, and having them curse each other, then finally it devolved into sexually degrading games.

Conclusion: Are humans good or evil?

The answer, as you might suspect, is neither. Apart from a tiny few with criminal or psychopathic tendencies, we all live within a social norm that deeply affects us. Some humans are better at withstanding social pressures to commit evil acts, such as the soldier who finally informed the media about the abuse in Abu Ghraib.

We cannot be good and moral beings if we don’t question who we are and question the values that society places upon us. Do these values truly deliver good results, or can they be oppressive onto others? This takes a lot of introspection, and the training of an eternal muscle that can withstand peer pressure.

Nor can we build a society of morally enlightened people if we don’t question the systems that creates attitudes and maintains them.

Moral good comes from two directions: from the top down and from the inside out. If the two forces aren’t somehow aligned, something will break along the line, and evil will manifest itself.

Compassion for ‘evil-doers’ becomes something entirely different in this light: it is the courage to hold people responsible for their acts, while taking them out or changing an environment that negatively affects them. Compassion then becomes giving them a chance, literally ‘changing their lives’ by changing their environment through our actions.

Zimbardo in his own words:

This dark talk might lead us to believe that humans are somehow twisted, but the truth is that we no longer amuse ourselves with gladiator games and instead have found less destructive entertainment.

Tomorrow, a blog post of hope, as we analyze what we can learn from the most peaceful period in human history.

Tags: 1963, 1971, 2004, Abu Ghraib, Cruelty, Derren Brown, Disobedience, Evil, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Good, Milgram experiment, Obedience, Philip Zimbardo, Prison, Psychology, Stanford Prison Experiment, Stanford University, Stanley Milgram, War