Zimbardo explain Abu Ghraib

Zimbardo explains Abu Ghraib
We worshipped those guys. As young psychology undergraduates the studies we loved best of all were those of Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo - we loved them because they showed us how to be different, how to be better, how to change the world.

Milgram's conformity experiments and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison simulation held a mirror to the world in an truly unprecedented fashion. They showed precisely and irrefutably how normal well-intentioned people like ourselves could be transformed into torturers and killers like the Nazis, and the specific circumstances under which this could occur. And they were very specific - their experimental variations allowed them to document precisely the conditions required to produce lethal conformity ranging from zero to one hundred percent. But the sheer knowledge was enough to liberate us, us psychologists, from the evils of conformity to which all others were subject.

And so I was thrilled to attend the lecture on Tuesday evening entitled "The Lucifer Effect: How good people turn evil" in which Zimbardo himself, Emiritus Professor of Social Psychology, Stanford University, drew inferences from his own study to the very similar circumstances which prevailed at the time of the Abu Ghraib atrocities. He concluded with a savage indictment of the system which induced regular patriotic people to behave so abhorrently. In short, there are no "bad apples", only "bad barrels" - systemic failure responsible for individual evil.

And was at about this point that it struck me: we all remembered those experiments made famous in the 60s and 70s. Some of us went on to work in learning, some in human resources - and some of us went on to work for the CIA and the armed forces. And I happen to know for certain that those same studies have had an enourmous effect on the 'combat effectiveness' of soliders around the world - in fact, it is no overstatement to say that they provided a detailed instruction manual regarding the means of transforming a 'regular' individual into an obedient killer. I know this because I attended a lecture given by the Chief Psychologist for the American Army in which the same principles uncovered by Milgram and Zimbardo - of desensitisation, obedience, anonymity and dehumanisation - were addressed explicitly as techniques for improving combat effectiveness. You might be surprised to learn that only about 15% of soldiers were actually killing the enemy prior to the introduction of conditioning techniques aimed at desensitising the soldier and dehumanising the opponent.
And so, it seems, the very same studies which we believed would deliver us from evil have been instrumental in engineering hundreds of thousands of deaths which might otherwise not have occured and that, ironically, the very same study used to explain Abu Ghraib may have contributed to its occurence.

There was no time for questions at the end. Zimbardo signed books. Everybody seemed very happy to have met in person the man they so admired as students.
I wonder if all critics of the system, all 'outsiders', are ultimately recycled by the system, and in fact provide a most valuable service - namely that of preventing any genuine escape by providing a self-satisfied stopping-off point for those of us who might otherwise fall further from the centre.