Zimbardo's experiment predicted the abuses at Abu Ghraib.
By
Rachel
on February 14, 2007
See links like this: http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct04/goodbad.html
Zimbardo ran the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students who were carefully screened for psychological health were randomly assigned to be prisoners or guards in a mock jail to test the strength of roles on behavior. It was one of the classic, nobody realized the results would prove to be so strongly true that the experiment had to be ended early after ethical abuses.
Most people put into certain situations will act unethically. And the soldiers who were at Abu Ghraib were not sufficiently trained in the ways they would need to be to combat this effect (it's hard to combat, but there is education that can help).
You can google for more information. There is a site saying that Zimbardo's experiment is not an accurate analogy, because his guards didn't use physical violence. However, they were strictly forbidden from doing so, that was enforced, and also the experiment was cut short early from the expected two weeks. Abu Ghraib went on far, far longer than two weeks.
Agreed
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5
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Discussion (9)
You are absolutely correct, the findings of the Stanford experiment match closely with the atrocities committed by American troops. Can you substantiate that Zimbardo's experiment was a prediction of troop behavior in wartime, not a finding about the way people assume roles? As I see it, Zimbardo's evidence implies that this sort of behavior is much more widespread than can be classified as solely the actions of people the government pays to be violent.
More importantly, can you link to any type of educational material on how best to combat this sort of behavior? Certainly the people who blew the whistle were heroes. Where/from whom can I learn to be a hero?
Here is some info:
http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2004/10/29/profZimbardoFaultsRumsfeldForAbuGhraib
Generally the training mentioned is training about when to disobey orders. Being consciously aware of the possible situations and what you are expected to do in advance is a big part of it. Military are supposed to be trained explicitly about what is not okay, what is an illegal order, and when they should take action against their own people. From what I've read, a lot of people involved had insufficient training because of the need for so many people.
The other way to resist such things is to regularly look internally for guidance rather than to your peers. This has been found to generally be the consistent factor in anomalies. Generally people with strong faith, but it can be any belief system that makes them look to it for what to do regardless of what everyone else does. This may sound good, but it's also what psychopaths do. There's a reason most people aren't like this.
Claims inspired by this comment
I have a list of everyone who is allowed to tell me what to think. Conveniently, this list also allows me to legally operate motor vehicles.Most of the prisoners at A G were still attached to their HEADS!
FWIW, Zimbardo got into hot water in the mid-80s for an elective course where students could opt out of the final ... by attending a cult initiation and returning to write a report about it. One of my friends was in it, and he opted to go to a Moonies retreat in Berkeley for a weekend. Unfortunately, not enough of his students returned to Stanford.
Wow... scary. I wish I knew more about how to help people who are getting sucked into cults. I doubt I'd be easily sucked into a cult, because of the way I was raised, I probably fall into the minority of people who do not look to others for their ethical principles. (Yes, that makes me more likely to be a psychopath, but I don't think i am one.) However, being influenced by others isn't a bad thing unless the influence is bad. And I'd like to help other good people not get sucked in.
On a side note, I'm not so certain of that that I really want to explore cults. I know how easy it is to overestimate how special you are.
It was creepy. My friend was the son of a popular political cartoonist, he went on to law school at UCLA - not naive or gullible in any sense, but even he had some struggle with leaving the Moonies session.
There was a seminar also by the parents of one student who had left but later gone through a forced deprogramming. I used to have their textbook - will try to find it.
Out of curiosity one time I went to see what an EST recruitment looked like - it was cheesier than I'd imagined. Not quite the Moonies!
What does EST stand for?
This is interesting reading... "EST" stands for Erhard Seminars Training, a social phenomenon from the 1970s which was somewhere on the cultist spectrum between Moonies and, say, LinkedIn.com
FWIW, Scientology treats EST as an enemy (read: competition).
BTW guys, sorry to be off-topic but it's a good idea to use tinyurl.com or a similar service for links that are really long.... Otherwise the long link tends to screw up the page layout and reduce legibility in at least some browsers by causing overlapping text between sections. A word to the wise :)