September 20, 2006
(1) THE ZIMBARDO REVELATIONS
What follows is from the introduction – “Why Meaning Matters” – in my latest book project, Wine, Sex, and War: Meaning and the Making of the Modern World.
This is a non-fiction book that blends history, social science, and natural science to offer a unique and compelling account of the making of the modern world, narrated from a psychological perspective that emphasizes humanity’s ongoing quest for meaning.
Comments welcome.
When we go back in time we tend to travel with the assumption that it’s only the specific things that the historian points out that were different and that everything else was the same. But in fact, in the past, everything was different. –Sven Lindqvist
In February 2004, an investigation into the US Army prison system in Iraq revealed that during the later months of 2003 numerous instances of “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” had occurred at Abu Ghraib prison. Major General Antonio M. Taguba wrote the report that summarized the investigation, which included a list of systematic abuses: “Breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; allowing a military police guard to stitch the wound of a detainee who was injured after being slammed against the wall in his cell; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick, and using military working dogs to frighten and intimidate detainees with threats of attack, and in one instance actually biting a detainee.” Bad things were taking place at Abu Ghraib, and the perpetrators were not the enemy; these were American crimes.
Roughly three decades prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC that precipitated the invasion of Iraq, a social psychologist named Philip Zimbardo asked the following question: “What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?” It was the summer of 1971 at Stanford University when Zimbardo put his question to the test – a test that yielded even more provocative results.
The context for Zimbardo’s psychological study was a small, mock prison built in a laboratory basement at Stanford. To fill it and to staff it, Zimbardo and his colleagues recruited 21 middle-class, male undergraduate volunteers. Informed that they would be compensated $15 a day for the duration of the two-week study, nine of the students were then randomly selected to be “prisoners,” with the remaining 12 divided randomly into three shifts of “guards” who would operate the prison around the clock. Those selected to be jailed soon learned that their short life as a convict was not going to be spent in some kind of pleasure prison. They were picked up at their home in a police squad car, charged as if suspects for armed robbery, warned of their legal rights, searched and handcuffed, and taken to the “Stanford Country Jail.” Meanwhile, the guards, who “were free, within limits to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain law and order in the prison, and to command the respect of the prisoners,” were waiting for them. When the prisoners arrived, they were strip-searched, issued a uniform and a number, and then burdened with a heavy chain that was bolted to one ankle.
Once the inmates were all jailed, the situation quickly escalated. Almost immediately, the volunteers were transformed by their respective roles, with guards tormenting prisoners and prisoners uniting in defiance against the guards. In Zimbardo’s words, “Because the first day passed without incident, we were surprised and totally unprepared for the rebellion which broke out on the morning of the second day. The prisoners removed their stocking caps, ripped off their numbers, and barricaded themselves inside the cells by putting their beds against the door...”
As though time had somehow been compressed by putting the inmates under constant pressure, events unfolded at a alarming pace. The study’s innocent volunteers had disappeared, with only guards and prisoners left in their place. Zimbardo: “The guards were very much angered and frustrated because the prisoners also began to taunt and curse them. When the morning shift of guards came on, they felt [the night shift] must have been too lenient… [and] they insisted that reinforcements be called in. The three guards who were waiting on stand-by call at home came in and the night shift of guards voluntarily remained on duty to bolster the morning shift. The guards met and decided to treat force with force. They got a fire extinguisher which shot a stream of skin-chilling carbon dioxide, and they forced the prisoners away from the doors.”
The experiment, scheduled for two weeks, was halted after only six days. Guards had become “sadistic,” the same word used by General Taguba to describe the abuses at Abu Ghraib. And the prisoners had become unhinged by chronic stress. One example was Prisoner #8612. This young man had been released from the experiment after only two days because he was experiencing “emotional disturbances, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying, and rage.” Despite this, Zimbardo notes, “we had already come to think so much like prison authorities that we thought he was trying to ‘con’ us – to fool us into releasing him.”
Just prior to the study’s early termination, Zimbardo assessed the degree to which the simulated prison had become an all-consuming system of meaning for the inmates. Did the volunteers still appreciate the artificiality of their roles, ready and able to slip back into their normal selves at any moment, or were they playing a role no longer? To test this, Zimbardo brought in a Catholic priest to act the role of someone from the outside. As the chaplain interviewed each prisoner individually, Zimbardo “watched in amazement” as many of the prisoners introduced themselves by number rather than their name. Then, after some preliminary small talk, the champlain probed Zimbardo’s hypothesis by asking, “Son, what are you doing to get out of here?” When the prisoners responded with puzzlement, the chaplain explained, as instructed, that the only way to get released was with the help of a lawyer. He then offered to contact their parents to get legal aid if they needed him to, with some of the prisoners gratefully accepting. Only a week had passed and already everything was different.
As the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal would affirm years later, Zimbardo’s simple study had real-world implications. People may display consistency and grace in everyday life; they may also feel that, as individuals, the boundaries separating them from society at large are as clear as they are durable. But is this so? What happens under more exceptional circumstances, when, for instance, evil comes to town? What do we learn about humanity then?
Everyone knows that each individual is a physical being, more or less distinct from his or her surroundings. The self, by contrast, is a psychological and social being, not so distinct from the surroundings. The self is suspended in an ecological web, rather, a web that is no less necessary, tenuous, and complex than the ecology supporting any animal or plant in the natural world. The cultural web of humanity is partly natural, of course, as is also well appreciated. What is less appreciated, but at least as important, is that this web is equally social and historical.
For the past ten thousand years or so, humans have evolved very rapidly, an evolution paralleled and promoted by a simultaneous evolution in culture. When the ecology of this culture changes rapidly, whether on a grand or tiny scale, people can change rapidly in turn. The results of Zimbardo’s study surprised even him, an expert in social psychology, and yet the transformative power of the small, if artificial, ecological niche he constructed should come as no surprise. The human self is literally held together by meaning, and the capacity of Zimbardo’s mock prison to tear down existing meaning for individuals and replace it with other meaning was very real.
The human self is literally held together by meaning, and the capacity of Zimbardo’s mock prison to tear down existing meaning for individuals and replace it with other meaning was very real.
For some of Zimbardo’s volunteers, meaning and identity were as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar; for most, however, they were a moveable feast. The volunteers engaged in behaviors, and came to view themselves in ways they could hardly have imagined only days earlier. “Guards” became guards, “prisoners” became prisoners. Had they any idea of their impending transformation, no doubt they would have avoided the experiment. Yes, the context of the mock prison stripped the individuals of their identities and replaced them with almost entirely new ones, almost at will, but the point should not be missed. If at times people prove to be either evil or weak – when evil triumphs – this is an historical fact rooted in everyday life, not a fact predetermined by human nature.
What is predetermined by biology is not so specific as this. What is in our nature is not aggression and violence, but rather a more general and benign capacity humans have to make and be possessed by meaning. From this point of view, the story of humanity is about finding meaning in the world, and about the entire world of meaning that has been built in the process. The problem, then, is not that the human self is held together by meaning, but that the meaning an individual embraces to hold themselves together may not be the kind of meaning that holds families, communities, societies or even humanity together. In fact, sometimes the world of meaning one inhabits does not hold them together at all; rather, it blows them apart.
