“POWER ALWAYS CORRUPTS”
“His interpretation chimed with ideas about the roots of evil, apparently helping to explain past atrocities”
Does evil reside within us, or are we corrupted by circumstances? In 1971, the Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo sought to demonstrate the potential power of situations and social roles to corrupt individual morality. Anticipating the scenarios dreamt up by reality TV decades later, Zimbardo and colleagues created a mock prison and recruited 12 male college students to play the role of guards and 12 to play the role of prisoners. The idea was to study their interactions for two weeks, but the ‘Stanford Prison Experiment’ had to be aborted after just six days, such were the levels of cruelty perpetuated by the ‘guards’ upon the ‘prisoners’, including forcing them to clean toilets with their bare hands.
To Zimbardo, the shocking lesson was clear – powerful
situations can overwhelm our individuality, turning good people bad. His interpretation chimed with ideas about the roots of evil, apparently helping to explain
atrocities of the past, and future – Zimbardo would later
invoke his research while testifying in defence of one of the US guards accused of cruelty towards prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003-4.
Over the years, Zimbardo’s study has been subject to intense criticism and reinterpretation. In 2002, the British social psychologists Alex Haslam and Stephen Reicher conducted a similar experiment called the ‘BBC Prison Study’. In their version, the prisoners united and overthrew the guards, showing that the events of the Stanford experiment were far from inevitable.
Footage has also emerged of Zimbardo – in the role of ‘prison superintendent’ – instructing his guards on how to behave, which seems to undermine the spontaneity of the events that unfolded. More recently, an audio recording was uncovered that revealed one of Zimbardo’s collaborators, in the role of ‘prison warden’, persuading one of the ‘guards’ to treat the prisoners more cruelly, including telling him that, if he did a good enough job, the experiment could lead to real-life prison reform. Critics like Haslam say the recording shows the Stanford study was more akin to a form of live theatre than a science experiment. Zimbardo and his defenders counter that, whether the guards’ sadism was inevitable or not, the study’s message still holds – that, in the wrong circumstances, otherwise ‘normal’ people are capable of extreme cruelty.