I’m in the middle of reading The Lucifer Effect, which details the Stanford Prison Experiment carried out in the 70s, where volunteers were randomly assigned to serve as either prisoners or guards. (“The question there was,” he says, “what happens when you put good people in an evil place? We put good, ordinary college students in a very realistic, prison-like setting in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford. We dehumanized the prisoners, gave them numbers, and took away their identity. We also deindividuated the guards… translated the anonymity of Lord of the Flies into a setting where we could observe exactly what happened from moment to moment.”)
The experiment was planned and executed by Philip Zimbardo, a psychologist in Stanford University. He wanted to prove that good & evil were situational rather than intrinsic attributes, that under the right external conditions everyone was capable of both the most compassionate & most brutal acts. (I began to investigate what specific kinds of situational variables or processes could make someone step across that line between good and evil. We all like to think that the line is impermeable—that people who do terrible things like commit murder, treason, or kidnapping are on the other side of the line—and we could never get over there. We want to believe that we’re with the good people. My work began by saying, no, that line is permeable. The reason some people are on the good side of the line is that they’ve never really been tested. They’ve never really been put in unusual circumstances where they were tempted or seduced across that line.)
Reading the book, what I was most horrified by weren’t the things the guards did to the prisoners, but that the experiment was allowed to go on as long as it did, that Zimbardo knew everything that was going on as it was going on, and yet for five days he did nothing to stop the escalating cycle of degradation the prisoners were subjected to, and probably wouldn’t have stopped it when he did if his girlfriend hadn’t visited and been completely appalled by what she saw.
As he said himself: “There are stunning parallels between the Stanford Prison Experiment and what happened at Abu Ghraib, where some of the visual scenes that we have seen include guards stripping prisoners naked, putting bags over heads, putting them in chains, and having them engage in sexually degrading acts.” These things and more also happened in the Stanford Prison Experiments, and he not only created the conditions that allowed them to happen but was right there when they were happening. He was the ultimate authority there, he was the one who set the rules, and not only that, but he had studied situations like this, knew more than anyone else the psychology of it, and yet he was more concerned with science than the human beings that were abused right in front of him, more concerned with proving his theories than the degrading, dehumanizing acts that were being carried out that allowed him to do so. Why wasn’t he punished? Why hasn’t he faced any consequences for this, any lawsuits, being disbarred from the American Psychological Association, anything? Instead he seems to have benefitted, becoming president of the APA, one of the most well-known and respected researchers in the field.
It does not surprise me that the guards did what they did, because even before reading the book I agreed with the thesis. But it shocks me that, as their teacher, as the one person who should have known better, Zimbardo not only allowed but also implicitly approved of all the actions of the prison guards. And now he is speaking out against the current administration about what happened in Abu Ghraib, saying that it is more their fault for creating an environment that allowed the abuses to occur, for implicitly condoning those abuses, that they should be on trial and face the consequences of what they did. And I agree with this analysis, but. What about him? What consequences has he ever faced? And he was right there, instead of thousands of miles away, and morever, as a psychologist and someone who had studied this he should have known better.
That’s the one thing that I can’t let go. It wasn’t an esoteric moral debate, the question of good and evil, right and wrong. It was something that he’d spent his life studying, and he still completely failed the test, and instead of being punished was rewarded for his failure and is now going around lecturing others about what they should or shouldn’t have done, which strikes me as despicably hypocritical.
And, even today, Zimbardo defends his experiment, the lengths he let it go to, by saying the benefits gained about our understanding of human behaviour and how we can improve society should out balance the distress caused by the study. So, it’s not just okay to cause the harm and degradation to another person, but it’s actual a noble, worthwhile endeavor that will benefit all of society. Which brings up the question, why stop the experiments at all? He should’ve let them continue for weeks, months, so we could fully explore all the depths that humans can sink to. It’s okay as long as it’s for the greater good of society, right?
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May 9, 2007 at 9:59 am
symbi0tic
I wanted to preserve the comments from my other journal.
morphaileffect:
(sorry in advance if i sound extremely uneducated in this, it’s only because i am ^^;; but i’m glad you posted about this, i appreciate the avenue to voice out my thoughts)
i watched a documentary about the stanford project a while back and it horrified me at the time, too. but even scientists mess with the lives of lab rats to know what medicines work and what don’t, so in the end i had to ask myself: what’s the difference between a human and a lab rat here? you can’t use mice to replicate human behavior. if you can justify using animals to conduct lifesaving and groundbreaking experiments, what’s the ethical rule that says you shouldn’t use human beings?
maybe in the end the scientists involved here do have the moral high ground, because they presented a means for people to become more aware of how power struggles work in less-than-fair conditions. the timeframe of the stanford project was only enough to dispel the illusion that good and evil are absolute, even in the best of us.
i may sound like a madcap SF fan or a conspiracy theorist here, but there’s a possibility that somewhere, there’s a similar experiment going on for the long haul. and scientists with perfect power are controlling and documenting all the events, so that someday, when they’re ready to release their results, all the world will be even more horrified.
but you know, in a less sheltered reality, we can get rid of the ethical question by rendering experimentation unnecessary. insider reportage is already commonplace, so even high-security prisons have some way to be exposed. all we have to do is listen to everyone tell their stories… but i guess nothing beats the shock factor of a laboratory simulation.
me (part 1):
sorry in advance if i sound extremely uneducated in this, it’s only because i am ^^;;
But you don’t at all! I’ve never watched the documentary, so you’re more educated than me on that. ^^ And, I’m glad you commented, too – talking with you has made me examine why I think what I do.
so in the end i had to ask myself: what’s the difference between a human and a lab rat here? you can’t use mice to replicate human behavior. if you can justify using animals to conduct lifesaving and groundbreaking experiments, what’s the ethical rule that says you shouldn’t use human beings?
That’s the problem with relative vs absolute morality, isn’t it? Because with relative morality, you have to draw the line somewhere, and what’s to say that it’s better if drawn in one place instead of another? I think, though, that while the location of this line might seem somewhat arbitrary (why not protect chimps as well as humans), it’s still clear where the line is? It’s the whole “everyone’s equal and entitled to life, liberty, & the pursuit of happiness” thing – the sense that in order to live in society together we’ve entered into a social contract with each other, and scientists experimenting on humans with the same detachment that they experiment on animals would be a breach of that contract.
This is, of course, a somewhat idealistic view on things, because things like the Tuskegee Study aren’t isolated incidents (not to mention how disturbing it is that it went unchecked for forty years). But for me there’s still the sense that something like the Tuskegee Study can’t happen today, because there’s been widespread condemnation for that practice. But there’s been no such condemnation for what happened in the Stanford Prison Experiment, and for that reason, for me personally, the SPE is almost more disturbing. In my view the SPE was also a breach of the social contract (though of course not as egregious a breach as the Tuskegee Study) and it undermines the sense that there is a social contract, an understanding which allows me to live comfortably in society. Because the kids who volunteered were made to believe that they couldn’t leave the prison, no matter how much they wanted to; food and rest was arbitrarily withheld, blankets were taken away, they were stripped naked, made to perform degrading sexual acts for the amusement of others, and this wasn’t merely allowed to go on but also implicitly encouraged by the ones running the study. Would you feel comfortable volunteering for a study if you knew that you might be made to go through this, and that even after you had, the American Psychological Association would see anything wrong with the methodology or the way it was supervised, that the person most responsible would actually be rewarded by his peers? And, forget psychological study, would you feel comfortable living in a society where the majority saw nothing wrong with what the director of the study did? (Because there’s been no widespread condemnation, sometimes I feel like I’m overreacting against what happened, but looked at it like this, is it an overreaction?)
And, yeah, that’s the ethical/pseudo-legal reason why I think it’s harmful for scientists to play god, to treat humans as experimental objects, because when they do it has reprecussions not just on the volunteers who were abused but also on society as a whole. It makes people less willing to trust authority figures, less willing to trust the institutions and practices and checks and balances that should prevent abuses from occurring, that are necessary and what allow us to live in a society together.
I don’t think, however, that scientists really think through the consequences of their actions like this. They’re focused on what they want to prove, and sometimes humans just become objects that can either prove or disprove their theories (which I’m sure most think have beneficial results for humanity), and it’s scary when that happens, and scarier still when the institutions that should speak out against it don’t, when they instead reward the people who do this. Personally, I don’t think any knowledge is worth that, no matter how useful it might turn out to be.
morphaileffect (re: part 1):
(another apology: must type without glasses, so am sorry in advance for any misspelligns ^^v)
And I have to apologize for speaking up so soon – I notice you’ve titled your comment “Part 1,” so there should be other parts coming? I’m looking forward to reading them. But right now, I feel the need to elaborate on why I don’t violently object to treating humans like test subjects, and to the events that transpired in the Stanford project, specifically…
I believe there is no better way to present something as natural and real than the scientific method. Analysis of case studies is harmless and could work, sure, but case studies seldom come with step by step documentation accomplished firsthand by a competent observer, and they certainly don’t allow an observer to introduce varying elements that could let him/her broaden the scope of the study and ask “What if?”
As a researcher relying mainly on secondhand (or even thirdhand, fourthhand, etc) information, your field of vision is very limited. You can do all the postulating you want, but if you don’t have hard data to back it up, your findings can be easily dismissed as just another research paper. I guess Zimbardo, et al didn’t want that.
In the case of the Stanford project, we have to bear in mind that this is not torture per se, but a mere simulation of torture. Executing abusive procedures in a controlled environment provides an invaluable safety net that is not available to people who have to languish in real hellholes. According to the Stanford project’s website, the respondents were narrowed down to those who did not have “psychological problems, medical disabilities, or a history of crime or drug abuse” – I’d say these criteria don’t usually apply to the people who end up in offshore prisons. It is reasonable to believe that satisfying these criteria would give each participant a greater fighting chance of being able to cope with the damages incurred during the experiment. Also, since the Stanford experiment was conducted in a first-world country, with the full backing of the APA, I would presume psychiatric treatment is readily available after the testing period. So it wasn’t exactly done without precautions, or with any overt biases.
About the reward system… I may have failed to read through the documentation carefully, but I saw no evidence that would suggest that the abusers would not resort to torture even if there was no reward on the table. The reward system, taken separately, is also a simulation of a real event; I can’t see it as merely a catalyst to further the scientists’ objectives. Abusers in offshore prisons are already being “rewarded” in one form or another, by themselves or by different authority figures. Sometimes, simply not getting caught and put in the media spotlight is its own “reward.”
If I understand you correctly, you’re asking: what if this happens to you? Would you allow yourself to participate? What if someone close to you willingly participated in this project and emerged physically and mentally scarred for life? I’d say Hell, no. No to everything. I won’t sign up – and I won’t encourage anyone to sign up – for a project like that just out of curiosity or need for money. And why? I already know about the Stanford project. It already exists as a warning to me. And, God forbid, should I find myself in the position of abuser, I should have learned my lesson from Stanford (and Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan, etc) and at least become more aware about what impulses I must control.
The project existed because there was a need for it. I would presume that there was no outcry against it because the way it raised awareness ended up doing more good than harm. One of the things this project taught the rest of us is: it’s not good to harbor an unhealthy trust in anything or anyone more powerful than yourself.
But there are some pretty eager risk-takers out there, and I say they could probably stand to learn something from volunteering in such projects. For example, would you really believe that you may be harmed extensively in the process of experimentation? Are you, as a civilized human living in a peaceful region, prepared to find yourself in the position of the weak and oppressed? I mean, you’re in a controlled environment in a country that recognizes your rights – what can go wrong, ye?
I get what you’re saying, that people in authority – scientific researchers, in particular – should feel a greater ethical responsibility toward the people who depend on their power. I do agree with that. It’s definitely not good to think of humans (or anything, for that matter) as mere test subjects. But hard science is at least one field where you could clearly see the good of the many outweighing the good of the few. Objectivity is important, and if a researcher must disassociate her/himself from all preconceived notions of “right” and “wrong” in order to protect the integrity of the data, then so be it.
Note that some people actually volunteer for experimental medical treatments even if they’re not fully sure what kind of pain they’ll undergo – not because they don’t have a choice, but because they want to know if it works, if it can help others like themselves. (Sometimes, also, because it’s the most cost-effective option ^^)
It may be folly to blindly trust any scientific institution, but it should be (relatively) safe to have faith in this: every form of experimentation is carried out with the intent of documenting useful information. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have been a scientific project – it would have been a game. And it wouldn’t have had the support of greater authority figures like the APA.
me (re: re: part 1):
I believe there is no better way to present something as natural and real than the scientific method.
We agree on this.
In the case of the Stanford project, we have to bear in mind that this is not torture per se, but a mere simulation of torture.
I disagree with this. It started out as just an experiment, but I’d argue that it soon became real for most of the parties involved – on the second or third day, the volunteer prisoners had become convinced that they couldn’t leave.
So it wasn’t exactly done without precautions
Agree with this too. It was done with precautions, and it’s easy to say now that the precautions weren’t enough – Zimbardo shouldn’t have been the superintendent as well as the experimenter, there should’ve been a third party who also had the power to call it off – but it’s much easier to second-guess after the fact. Like I said in part 2, it isn’t the initial conditions of the study that bother me as much as the fact that it wasn’t called off much sooner.
About the reward system… I may have failed to read through the documentation carefully, but I saw no evidence that would suggest that the abusers would not resort to torture even if there was no reward on the table.
I don’t understand what the reward system has to do with this, what you’re arguing for or against? ^^;; When I said that the person most responsible would actually be rewarded by his peers, I didn’t mean the volunteers who acted as guards, I meant Zimbardo, because he used this experiment as a launching pad for his career.
Objectivity is important, and if a researcher must disassociate her/himself from all preconceived notions of “right” and “wrong” in order to protect the integrity of the data, then so be it.
Objectivity is important, but I think that being a scientist doesn’t excuse you from also being human? By preconceived notions of right and wrong I assume you’re referring to a person’s morality, what stops them from hurting others/committing crimes/etc, and I’d argue that murder done in the name of science is still murder, that a scientist’s actions still have the same consequences as those of everyone else and so aren’t exempt from being judged as everyone else’s. Also, when I said above – I don’t think, however, that scientists really think through the consequences of their actions like this. – I should have said scientists “always think through”. I think that most scientists do keep this in mind (at least, most of the scientists I’ve encountered do).
One of the things I found interesting (was this in the documentary?), was when the most sadistic guard afterwards talked about what had happened, he said that he did those things because he wanted to see how far he could go before being stopped, that he was running an experiment of his own (an article that has the convo between him & Clay-416, the prisoner he abused). That’s how he excused himself.
Note that some people actually volunteer for experimental medical treatments even if they’re not fully sure what kind of pain they’ll undergo
Yeah, and when they do it’s their choice, not that of the scientist’s. imo it’s the difference between voluntary & involuntary sacrifice – nothing wrong with the former, but when it’s the latter, when it’s the scientist deciding, that’s when I have a problem. By the third or fourth day, the impression I got from the book was that the majority of the volunteers wanted to leave. When asked, they said that they’d even be willing to give up the money they’d earned so far if they could go. But they didn’t know they had the choice, for the prison had become very real in their minds, and Zimbardo and others let them think this.
It may be folly to blindly trust any scientific institution, but it should be (relatively) safe to have faith in this: every form of experimentation is carried out with the intent of documenting useful information.
Of course! I think the question is whether the integrity of the data is more important than the humanity of those involved (and by humanity I mean that their rights aren’t taken away, they aren’t dehumanized – sorry, can’t think of a more specific term than humanity right now ^^;), and I fall really firmly into the camp that the humanity of those involved is always more important, and I take it you fall into the camp that the integrity of data can be, as long as the data’s useful enough?
me (part 2):
but you know, in a less sheltered reality, we can get rid of the ethical question by rendering experimentation unnecessary. insider reportage is already commonplace, so even high-security prisons have some way to be exposed. all we have to do is listen to everyone tell their stories… but i guess nothing beats the shock factor of a laboratory simulation.
hmm, yes, though I can see why he set up this experiment; he wanted to prove that there weren’t bad apples but a bad barrel that created bad apples – that the flaw wasn’t in the people but in the institution – and this was the quickest & easiest way to do that. It isn’t the experiment that I object to, but the way it was carried out and the way it’s being packaged today. I don’t think it should’ve gone on for as long as it did (one area where both me & Zimbardo agree), that it should’ve stopped when the first volunteer had a nervous breakdown, and definitely when the second volunteer did. Yet it seems, from reading the book, that the thought of stopping the experiment never occurred to Zimbardo until his girlfriend confronted him about it (he admits to initially being shocked that she found anything wrong with what was going on). He had every intention of letting it run its two weeks, prepared to watch as the abuse escalated. I felt that after the first couple of days, the point had been proven, and the only reason it lasted so long was to give the findings an additional shock value, and the time came at a cost to what the volunteers suffered.
Also, another thing that bothers me is how, looking back, Zimbardo’s only willing to take limited, hedged responsibility for his actions. He’s not stupid enough to pretend that he wasn’t at fault at all, but he does justify his actions by saying that the volunteers could have left any time they wanted, that the parents of the volunteers and others who came to observe could have stopped it. Except, he set up conditions that made the volunteers believe that they couldn’t leave, and when visitors came he provided the prisoners limited contact with them, and did major PR work beforehand by cleaning up the prison & prisoners & etc (he seemed quite proud of how he was able to deceive the family members of prisoners in the book). Also, he was fully aware of the psychological research being done at that time that showed that an overwhelming majority of people would do things they’d consider amoral otherwise to please an authority figure, so it seems a bit disingenious for him to absolve himself of part of his responsibility by granting it to those that were below him in the hierarchy.
Why the way the experiment is packaged today bothers me: In the book, Zimbardo rarely ever brings up his role in the experiments, and the handful of times he does, he says that he became a victim of the same forces that everyone else did, became too invested in his identity as a prison superintendant to realize that what was happening was going to far. But he never takes the next step in responsibility, in acknowledging that he was also the creator of the system, the one person who had the most power to look beyond it and change it, and morever had all the psychological understanding and tools to do so. And yet, when he draws analogies between the SPE and real world events, such as the abuses at Abu Ghraib, that is the main thing he talks about, the responsibility that President Cheney and President Bush had in creating the conditions that allowed for the abuses to take place, in being the ones who could’ve ended it but chose not to. And it is this disconnect that makes me think that his research will only ever have limited value. He is not doing what he preaches, he is holding others to standards he never seems to have held himself to. And it is not just the book; in every interview I’ve read, when they talk about the SPE his focus is always on the abuses of the guards.
An excerpt from an article:
“Prisons are evil places that demean humanity. … They are as bad for the guards as they are for the prisoners,” he said, pointing to results of his experiment showing that both guards’ and prisoners’ personalities were warped by their given roles.” [Yet nowhere in the article is his role mentioned, how his personality might have warped.]
Another excerpt:
“What drives much of the fascination with the experiment is the sense that any individual could become a brutal dictator if given the chance. Zimbardo is still surprised at how quickly the participants changed their stripes.
“These guys were all peaceniks,” he recalled of the students chosen to be guards. “They became like Nazis.” [Yet he never takes the extra step to say - "I'm also surprised at how quickly I changed my stripes, that I allowed the situation to escalate as long as it did with no thought to stopping it".]
These articles are distressingly typical of the majority out there. It is always “they” – he can’t understand how quickly the guards changed, how quickly the guards became evil, always guards guards guards. He seems to forget, or be willing to ignore, that he was also a vital part of the experiment as the prison superintendent and should also be examining himself, focusing on what his role had been – that the evil wasn’t just in what the guards did but also that he manufactured the conditions that caused them to do this and then stood by silently and watched as they did it. That is the critical extra step that he takes everywhere else, yet rarely ever seems to take when talking about the SPE. For example, in the Abu Ghraib trials, he argued that the guards that were accused should be let go because it was mostly the fault of the authorities for what happened. In the book he wrote, he spent pages upon pages analyzing how Abu Ghraib was the fault of the authorities. And yet when it comes to the SPE, he devotes chapters on what the guards did and just a couple of paragraphs on his role, and I can’t help but think that by always focusing on the actions of the guards and not on his actions & inactions, he is undermining his own message, that the message most people come away with after hearing about the experiment is “ohgod, normal people can act like real assholes, this is so depressing”, and not “ohgod, authority figures are really important and must remain ever-vigilant and set up appropriate safeguards in systems so that abuses by their underlings do not occur”. And this is his own fault, imo – his inability to fully acknowledge the role he played hinders the message he is trying to deliver, people become fixated and shocked by the problem and little attention is payed to how it might be solved, to how abuses might be prevented.
May 9, 2007 at 10:02 am
symbi0tic
navia:
That interview you linked to was really fascinating. I even read your discussion with morphaileffect, but somehow I don’t have much to contribute.
I agree that Zimbardo doesn’t seem to focus on his own role nearly as much as he should. I was somewhat placated by his admission that he should not have been both the observer and a participant. He seems aware of his role but dismissive of it at the same time.
It seems clear that the only reason the experiment went on as long as it did is because Zimbardo lost sight of himself as a scientist. I’d be interested to hear him talk about that.
I’d also be interested to hear more about the guards who didn’t participate in the abuse. Does the book focus on them at all?
me:
He seems aware of his role but dismissive of it at the same time.
Yeah, that’s it exactly.
It seems clear that the only reason the experiment went on as long as it did is because Zimbardo lost sight of himself as a scientist. I’d be interested to hear him talk about that.
He does mention it briefly in the book. He says that he got too involved in his role as a superintendent, and the integrity of his “prison” became the first concern in his mind; that the same forces that were at work with the guards & prisoners were also at work on him, and he lost his objectivity. And when his girlfriend first objected he got really mad, and was like omg what’s wrong with you can’t you see what a great thing this is for science?!!
I’d also be interested to hear more about the guards who didn’t participate in the abuse. Does the book focus on them at all?
*nods* Everyone seems to have felt a lot of peer pressure, and gotten really invested in their roles, and even the guards that didn’t participate in the abuse never spoke out against it; they just held back and ignored it as it was going on. Kinda like the “see no evil hear no evil” type thing, and that was one of the things that allowed it to go on – the sadistic guards had few checks to keep them in place.
The book also talked about this one psychology study – you’ve heard of the Asch conformity experiments, right? Well, just a few years ago, they did that, but this time they hooked people to MRI machines to see what was going on in their brains. (If you’ve already heard of this, ignore this next part! Just figured you might not have, since this was fairly new.) They found out that in the people who changed their minds to go with what the group said, the part of the brain that lit up was the visual/spatial part. This meant that they didn’t change their answer knowing that the new answer was wrong; social pressure had actually changed their perception, and they thought the new answer they were giving was right (more on the study here). And this seems to have happened to the good guards; it could explain why they never said anything to stop what was going on, even when they felt uncomfortable with it.
(Also, somewhat otish, but in the study, they also found that in the people who stuck to their independent judgments, the parts of the brain that lit up were ones dealing with emotions & stress – that it was really stressful for these people not to go along with the group.)