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What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. That is, until someone finds the pictures. It's 2:30 a.m. Bored prison guards pull prisoners from their cells, strip them naked, chain them together and force them to simulate sodomy. The guards know someone is recording their activities, but they don't let concerns about future consequences interfere with the degradation and abuse. Sound familiar? It might sound like abuses that occurred at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, but these pictures were taken over 30 years ago - at Stanford University. In 1971 a group of 24 college men volunteered to act as either guards or prisoners in an experimental prison. Under the watchful eye of Dr. Philip Zimbardo, esteemed professor of psychology and former president of the American Psychological Foundation, volunteers went through several rounds of testing to ensure psychological and physical health and "normalcy." They were then designated either guards or prisoners by the simple flip of a coin. Two days into the good doctor's experiment, the normal, adjusted students were playing their prison roles with frightening reality. The "prisoners," fed up with having roll calls in the middle of the night, rebelled by pushing their beds against their cell bars and refusing to come out. The "guards" called in reinforcements, pulled the prisoners from their cells, striped them naked, and proceeded to humiliate and abuse them for hours. To further reinforce their power, the guards took away bathroom privileges and forced prisoners to urinate and defecate in buckets inside their cells, and to later clean the mess out with their bare hands. It got worse - so bad that Zimbardo halted the planned two-week study after only six days. Fast forward to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and Zimbardo sees a connection. While American officials have been blaming the situation on "a few bad apples," Zimbardo told MTV News it's more like "a bad barrel converting good apples into bad apples." "When people are deindividualized, they are usually put in herds, or groups, and given numbers. Their identity is taken away," Zimbardo said. "[In Abu Ghraib] the guards had a mob mentality, a group mindset. You start to do things because other people in your group are doing them." Psychologists call it the "Lord of the Flies" effect, named for William Golding's Nobel Prize-winning book. In it, Golding describes the transformation of shipwrecked, island-bound English choirboys into a murderous mob. It's not really as uncommon as it might sound, Zimbardo explained. Take Mardi Gras, for example. Each year normal people from all over the country converge on New Orleans and become gluttonous, lustful and reckless. Their environment validates their actions, they go crazy and one night blends into the next. Regard for accountability and consequences are cast away as easily as shiny beads. "When the people who usually focus your life are not part of the picture," Zimbardo said, "the situation gives you permission to do what you like." Zimbardo went on to explain that the Stanford prison experiment and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal were built on the same foundations with similar (and even predictable) results. Inexperienced guards were given little instruction, extraordinary power and limited oversight. In Abu Ghraib that dynamic was heightened by the stress of war and death and the need for information from Iraqi prisoners. But does a lack of training, combined with the Lord of the Flies effect, absolve the Abu Ghraib guards from the consequences of their actions? That's a question for the military courts to deal with, and if the case of Specialist Jeremy Sivits is any indication (see "U.S. Soldier Receives Maximum Sentence For Role In Iraqi Prisoner-Abuse Scandal"), the answer is no. |
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