Zoomie
05-19-2004, 04:08 PM
I don't know if this was ever posted before, so here it is. Now I'm not supporting the abuses or anything related to them, I think what they did was totally wrong.
*****
Experiments in 1971 foreshadow abuses
Situations drove subjects to do horrible things
By John Schwartz
New York Times News Service
Posted May 13 2004
In 1971, researchers at Stanford University created a simulated prison in the basement of the campus psychology building. They randomly assigned 24 students to be either prison guards or prisoners for two weeks.
Within days, the "guards" had become swaggering and sadistic, to the point of placing bags over the prisoners' heads, forcing them to strip naked and encouraging them to perform ****** acts.
The landmark Stanford experiment and studies like it give insight into how ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, do horrible things--like the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
What is the distance between "normal" and "monster?" Can anyone become a torturer?
Such questions have been explored over the decades by philosophers and social scientists, and they come up anew whenever shocking cases of abuse burst upon the national consciousness--whether in the interrogation room, the police station or the high school locker room.
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "banality of evil" to describe the averageness of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. Social psychologists pursued the question more systematically, doing experiments that demonstrated the power of situations to determine human behavior.
`Not surprised'
Philip Zimbardo, a leader of the Stanford prison study, said that while the rest of the world was shocked by the images from Iraq, "I was not surprised that it happened."
"I have exact, parallel pictures of prisoners with bags over their heads," from the 1971 study, he said.
At one point, he said, the guards in the fake prison ordered their prisoners to strip and used a rudimentary *** joke to humiliate them.
Zimbardo ended the experiment the next day, more than a week earlier than planned.
Prisons, where the balance of power is so unequal, tend to be brutal and abusive places unless great effort is made to control the guards' base impulses, he said. At Stanford and in Iraq, he added, "It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches."
To the extent that the Abu Ghraib guards acted, as some have argued, at the request of intelligence officers, other studies, performed 40 years ago by Stanley Milgram, then a psychology professor at Yale University, can also offer some explanation, researchers said.
In a famous series of experiments, Milgram told test subjects that they were taking part in a study about teaching through punishment.
The subjects were instructed by a researcher in a white lab coat to deliver electric shocks to another participant, the "student."
Every time the student gave an incorrect answer to a question, the subject was ordered to deliver a shock. The shocks started small but got progressively stronger at the researcher's insistence, with labels on the machine indicating jolts of increasing intensity--up to a huge 450 volts.
The shock machine was a fake, however, and the victims were actors who moaned and wailed. But to the test subjects, the experience was all too real.
Most exhibited great anguish as they carried out the instructions. But a stunning 65 percent of the participants obeyed the commands to administer the electric shocks all the way up to the last, potentially lethal switch, marked "XXX."
Emotions of war
Charles Strozier, director of the Center on Terrorism and Public Safety at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the prison guards in Iraq might feel that the emotions of war and the threat of terrorism gave them permission to dehumanize the prisoners.
"There has been a serious, seismic change in attitude after 9/11 in the country in its attitude about torture," Strozier said, a shift that is evident in polling and in public debate. In the minds of many Americans, he said, "It's OK to torture now, to get information that will save us from terrorism."
Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the lead researchers in the Stanford experiment, said prison abuses can be prevented.
"The basic message of the study is that prisons are, basically, destructive environments that have to be guarded against at all times," Haney said. He added that regular training and discipline can keep prisons from degenerating into pits of abuse, but the vigilance must be constant, with outside monitoring as well.
Without outsiders watching, Haney said, "what's regarded as appropriate treatment can shift over time" so "they don't realize how badly they're behaving and, as in this case, they take pictures of it.
"If anything, the smiling faces in those pictures suggest a total loss of perspective--a drift in the standard of humane treatment."
Experiments like those at Stanford and Yale are no longer done, in part because researchers think they involved so much deception and such high levels of stress--four of the Stanford prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns--that the experiments are unethical.
*****
Experiments in 1971 foreshadow abuses
Situations drove subjects to do horrible things
By John Schwartz
New York Times News Service
Posted May 13 2004
In 1971, researchers at Stanford University created a simulated prison in the basement of the campus psychology building. They randomly assigned 24 students to be either prison guards or prisoners for two weeks.
Within days, the "guards" had become swaggering and sadistic, to the point of placing bags over the prisoners' heads, forcing them to strip naked and encouraging them to perform ****** acts.
The landmark Stanford experiment and studies like it give insight into how ordinary people can, under the right circumstances, do horrible things--like the mistreatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
What is the distance between "normal" and "monster?" Can anyone become a torturer?
Such questions have been explored over the decades by philosophers and social scientists, and they come up anew whenever shocking cases of abuse burst upon the national consciousness--whether in the interrogation room, the police station or the high school locker room.
Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "banality of evil" to describe the averageness of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. Social psychologists pursued the question more systematically, doing experiments that demonstrated the power of situations to determine human behavior.
`Not surprised'
Philip Zimbardo, a leader of the Stanford prison study, said that while the rest of the world was shocked by the images from Iraq, "I was not surprised that it happened."
"I have exact, parallel pictures of prisoners with bags over their heads," from the 1971 study, he said.
At one point, he said, the guards in the fake prison ordered their prisoners to strip and used a rudimentary *** joke to humiliate them.
Zimbardo ended the experiment the next day, more than a week earlier than planned.
Prisons, where the balance of power is so unequal, tend to be brutal and abusive places unless great effort is made to control the guards' base impulses, he said. At Stanford and in Iraq, he added, "It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches."
To the extent that the Abu Ghraib guards acted, as some have argued, at the request of intelligence officers, other studies, performed 40 years ago by Stanley Milgram, then a psychology professor at Yale University, can also offer some explanation, researchers said.
In a famous series of experiments, Milgram told test subjects that they were taking part in a study about teaching through punishment.
The subjects were instructed by a researcher in a white lab coat to deliver electric shocks to another participant, the "student."
Every time the student gave an incorrect answer to a question, the subject was ordered to deliver a shock. The shocks started small but got progressively stronger at the researcher's insistence, with labels on the machine indicating jolts of increasing intensity--up to a huge 450 volts.
The shock machine was a fake, however, and the victims were actors who moaned and wailed. But to the test subjects, the experience was all too real.
Most exhibited great anguish as they carried out the instructions. But a stunning 65 percent of the participants obeyed the commands to administer the electric shocks all the way up to the last, potentially lethal switch, marked "XXX."
Emotions of war
Charles Strozier, director of the Center on Terrorism and Public Safety at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said the prison guards in Iraq might feel that the emotions of war and the threat of terrorism gave them permission to dehumanize the prisoners.
"There has been a serious, seismic change in attitude after 9/11 in the country in its attitude about torture," Strozier said, a shift that is evident in polling and in public debate. In the minds of many Americans, he said, "It's OK to torture now, to get information that will save us from terrorism."
Craig Haney, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and one of the lead researchers in the Stanford experiment, said prison abuses can be prevented.
"The basic message of the study is that prisons are, basically, destructive environments that have to be guarded against at all times," Haney said. He added that regular training and discipline can keep prisons from degenerating into pits of abuse, but the vigilance must be constant, with outside monitoring as well.
Without outsiders watching, Haney said, "what's regarded as appropriate treatment can shift over time" so "they don't realize how badly they're behaving and, as in this case, they take pictures of it.
"If anything, the smiling faces in those pictures suggest a total loss of perspective--a drift in the standard of humane treatment."
Experiments like those at Stanford and Yale are no longer done, in part because researchers think they involved so much deception and such high levels of stress--four of the Stanford prisoners suffered emotional breakdowns--that the experiments are unethical.