One Utah

The Stanford Prison Experiment strongly suggests that moral and immoral behavior are hugley influenced by environment. It’s not so much that we change our morals from setting to setting but that the setting in which we function has the power to put our morality into neutral.

The Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by Philip Zimbardo, suggested that in the right setting, with the right stimulus and lack of restraint, even normally psychologically well adjusted persons will gladly even willingly engage in pathological behaviors. During the SPE, the abusive guards for all intents and purposes, engaged in behaviors that at least some of then later tried to rationalize away as “playing a role.” Even that rationalization points us in the direction of understanding what happened. They didn’t see themselves as morally culpable for their behaviors because they believed they were inhabiting a role they were expected to play. Lack of effective oversight, deindividuation of and dehumanization the prisoners allowed the guards to see them as non-human (at a minimum, they saw them as less than fully human). This was just an experiment, one that the participants reminded themselves on mulitple occassions was just an experiment, nevertheless within 36 hours of beginning, it had spun out of control.

Now imagine a different setting - instead of the basement of the psychology department at Stanford, you’re in a crumbling former insane asylum transformed into a prison, surrounded by a hostile population which regularly attacks the institution. You have no effective oversight, have had no effective training, are separated from the prisoners you are supposed to guard by language and culture, are constantly being fed propaganda that says the prisoners are dangerous and know things they won’t tell, and you receive the message again and again that there is no one in charge. Discipline is lacking if not altogether missing. The situation into which you have been thrust is disorienting enough but you are expected to work excessive hours without a break, under extreme stress, without sufficient food or hygience facilities available to you.

This is a snap shot of Abu Ghraib. One guard in particular worked something like 40 straight days without a day off - working twelve hours a day. He got one day off and was back on for twelve straight days.  He was so exhausted after his shifts he would sleep most of the time between them, leaving time to eat one meal per day.  His shift ran from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. Removed from all the social and emotional support of home, he became one of the prominent torturers in Abu Ghraib. His transformation from well adjusted American citizen to torturer was inevitable in the setting.

Zimbardo argues that the torturers of Abu Ghraib are culpable for their actions, however their actions did not occur in a vacuum.  A host of systemic forces were at work on those individuals that made their actions a reasonably predictable outcome.  Zimbardo, in The Lucifer Effect, points out that other US soldiers in similar settings did not behave like the Abu Ghraib torturers - those soldiers however were in a place where military discipline was maintained.  Abu Ghraib was a free for all - the now infamous Lynndie England wasn’t stationed there; she came to visit a lover who was stationed there (the lover, btw, married another woman who was stationed at the prison later).  The sexual component of the torture at Abu Ghraib arose from the already sexualized environment a lack of discipline created.  Lack of military discipline is a top down issue (the general in charge of the prison had no experience with prisons before she was assigned to the duty; she rarely visited the prison and was told the prisoners subjected to the torture were special classifications and so she never set foot in the parts of the complex in which they were housed). 

The prison also gradually became more and more crowded, more and more rundown.  With additional prisoners, the already insufficient plumbing became grotesquely insufficient. The prisoner population was a random mixture of people - most of whom were innocent - some were former officers in the Ba’athist government and their families, others were members of entire families who had been captured in random sweeps of neighborhoods, some were believed to be the relatives of insurgents, some were prostitutes, some were really criminals (thieves and so forth), and it is possible a few were actual insurgents.  The logic of the place was such that simply being there, in the eyes of the Americans, meant you were guilty of something. 

Zimbardo examined the psychological profiles of the primary torturers and found that prior to Abu Ghraib, they exhibited no discernable pathology.  One in particular, Chip Frederick, had served in a relatively small jail in Virignia; Frederick, however, exhibited no pathologies and in that job had only one write up for a minor infraction.  In terms of disposition, Frederick exhibited a tendency toward conformity - he would change his opinions to match persons around him.  However, this is not a psychology pathology and is in fact a tendency found in many shy persons - they change their mind to avoid confrontations.  The emotional dynamic at play then was exhaustion, poor nutrition, alien and hostile surroundings, and finally, a break down in authority systems and apparent lack of accountability.  Let’s be honest, if the pictures of what happened hadn’t gone public, no one would ever have been held accountable.  In this setting, otherwise emotionally sound persons become unwell literally by contact with the toxic environment.  Culpability runs to the top - every decision made about post invasion strategy (from insufficient troop levels to failing to consider what to do with places like Abu Ghraib and the whole process of “De-Baathification”), decisions made by top administration officials, created the environment of chaos and hostility in which Abu Ghraib existed.

Zimbardo’s analysis is nuanced.  He argues that circumstances like Abu Ghraib come about because of the complex interplay systemic forces and individual dispositions.  The social forces acting on the guards at Abu Ghraib weren’t as simple as peer pressure; they were instead subtle and varied social forces that began by defining the American guards as the insiders and the Iraqi prisoners as the outsiders.  To maintain insider status, the American guards closed ranks (wow this term jumps out in this context!).  The guards didn’t torturing the first day they arrived.  As the actual prison deteriorated around them - as sanitation became increasingly difficult, as the stench of the place got worse and worse, as the numbers of prisoners rose, and unsurprisingly the prisoners became more unruly, the guards grew increasingly paranoid.  Making the entire experience even more toxic, the guards were sleeping in the prison - in empty cells - during their off time.

Slowly, certainly, and all but inevitably, hese otherwise non-pathological American soldiers were transformed into torturers.  Primo Levi refers to such a place as the Grey Zone - a place void of morality, of standards, the inside of a toxic bubble.  The normal rules of human behavior, decision making, and society are in abeyance.  Zimbardo describes it as the bad barrel infecting the good apples.  To my eyes, it is a place in which our morality is thrown into neutral, the moral drives of the human mind simply run faster and faster but don’t turn any behvaioral wheels.

At the end of the day, the SPE was a sound predictor that Abu Ghraib would have happened.  Lots of folks predicted post invasion chaos.  Few of us realized exactly how bad it would get.

This entry was posted Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 11:43 am and is filed under Abu Ghraib, Contractors Military, Corruption, Crimes, Disgrace to the Military, Iraq, Political Corruption, Terrorism, This Blog, Torture, Tribalism & Blind Obedience to Authority, War Crimes. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.