"The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson: often it
is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in
which he finds himself that determines how he will act." - Stanley
Milgram
The poet John Milton gave highest praise to the human mind when he wrote in 'Paradise Lost', "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." I have been celebrating that mental agility for most of my life, as a research psychologist for the past fifty years, but even before that as a child of only five years. Before I describe how I helped to transform the paradise that is Palo Alto, California, and Stanford University, into a hell on earth for a group of college students that I imprisoned in a dramatic experiment, allow me first to note briefly how I also mentally transformed a living hell into my optimistic heaven.
From Heavens to Hells to Heroes – In-Mind.org
Having developed the contagious disease of whooping cough compounded by double pneumonia, I was sent to Willard Parker Hospital, on the east side of Manhattan, to join hundreds of other poor kids suffering from every conceivable contagious disease. It was winter 1939, before the advent of wonder drugs, penicillin or sulfa, that would have helped us to survive. It was also an era before exercise was valued, so we lay in our cots day and night, never allowed to stand or stretch, or do anything that might disturb the nurses. There was no TV, of course, but also no radio or music or telephones or games or anything to do except to read comic books. Parents were restricted to visiting only a few hours on Sundays, when they were able to brave the long walk from the subway in winter storms. When they could not come, they couldn’t call to let their desperately lonely children know they would surely come next week. And naturally, we all worried that they might forget where we were. When they did come, we were separated by a huge glass wall, across which we tried to touch or kiss against before the nurses noticed and forbade this minimal moment of intimacy. Because kids were coughing and wheezing constantly, the nurses all wore masks, and had learned to harden themselves against getting emotionally involved with any of us; a kind of “detached concern” for their welfare charges.
And then night fell. Having not done anything all day but reread comic books, no one was tired, but lights were out promptly at 8 PM, and we had to pretend to sleep. It was hard to sleep, with so much noise from the constant crying and coughing, and with the black figures that slithered across the walls as the light from the nurses’ station projected scary shadows. We knew it was the Devil coming to look us over for his wicked selections. The kids around my bed all agreed never to say that dumb prayer, “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” It did not matter whether we said it or not, when morning finally arrived, “Billy had gone home,” or “Johnny’s folks came to take him home.” Kids died in a game of genetic roulette, without medication or health savvy treatment. But we all formed a silent conspiracy of denial among nurses and kids, to deny the reality of death taking us one by one. It was the only way we could sustain hope of ever being released alive. We knew that “going home” was really going to your grave, but we suppressed that ominous thought and replaced it with visions of our departed friends back home riding their bicycles, playing stickball, or just having fun. And we desperately imagined that when our turn came to go home, we would really go home and not go there.
I endured this nightmare for 5 months, through Christmas, New Years, my birthday in March, and eventually, magically, I was paroled right after Easter. When my parents tried to comfort me for the suffering I endured, I accepted none of those tears and sympathy. I had erected a different frame for the picture of poor little Philip – I had a great time in that charity ward at Willard Parker Hospital! I made lots of close friends, I learned to read and write before I went to school, I learned to ingratiate myself with the nurses using compliments to get extra pats of butter or sugar, and I developed leadership skills by being able to come up with interesting group games we could play from our dozens of beds, like we were a navy sailing down the Nile in search of the magic white crocodile. In my mind, I continued to make a heaven of this hell for many years afterwards, until the spell was broken when I confronted one of my students in a hospital dying of AIDS. But that is another story, for another day.
The Stanford Prison Experiment
Fast forward to summer 1971; I became Superintendent of the Sanford Prison, an experimental prison run by psychologists, not by the state. I wanted to understand better what happens when you put good people in a bad place, like prison. Who or what wins? Instead of observing what happens in real prisons that generate so much violence, I needed to separate what is usually confounded, the kind of prisoners and guards who populate prisons from the kind of forces operating in such places. To do so, it was necessary to conduct a controlled experiment, to select a group of volunteers who were normal, healthy young men with no history of crime or violence, and then randomly assign them to play the roles of prisoner or guard in a two-week long experiment in which we could observe and record everything that happened. Those assigned to be prisoners lived in their cells and on the prison yard all the time, 24/ 7; the guards worked 8 hour shifts.
Our prison simulation tried to create a psychology of imprisonment in the minds of all participants and staff, with all-powerful guards dominating powerless prisoners. The realistic elements including actual mass arrests and booking by the city police, visits by a prison chaplain, public defender, and parents in visiting hours, parole board hearings, along with unplanned prisoner rebellions and guards’ abuse and torture of prisoners. The experiment had to be terminated after only 6 days because nearly half the prisoners had emotional breakdowns in response to the extreme stress and psychological torments sadistically invented by their guards. The situational forces had overwhelmed many of these good, intelligent college students.
Abu Ghraib Abuses
Fast forward next to April 2004. Horror images flash across our television screens of humiliating abuses of Iraqi prisoners by young American soldiers; men and women Military Police in Abu Ghraib Prison. The military commanders condemn these criminal actions of a “few bad apples,” asserting that such abuses are not systematic in our military prisons. The images were shocking to me, but familiar because they were so similar to what I had seen in our mock Stanford Prison-- Prisoners naked, bags over their heads, forced into sexually humiliating poses. Could the perpetrators of these evils be like the good apples in my prison? Could they have been corrupted by the “bad barrel” of the Abu Ghraib Prison within the bad barrel of war? To what extent was their behavior shaped by the same kinds of social psychological forces that operated in the Stanford Prison Experiment, such as dehumanization? My conclusion, after having become an expert witness for one of those military policemen, and reviewing all the evidence of the many investigations into these abuses, was that the parallels were palpable, the same psychology was at work despite different settings. One of the investigative reports by the Schlesinger Committee highlighted the fact that the “landmark Stanford study” should have been a cautionary tale for the military in preventing the Abu Ghraib abuses.
My new book, ‘The Lucifer Effect’ presents a detailed analysis of the psychological transformation of good apples immersed in bad barrels, both in mock and real prisons. Such an understanding does not excuse immoral behavior, rather it makes us aware of how the to change those features of situations, like military prison environments, that can exerts such corrosive influences on even our best young soldiers who temporarily play various roles on those stages. Historical inquiry and behavioral science have demonstrated the “banality of evil”—that is, given certain conditions, ordinary people can succumb to social pressure to commit acts that would otherwise be unthinkable. Just as Lucifer was transformed from God’s favorite angel into the devil, I argue that many good, ordinary people can also be seduced by situational forces to engage in evil deeds.
I also question how well any of us really knows what we are capable of doing in new situations where we might be given authority and control over others. We want to believe that we are good folks fully aware of the inner moral constraints on our behavior, and of course different from the bad folks on the other side of the line separating good and evil. But the dangerous thought to consider is that line being permeable, like cells of our body that allow movement of chemicals across their boundaries. Any thing that any human being has ever done, that is imaginable, becomes doable, by any of us in the same situation. It is a humbling corrective to our moral arrogance of assuming superiority without fully appreciating the situational forces that may have driven others just like us to become perpetrators of evil at that time in that place.
Good news: We can resist powerful situations and even become heroes
We need not be slaves to situational forces. In all the research that my colleagues in social psychology and I have conducted, we find that although the majority conform, comply, yield, and succumb to the power of the situation, there are always some who refuse, resist, and disobey. They do so in part because they are more sensitive to these situational pressures, more “street wise,” and are able to engage effective mental strategies of resistance against unwanted social forces. Some of what they know intuitively is how to spot and identify wolves dressed in sheep’s garments, smiling faces of con men and slick sisters with hot deals concealing manipulative intent. They are also more aware than most people of how their own thinking can contribute to distorting the scene before them, and thus needs some mental correcting.
In their arsenal of general resistance strategies, the first is always trying to be mindful of their place in any behavioral context, of not going on automatic pilot that triggers scripted behavior to unfold without critical awareness. They engage in critical thinking that goes beyond accepting other peoples’ definition of the situation, asking questions about how and why, and what happens down the road if they follow the prescribed path. That means developing “discontinuity detectors,” a sense of awareness of things that don’t fit, are out of place in this setting, that don’t make sense to you. It means asking questions, getting the information you need to take responsible action. It is important also not to fear interpersonal conflict, and to develop the personal hardiness necessary to stand firm for cherished principles. Think not of getting into conflicts, but rather challenging others to support their means, their ends, and their ideology. Take nothing for granted, be a hard-headed behavioral accountant. Finally, those who resist unwanted situational influences are willing to admit mistakes, of being wrong, of cutting bait rather than sticking with prior bad decisions; thus, they do not have to rationalize away earlier commitments made without full awareness of their consequences. Our hardy band of resistors insist also on retaining their personal sense of identity and self-worth, of not allowing others to de-individuate them or to de-humanize them.
Promoting the Heroic Imagination in Ordinary Heroes
When the mass of humanity is blindly obeying unjust authorities or bending to the will of corrupt systems of dominance, the few who resist are really heroes. Heroes are not only the courageous few whose brave physical dangers to help others in distress. Heroes are all those willing to make personal and social sacrifices for the good of others or their society. Social heroism involves putting one’s self at risk in the service of an important principle or idea. Being a hero is not simply being a good role model or a popular sports figure. Heroism in service to a noble idea is usually not as dramatic as heroism that involves immediate physical peril. Yet social heroism is very costly in its own way, often involving loss of financial stability, lowered social status, loss of credibility, arrest, torture, risks to family members, and, in some cases, death. In contrast to those whose heroism involves life-long sacrifices or ordering their lives around principles of passive resistance to injustice, such as Mahatma Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, or Martin Luther King, Jr., most heroism can be a sudden, one-time act. It can be an almost instantaneous reaction to a situation, like that of the army reservist Joe Darby, who revealed the photos of Abu Ghraib abuses to a criminal investigator, and thereby stopped those abuses.
This heroic deed of this average young man reveals what I have termed the “banality of heroism.” The idea of the banality of heroism debunks the myth of the “heroic elect,” a myth that reinforces the false notion of ascribing very rare personal characteristics to people who do something special—to see them as superhuman, practically beyond comparison to the rest of us. Just as with the psychology of evil, situations have immense power to bring out heroic actions in people who never would have considered themselves heroes. In fact, the first response of many people who are named heroes is to deny their own uniqueness with statements such as, “I am not a hero, anyone in the same situation would have done what I did,” or “I just did what needed to be done.” Immediate life and death situations, such as when people are stranded in a burning house or a car wreck, are clear examples of situations that galvanize some people into heroic action. But other situations—such as being witness to discrimination, corporate corruption, government malfeasance, or military atrocities—not only bring out the worst in people; sometimes they bring out the best in others.
I believe that an important factor that may encourage heroic action is the stimulation of the “heroic imagination”-- the capacity to imagine facing physically or socially risky situations, mentally struggle with the hypothetical problems these situations generate, and consider one’s actions and the consequences. Such a mental orientation may make people more likely to act heroically when the time comes. By considering these issues in advance, the individual becomes more prepared to act when and if a moment arises that calls for heroism. It might mean stopping the cab driver as he starts telling his favorite racist or sexist joke. It could mean intervening when a relative starts slapping her child around at a family event. It should mean willingness to risk losing your job by exposing fraud and deception as Sherron Watkins did at Enron, or even greater risks as Debby Layton did in exposing the dangers of Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple cult in Guyana.
Strengthening the heroic imagination may help to make people more aware of the ethical tests embedded in complex situations, while allowing the individual to have already considered and to some degree transcended the costs of their heroic action. Seeing one’s self as capable of the resolve necessary for heroism may be the first step toward taking a heroic action.
Our society needs to consider ways of fostering such heroic imagination in all of its citizens, most particularly in our young. As the sophistication of video gaming grows, can the power of this entertainment form be used to educate children about the pitfalls of going along with a herd mentality? Or help them develop their own internal compass in morally ambiguous situations? Or perhaps even help them think about their own ability to act heroically? And as we plow ahead in the digital era, how can the fundamental teachings of a code of honor remain relevant to our daily human interactions?
If we lose the ability to imagine ourselves as heroes, and to understand what true heroism is, our society will be poorer for it. We need to create a viable connection with the latent hero within ourselves. It is this vital, internal conduit between the modern work-a-day world and the mythic world of super heroes that can prepare an ordinary person to become an everyday hero.
There will come a time in each of our lives when three paths lie ahead. To the left, we follow the lead of others mindlessly engaged in some evil, practicing discrimination, or injustice, or abusing their fellows. That is the path of “perpetrators of evil.” To the right, we follow the lead of others who try to ignore the evil in their midst, smilingly looking the other way. That is the path of the “evil of inaction.” To the center, we make up our own mind, to act responsibly as individuals to stand up for what we believe in, to do the right thing when it is easier to do the wrong thing, or to do nothing. That is the path of “ordinary heroes.” Some day when You are faced with that decision matrix, what path will you take? Think Central, and be counted among those who represent this democratic ideal of ordinary heroes in your family, your community, and your nation.
Dr. Philip Zimbardo
Dr. Zimbardo is one of the faces of modern (social) psychology. Perhaps most famous for his Stanford Prison Experiment, he was featured on award-winning series and a frequent guest on TV programs around the world, with a recent appearance on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show. Dr. Zimbardo currently is professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. He received his Ph. D. from Yale and was elected President of the American Psychological Association in 2002. He is the founder of the National Center for Psychology of Terrorism and creator of the Shyness Clinic. Known as a creative and innovative researcher, he has produced over 350 professional articles, chapters, magazine and news articles, along with 50 text books.
Zimbardo misrepresents his Prison Experiment as "controlled". It had neither internal nor external validity and there was no control group whatsoever. He continues to promote a position which has been contradicted both empirically and theoretically. Recently, a group of psychologists released a public letter to alert people that his claims are not supported. He was directly responsible for the abuse that took place in that experiment and which caused the mental breakdown of two of the students. A film he produced from the experiment was used by the military in torture training.
Senior Researcher
By: David Stodolsky () on 09-08-2008 14:52