Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
In a simulated prison students were randomly assign to play the role of prisoners or the role of guards. The guards became brutal and abusive toward prisoners after just six days, leading Philip Zimbardo to prematurely end the experiment. The experiment showed that institutional forces and peer pressure led normal student volunteer guards to disregard the potential harm of their actions on the other student prisoners. You don't need a motive, all you really need is a situation that facilitates moving across that line of good and evil.
The Lucifer Effect
http://www.lucifereffect.com/
Wikipedia Introduction
The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was a psychological experiment conducted in the summer of 1971. It was a two-week simulation of a prison environment that examined the effects of situational variables on participants' reactions and behaviors. Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo led the research team who administered the study.
Participants were recruited from the local community with an ad in the newspapers offering $15 per day to male students who wanted to participate in a "psychological study of prison life." Volunteers were chosen after assessments of psychological stability, and then randomly assigned to being prisoners or prison guards. Critics have questioned the validity of these methods.
Those volunteers selected to be "guards" were given uniforms specifically to de-individuate them, and instructed to prevent prisoners from escaping. The experiment officially started when "prisoners" were arrested by real Palo Alto police. Over the following five days, psychological abuse of the prisoners by the "guards" became increasingly brutal. After psychologist Christina Maslach visited to evaluate the conditions, she was upset to see how study participants were behaving and she confronted Zimbardo. He ended the experiment on the sixth day.
SPE has been referenced and critiqued as one of the most unethical psychology experiments in history. The harm inflicted on the participants prompted universities worldwide to improve their ethics requirements for human subjects of experiments to prevent them from being similarly harmed. Other researchers have found it difficult to reproduce the study, especially given those constraints. Critics have described the study as unscientific and fraudulent.
Stanford Prison Experiment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
The Psychology of Imprisonment
These ethical problems were not peculiar to dissonance studies; they existed in more severe form in other kinds of sociopsychological research. A famous case in point is an experiment conducted in 1971 by Professor Philip G. Zimbardo, a social psychologist at Stanford University, and three colleagues.30 To study the social psychology of imprisonment, they enlisted undergraduate men as volunteers in a simulation of prison life, in which each would play the part of a guard or a prisoner. All volunteers were interviewed and given personality tests; twenty-one middle-class whites were selected after being rated emotionally stable, mature, and law-abiding. By the flip of a coin, ten were designated as prisoners, eleven as guards, for the duration of a two-week experiment.
The “prisoners” were “arrested” by police one quiet Sunday morning, handcuffed, booked at the police station, taken to the “prison” (a set of cells built in the basement of the Stanford psychology building), and there stripped, searched, deloused, and issued uniforms. The guards were supplied with billy clubs, handcuffs, whistles, and keys to the cells; they were told that their job was to maintain “law and order” in the prison and that they could devise their own methods of prisoner control. The warden (a colleague of Zimbardo’s) and guards drew up a list of sixteen rules the prisoners had to obey: they were to be silent at meals, rest periods, and after lights out; they were to eat at mealtimes but no other time; they were to address one another by their ID number and any guard as Mr. Correctional Officer, and so on. Violation of any rule could result in punishment.
The relations between guards and prisoners quickly assumed a classic pattern: the guards began to think of the prisoners as inferior and dangerous, the prisoners to view the guards as bullies and sadists. As one guard reported:
I was surprised at myself…I made them call each other names and clean out the toilets with their bare hands. I practically considered the prisoners cattle, and I kept thinking I have to watch out for them in case they try something.
In a few days the prisoners organized a rebellion. They tore off their ID numbers and barricaded themselves inside their cells by shoving beds against the doors. The guards sprayed them with a fire extinguisher to drive them back from the doors, burst into their cells, stripped them, took away their beds, and in general thoroughly intimidated them.
The guards, from that point on, kept making up additional rules, waking the prisoners frequently at night for head counts, forcing them to perform tedious and useless tasks, and punishing them for “infractions.” The prisoners, humiliated, became obsessed by the unfairness of their treatment. Some grew disturbed, one so much so that by the fifth day the experimenters began to consider releasing him before the end of the experiment.
The rapid development of sadism in the guards was exemplified by the comments of one of them who, before the experiment, said that he was a pacifist, was nonaggressive, and could not imagine himself mal-treating another person. By the fifth day he noted in his diary:
I have singled him [one prisoner] out for special abuse both because he begs for it and because I simply don’t like him… The new prisoner (416) refuses to eat his sausage…I decided to force feed him, but he wouldn’t eat. I let the food slide down his face. I didn’t believe it was me doing it. I hated myself for making him eat but I hated him more for not eating.
Zimbardo and his colleagues had not expected so rapid a transformation in either group of volunteers and later wrote in a report:
What was most surprising about the outcome of this simulated prison experience was the ease with which sadistic behavior could be elicited from quite normal young men, and the contagious spread of emotional pathology among those carefully selected precisely for their emotional stability.
On the sixth day the researchers abruptly terminated the experiment for the good of all concerned. They felt, however, that it had been valuable; it had shown how easily “normal, healthy, educated young men could be so radically transformed under the institutional pressures of a ‘prison environment.’ ”
That finding may have been important, but in the eyes of many ethicists the experiment was grossly unethical. It had imposed on its volunteers physical and emotional stresses that they had not anticipated or agreed to undergo. In so doing, it had violated the principle, affirmed by the Supreme Court in 1914, that “every human being of adult years and sound mind has a right to determine what shall be done with his own body.”31 Because of the ethical problems, the prison experiment has not been replicated; it is a closed case.*
The Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt
https://www.amazon.com/Story-Psychology-Updated-Revised/dp/0307278077
Prison Abuse At Abu Gharib:
Situations can influence or pull good people to act in ways they never
thought imaginable and cause them to become bad. This kind of Dr. Hyde
transformation occurred among U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib because they were
influenced by the same situational effects on their behavior as people were
in the Stanford Prison Experiment.
In May 2004, we all saw vivid images of young American men and women engaged
in unimaginable forms of torture against civilians they were supposed to be
guarding. The tormentors and the tormented were captured in an extensive
display of digitally documented depravity that the soldiers themselves had
made during their violent escapades. The images are of punching, slapping,
and kicking detainees; jumping on their feet; forcibly arranging naked,
hooded prisoners in piles and pyramids; forcing male prisoners to masturbate
or simulate fellatio; dragging a prisoner around with a leash tied to his
neck; and using unmuzzled attack dogs to frighten prisoners.
The media and the person in the street around the globe asked how such evil
deeds could be perpetrated by these seven men and women, whom military
leaders had labeled as rogue soldiers and a few bad apples. But instead of
bad personal intentions, circumstances in that prison cellblock could have
tipped the balance and led even good soldiers to do such bad things.
We want to believe that it is a few bad apples that spoil a barrel, that we
could never be a bad apple and that we're the good ones in the barrel. But
it is obvious that people can be influenced, regardless of their intention
to resist.
As such, the Abu Ghraib soldiers' mental state - such as stress, fear,
boredom and heat exhaustion, coupled with no supervision, no training and no
accountability - may have further contributed to their "evil" actions.
Situational forces dominate most of us at various times in our lives even
though we'd all like to believe we're each that singular hero who can resist
those powerful external pressures, like Joe Darby, the whistle-blowing hero
of the Abu Ghraib prison.
Conclusion:
How do ordinary people adapt to such an institutional setting? How do the
power differentials between guards and prisoners play out in their daily
interactions? If you put good people in a bad place, do the people triumph
or does the place corrupt them? Would the violence that is endemic to most
real prisons be absent in a prison filled with good middle-class boys?
This transformation of character with good people suddenly becoming
perpetrators of evil as guards or pathologically passive as prisoners could
be mainly a response to situational forces acting on them.
When all members of a group are in a deindividuated state, their mental
functioning changes: they live in an expanded-present moment that makes past
and future distant and irrelevant. Feelings dominate reason, and action
dominates reflection. The usual cognitive and motivational processes that
steer behavior in socially desirable paths no longer guide people. It
becomes as easy to make war as to make love, without considering the
consequences.
At Abu Ghraib, MP Chip Frederick recalls, It was clear that there was no
accountability. It became the norm for guards to stop wearing their full
military uniforms while on duty. All around them, most visitors and the
civilian interrogators came and went unnamed. No one in charge was readily
identifiable, and the seemingly endless mass of prisoners, wearing orange
jumpsuits or totally naked, were also indistinguishable from one another. It
was as extreme a setting for creating deindividuation as I can imagine.
Dehumanization of prisoners occurred by virtue of their sheer numbers,
enforced nakedness, and uniform appearance, as well as by the guards
inability to understand their language. One night shift MP, Ken Davis, later
reported how dehumanization had been bred into their thinking: As soon as
wed have prisoners come in, sandbags instantly on their head. They would
flexicuff em; throw em down to the ground; some would be stripped. It was
told to all of us, theyre nothing but dogs. . . . You start looking at these
people as less than human, and you start doing things to em that you would
never dream of.
The Stanford Prison Experiment relied on deindividuating silver reflecting
sunglasses for the guards along with standard military-style uniforms. The
power the guards assumed each time they donned these uniforms was matched by
the powerlessness the prisoners felt in their wrinkled smocks. Obviously,
Abu Ghraib Prison was a far more lethal environment than our relatively
benign prison at Stanford. However, in both cases, the worst abuses occurred
during the night shift, when guards felt that the authorities noticed them
least. It is reminiscent of Goldings Lord of the Flies, where supervising
grown-ups were absent as the masked marauders created havoc.
Why Situations Matter: We want to believe in the essential, unchanging
goodness of people, in their power to resist external pressures. The
Stanford Prison Experiment is a clarion call to abandon simplistic notions
of the Good Self dominating Bad Situations. We are best able to avoid,
challenge, and change negative situational forces only by recognizing their
potential to infect us as they have others who were similarly situated. This
lesson should have been taught repeatedly by the behavioral transformation
of Nazi concentration camp guards, and by the genocide and atrocities
committed in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Burundi, and Sudans Darfur region.
Any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is
possible for any of us under the right circumstances. That knowledge does
not excuse evil; it democratizes it, sharing its blame among ordinary actors
rather than declaring it the province of deviants and despots of Them but
not Us. The primary lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment and the prison
abuse at Abu Gharib is that situations can lead us to behave in ways we
would not, could not, predict possible in advance.
The Lucifer Effect - Understanding How Good People Turn Evil
by Philip Zimbardo
http://www.lucifereffect.com
Philip Zimbardo’s Response to Recent Criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment
Blogger Ben Blum (Medium, June 7, 2018) recently questioned the authenticity and value of the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), labeling it a “fraud” and a “lie,” and other commentators have followed suit. For example, after watching a video that I deposited with the Stanford Archives, Brian Resnick wrote, “This damning video debunks the famed experiment” (VOX, June 14, 2018), and Jay Van Bavel told LIVE-SCIENCE (June 12, 2018), “The bottom line is that conformity isn't natural, blind or inevitable.” French author Thibault LeTextier (2018) even published a book-length critique entitled History of a Lie.
In this response to my critics, I hereby assert that none of these criticisms present any substantial evidence that alters the SPE’s main conclusion concerning the importance of understanding how systemic and situational forces can operate to influence individual behavior in negative or positive directions, often without our personal awareness. The SPE’s core message is not that a psychological simulation of prison life is the same as the real thing, or that prisoners and guards always or even usually behave the way that they did in the SPE. Rather, the SPE serves as a cautionary tale of what might happen to any of us if we underestimate the extent to which the power of social roles and external pressures can influence our actions...
https://www.prisonexp.org/response
Read Zimbardo's 26-page response written to recent criticisms of the Stanford Prison Experiment here.
In response to Blum's piece, Zimbardo published a 26-page defense of the experiment. Among his detailed criticisms of Blum's article, Zimbardo alleges:
There's evidence to show the prisoners and guards weren't faking it.
The British experiment by Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher is not scientifically valid.
He worked to make archival material public over the years and kept nothing hidden.
The underlying takeaway of the SPE is not that perpetrators should be absolved of their sins, but that "preventing undesirable behavior of individuals or groups requires an understanding of what strengths, virtues, and vulnerabilities that they bring into any given situation.
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/reports/1530311324.pdf
The Dirty Work of the Stanford Prison Experiment: Re-reading the Dramaturgy of Coercion
Diagnosing the Situation
According to its creators, the SPE validated a general hypothesis about the influence of situational forces on individual behaviour. Too often in public discourse, they argued in their key, 1973 journal account, ‘the deplorable condition of our penal system and its dehumanising effects upon prisoners and guards’ are ascribed to the pre-existing dispositional traits of both prisoners and staff – since the former are criminals, by definition, and the latter are often thought to be ‘sadistic, uneducated and insensitive people’ whose underlying traits explain their attraction to the job (Haney et al., 1973: 70). The SPE sought to neutralize this dispositional argument by screening out, in advance, any volunteers with histories of aggression or volatility. The study’s outcomes, it was argued, arose from structural aspects of the situation – and particularly the power disparity between prisoners and guards.
This bold, situational message resonated strongly in 1971. On August 21, the day after the experiment ended, Black Panther leader George Jackson was shot dead by tower guards at California’s San Quentin State Prison. The following month, a four-day hostage situation at Attica Correctional Facility, in upstate New York, was brought to an abrupt end when State Troopers retook the facility with tear gas and shotguns – the bloodiest assault on a penitentiary in US history. Prisons were in crisis, and answers were being sought, so initial accounts of the SPE were quickly picked up by the national news media. By October, Zimbardo (who had never yet set foot in a real prison) found himself testifying before a Congressional enquiry into prison conditions. As is also clear from his archived papers, he was deluged that fall with letters from prisoners and correctional staff alike, from across the United States, thanking him for articulating what they already knew – that abuses can arise from bad situations, not just bad people.
The clarity and simplicity of that basic argument had, and perhaps continues to have, considerable communicative power. Considered critically, however, the experimenters’ claim that the SPE was designed ‘to separate the effects of the prison environment per se from those attributable to a priori dispositions of its inhabitants’ actually raises more questions than it answers (Haney et al., 1973: 71). There is, after all, no such thing as the prison environment. There are many, differently administered prison regimes, and a central question in penology is why the differences between institutions make some of them so much more harmful than others. This being the case, it is necessary to ask what specific aspects of the SPE’s environmental design produced the negative effects reported. What, specifically, prompted the individuals involved to act as they did?
This question of situational prompts was at the core of recent, critical attacks on the SPE by the French writer Thibault LeTexier, who in 2018 published a book accusing the experimenters of intellectual dishonesty. Histoire d’un Mensonge (History of a Lie) prompted extensive discussion online and was eventually condensed into an English-language journal article for American Psychologist. Unfortunately, however, LeTexier’s intemperate attempts to ‘debunk’ the SPE largely ignored the wider questions posed by the experimenters about the impact of institutional roles on those socialized into them. Instead, his underlying assumption seems simply to be that any prompting of the participants represented inappropriate manipulation of a psychological study. LeTexier presents evidence which, he claims, ‘directly contradicts’ the experimenters’ suggestion that they ‘did not give any formal or detailed instructions about how to be an effective guard’ (LeTexier, 2019: 8)...
The environment of ‘Stanford County Jail’ was designed, then, as an abstracted representation of overwhelming institutional power...
Manufacturing dissonance
The role demands involved in maintaining control and authority over prisoners, even in the most benign of institutions, are widely recognized as a source of psychological conflict for correctional officers. As Liebling et al. note in their ethnographic study, The Prison Officer, ‘role conflict’ is something of an occupational hazard, given the contradictory range of functions often expected of staff: ‘In one day, an officer can be a supervisor, custodian, disciplinarian, peacekeeper, administrator, observer, manager, facilitator, mentor, provider, classifier and diplomat…. Versatility and flexibility are key requirements’ (2011: 48). At Stanford, the artifice of the prison simulation involved a narrowing down of these role functions to the coercive tasks of custodian and disciplinarian – a limiting of variables that was arguably appropriate to the scientific context. In effect, the researchers sought to isolate the form of role conflict in which they were most interested – the discrepancy between ‘good people’ and their ‘dirty work’.
The prison study can thus be read as a further exploration of cognitive dissonance, the theoretical framework that Zimbardo had spent most of the 1960s investigating. His predecessor at Stanford, Leon Festinger, had developed the concept during the late 1950s, and for a decade, it became a key area of enquiry for social psychologists. Festinger argued that when a person is obliged to live with two conflicting cognitions, she will be driven to reduce the dissonance between them by altering one or other of those cognitions. In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (first published in 1957), he outlined four distinct paradigms under which this phenomenon was apparent, one of which – forced compliance – addressed conditions which appear ‘to elicit overt behavior that is at variance with private opinion’ (Festinger, 1962: 261). If, for example, a person’s job requires her to make public statements which she does not personally believe to be true, she will likely seek to reduce the dissonance arising from this conflicted position. She can do this either by quitting the job or (if she needs the money) by convincing herself that the public statements are in fact justified: thus, ‘attitude change occurs when one behaves in a manner discrepant with his private attitudes and values’ (Zimbardo, 1968: 76–77). In the case of the prison study, the question arose as to whether the guards’ forced compliance with an authoritarian regime would prompt them to rationalize their behaviour as appropriate and necessary. As Gresham Sykes had put it: ‘How does living in a system of complete social control affect the personality of the rulers and the ruled?’ (1958: xvi).
Zimbardo’s assumption, based on Festinger’s theory, seems to have been that prison guards will naturally tend to reduce any dissonance experienced in role by becoming harsher in their attitudes towards prisoners: if I have to treat them this way, then they must deserve it. This rationale seems to underpin his boldly sweeping claims to Congress in 1971: ‘With regard to prisons, we can state that the mere act of assigning labels to people, such as “prisoners” and “guards”…is sufficient to elicit pathological behavior’ (Zimbardo, 1973: 156). Yet the invocation of pathology does little to further our understanding of guard behaviour within in the SPE. Zimbardo’s reliance on dissonance theory, moreover, meant that he overlooked another rich theoretical framework, developed by Erving Goffman. In his essay ‘Role Distance’, published in the same year as Asylums (1961a), Goffman argued that social roles are rarely taken on unquestioningly by their performers. Rather, they are subjected to various forms of personal negotiation – just as an actor makes decisions about how best to play a part. There is always something of a gap, Goffman argued, between the normative role and a particular player’s attempts to inhabit it. Normative expectations present an outline scenario that must be adhered to, yet for any given role, there is a range of viable adaptation strategies. Goffman labelled these the typical modes of adherence to a norm...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2632666320944316
The Psychology of Good & Evile Phillip Zimbardo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsFEV35tWsg
http://www.lucifereffect.com/about_synopsis.htm
Was the Stanford Prison Experiment a sham?
https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2018/07/01/was-the-stanford-prison-experiment-a-sham-a-qa-with-the-writer-who-exposed-the-celebrated-study
The Right-Wing Story About Human Nature Is False - Are we naturally
violent, power-hungry, and greedy? Rutger Bregman’s book “Humankind”
devastates the myth of human selfishness.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2021/11/the-right-wing-story-about-human-nature-is-false/
........................................
How Our Roles Shape Us
https://executivecoachinglondon.com/life-choices/how-our-roles-shape-us/
Person–situation Debate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Person%E2%80%93situation_debate
Trait Activation Theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trait_activation_theory
We can compare prehistory to a state of childlike freedom and play, and the
relative rigidity of civilization to the stagnation in an adult’s
accumulated experience, memories, and background knowledge.
https://medium.com/grim-tidings/do-all-cultures-start-from-childish-twaddle-6a7cf341d066
~~ Similar Biases - Disposition (the mental) vs Structure (the situation) ~~
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor-observer_bias
The tendency for explanations of other individuals' behaviors to overemphasize the influence of their personality and underemphasize the influence of their situation (see also Fundamental attribution error), and for explanations of one's own behaviors to do the opposite (that is, to overemphasize the influence of our situation and underemphasize the influence of our own personality)...
The tendency for people to over-emphasize personality-based explanations for behaviors observed in others while under-emphasizing the role and power of situational influences on the same behavior (see also actor-observer bias, group attribution error, positivity effect, and negativity effect)...
http://www.overcominghateportal.org/attribution-fallacies.html
Dispositional Attribution
The explanation of individual behavior as a result caused by internal characteristics that reside within the individual, as opposed to outside (situational) influences that stem from the environment or culture in which that individual is found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispositional_attribution
Situated Cognition
Perspective of human cognition that asserts learning happens as human beings interact with the living world. The situativity theory of cognition (Greeno, 1998), is a theory of thinking as mainly "on the fly" and "in the moment," rather than off line and mainly in our heads. It is a context and situation-bound theory of cognition...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_cognition
Examples;
Many rich people insist that their fast-increasing wealth has nothing to do with the fact that others are poor, and everything to do with merit and just deserts;
1 - In the attributionalist’s view, people are poor because of personal traits — especially their moral failings. In order to relieve poverty, we must make poor people into better human beings, by essentially regulating their behavior.
2 - The opposing “relationalist” view contends that economic positions are largely explained by relationships between groups, and that we all share a responsibility to alleviate poverty because the experiences and behaviors of those who aren’t poor have an effect on the lives of those who are.
http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/2/the-marriage-of-povertyandinequality.html
The Culture of Poverty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_poverty
The Cycle of Poverty
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life - An Overview
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life is a book that was published in the U.S. in 1959, written by sociologist Erving Goffman. In it, Goffman uses the imagery of theater in order to portray the nuances and significance of face-to-face social interaction. Goffman puts forth a theory of social interaction that he refers to as the dramaturgical model of social life.
According to Goffman, social interaction may be likened to a theater, and people in everyday life to actors on a stage, each playing a variety of roles. The audience consists of other individuals who observe the role-playing and react to the performances. In social interaction, like in theatrical performances, there is a 'front stage' region where the actors are on stage before an audience, and their consciousness of that audience and the audience's expectations for the role they should play influence the actor's behavior. There is also a back region, or 'backstage,' where individuals can relax, be themselves, and the role or identity that they play when they are in front of others.
Central to the book and Goffman's theory is the idea that people, as they interact together in social settings, are constantly engaged in the process of "impression management," wherein each tries to present themselves and behave in a way that will prevent the embarrassment of themselves or others. This is primarily done by each person that is part of the interaction working to ensure that all parties have the same "definition of the situation," meaning that all understand what is meant to happen in that situation, what to expect from the others involved, and thus how they themselves should behave.
Though written over half a century ago, The Presentation of Self in Everday Life remains one of the most famous and widely taught sociology books, which was listed as the 10th most important sociology book of the twentieth century by the International Sociological Association in 1998.
https://www.thoughtco.com/the-presentation-of-self-in-everyday-life-3026754
