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March 8 - May 25, 2023
Changing or preventing undesirable behavior of individuals or groups requires an understanding of what strengths, virtues, and vulnerabilities they bring into a given situation.
One of the dominant conclusions of the Stanford Prison Experiment is that the pervasive yet subtle power of a host of situational variables can dominate an individual’s will to resist.
Lucifer, the “light bearer,” was God’s favorite angel until he challenged God’s authority and was cast into Hell along with his band of fallen angels. “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven,” boasts Satan, the “adversary of God” in Milton’s Paradise Lost. In Hell, Lucifer-Satan becomes a liar, an empty imposter who uses boasts, spears, trumpets, and banners, as some national leaders do today. At the Demonic Conference in Hell of all the major demons, Satan is assured that he cannot regain Heaven in any direct confrontation.1 However, Satan’s statesman, Beelzebub, comes up with the most
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cupiditas.”*1 For Dante, the sins that spring from that root are the most extreme “sins of the wolf,” the spiritual condition of having an inner black hole so deep within oneself that no amount of power or money can ever fill it.
Evil consists in intentionally behaving in ways that harm, abuse, demean, dehumanize, or destroy innocent others—or using one’s authority and systemic power to encourage or permit others to do so on your behalf. In short, it is “knowing better but doing worse.”
And is there anything that anyone has ever done that you are absolutely certain you could never be compelled to do? Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special. These self-serving protective shields allow us to believe that each of us is above average on any test of self-integrity.
One thesis of this book is that most of us know ourselves only from our limited experiences in familiar situations that involve rules, laws, policies, and pressures that constrain us.
Malleus Maleficarum, or “The Witches’ Hammer.”8 It was required reading for the Inquisition judges. It begins with a conundrum to be solved: How can evil continue to exist in a world governed by an all-good, all-powerful God? One answer: God allows it as a test of men’s souls. Yield to its temptations, go to Hell; resist its temptations, and be invited into Heaven. However, God restricted the Devil’s direct influence over people because of his earlier corruption of Adam and Eve. The Devil’s solution was to have intermediaries do his evil bidding by using witches as his indirect link to people
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The process begins with creating stereotyped conceptions of the other, dehumanized perceptions of the other, the other as worthless, the other as all-powerful, the other as demonic, the other as an abstract monster, the other as a fundamental threat to our cherished values and beliefs. With public fear notched up and the enemy threat imminent, reasonable people act irrationally, independent people act in mindless conformity, and peaceful people act as warriors.
First, she was moved by the widespread sense of the lower status of the Hutu women compared with the beauty and arrogance of Tutsi women. They were taller and lighter-skinned and had more Caucasian features, which made them appear more desirable to men than Hutu women were.
She was hutu
That became another source of Pauline’s pent-up desire for revenge. It was also true that she was a political opportunist in a male-dominated administration, needing to prove her loyalty, obedience, and patriotic zeal to her superiors by orchestrating crimes never before perpetrated by a woman against an enemy.
human beings are capable of totally abandoning their humanity for a mindless ideology, to follow and then exceed the orders of charismatic authorities to destroy everyone they label as “The Enemy.”
The Stanford Prison Experiment went from initially being a symbolic prison to becoming an all-too-real one in the minds of its prisoners and guards. What are other self-imposed prisons that limit our basic freedoms? Neurotic disorders, low self-esteem, shyness, prejudice, shame, and excessive fear of terrorism are just some of the chimeras that limit our potentiality for freedom and happiness, blinding our full appreciation of the world around us.21
conditions that make us feel anonymous, when we think that others do not know us or care to, can foster antisocial, self-interested behaviors.
This abandoned car demonstration extended that notion to include ambient anonymity as a precursor to violations of the social contract.
“Broken Windows Theory” of crime, which posits public disorder as a situational stimulus to crime, along with the presence of criminals.
Broken Windows advocates argue that alleviating physical disorder—removing abandoned cars from the streets, wiping out graffiti, and fixing broken windows—can reduce crime and disarray in city streets. There is evidence that such proactive measures work well in some cities, such as New York, but not as well in other cities.
Stanford student radicals during the 1970 strike against the United States involvement in Indochina.
The most serious demonstrations occurred on April 29 and 30, 1970, following news of the U.S. invasion in Cambodia.
Chief Zurcher agreed that it would be interesting to study how men become socialized into the role of police officers and what went into transforming a rookie into a “good cop.” Great idea, I replied, but that would require a big grant that I didn’t have. But I did have a small grant to study what went into the making of a prison guard, since that was a role narrower in function as well as in territory. How about creating a prison in which rookie cops and college students would be both mock guards and mock prisoners? That sounded like a good idea to the chief.
“As I was saying, the nine students you are about to arrest were part of a large group of about a hundred men who answered our ads in the Palo Alto Times and The Stanford Daily.
After an hourlong psychological assessment and in-depth interviews by my assistants, Craig Haney and Curt Banks, we selected twenty-four of these volunteers to be our research subjects.”
We’d like to better understand the deeper structure of the prisoner/guard relationship by re-creating the psychological environment of a prison, and then to be in a position to observe, record, and document the entire process of becoming indoctrinated into the mental set of prisoner and guard.”
our research will attempt to differentiate between what people bring into a prison situation from what the situation brings out in the people who are there. By preselection, our subjects are generally representative of middle-class, educated youth. They are a homogeneous group of students who are quite similar to each other in many ways. By randomly assigning them to the two different roles, we begin with ‘guards’ and ‘prisoners’ who are comparable—indeed, are interchangeable. The prisoners are not more violent, hostile, or rebellious than the guards, and the guards aren’t more power-seeking
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“Another way of looking at it is, you’re putting good people in an evil situation to see who or what wins.”
“Whether the prisoners knew they would be arrested as part of the experiment. The answer is no. They were merely told to be available for participation in the experiment this morning.
The prisoners are clearly complying with orders more and more quickly. But that just reinforces the guards’ desire to demand more of them.
It was just harder to act the tough-guard role when alone with a solitary prisoner one on one.
Guard Landry returns armed with a big fire extinguisher and shoots bursts of skin-chilling carbon dioxide into Cell 2, forcing the prisoners to flee backward. “Shut up and stay away from the door!” (Ironically, this is the same extinguisher that the Human Subjects Research Committee insisted we have available in case of an emergency!)
Guard Arnett loudly announces that because Cell 3 has been behaving well, “their beds are not being torn up; they will be returned when order is restored in Cell 1.” The guards are trying to solicit the “good prisoners” to persuade the others to behave properly.
time distortion that is beginning to alter everyone’s thinking. “After we had barricaded ourselves in this morning, I fell asleep for a while, still exhausted from lack of a full sleep last night. When I awoke I thought it was the next morning, but it wasn’t even lunch today yet!”
many of the prisoners felt good about having had the courage to challenge the system.
The guards have prepared a special lunch for “Good Cell 3,” for them to eat in front of their less-well-behaved fellows. Surprising us again, they refuse the meal.
Prisoner Rich-1037 is offered a chance to leave solitary and join the work brigade but refuses. He is coming to prefer the relative quiet in the dark. The rules say only one hour max in the Hole, but that max is being stretched to two hours now for 1037, and also for occupant 8612.
Guard John Markus seems listless. He rarely gets involved in the main activities in the Yard. Instead, he volunteers to do off-site chores, like picking up food at the college cafeteria. His body posture gives the impression that he is not enacting the macho guard image; he slouches, shoulders down, head drooping.
prisoners should elect three members to the newly formed “Stanford County Jail Prisoners’ Grievance Committee,” who will meet with Superintendent Zimbardo as soon as they agree on what grievances they want to have addressed and rectified. We later learn from a letter that Paul-5704 sent to his girlfriend that he was proud to be nominated by his comrades to head this committee. This is a remarkable statement, showing how the prisoners had lost their broad time perspectives and were living “in the moment.”
Nothing could have had a more transformative impact on the prisoners than the sudden news that in this experiment they had lost their liberty to quit on demand, lost their power to walk out at will.
It is interesting to see how Geoff Landry vacillates between the tough-guard and good-guard roles. He still has not relinquished control to Hellmann, to whose dominance he may aspire at some level, while feeling greater sympathy for the prisoners than Hellmann seems capable of.
Simple self-interest is starting to win out over prisoner solidarity.
He threatens to do anything necessary to get out, even to slit his wrists! “I’ll do anything to get out! I’ll wreck your cameras, and I’ll hurt the guards!”
8612 was indeed confused, as he revealed to us later: “I couldn’t decide whether the prison experience had really freaked me out, or whether I had induced those reactions [purposefully].”
this young man was more disturbed by his brief experience in the Stanford Prison than any of us had expected any of the participants to be even by the end of 2 weeks. So I decided to release Prisoner 8612, going with the ethical/humanitarian decision over the experimental one.13
Even though personality tests had revealed no hint of mental instability, we persuaded ourselves that the emotional distress 8612 revealed was the product of his overly sensitive personality and his overreaction to our simulated prison conditions.
there must have been a flaw in our selection process that had allowed such a “damaged” person to slip by our screening—while ignoring the other possibility that the situational forces operating in this prison simulation had become overwhelming for him.
Confusion remained about 8612’s ulterior motives. On the one hand, we wondered, was he really out of control, suffering from an extreme stress reaction, and so of course had to be released? Alternatively, had he started out by pretending to be “crazy,” knowing that if he did a good job, we would have to release him? It might be that, in spite of himself, he had ended up temporarily “crazed” by his over-the-top method acting.
some guards have made toilet visits a privilege to be awarded infrequently and never after lights out. During the night, prisoners have to urinate and defecate in buckets in their cells, and some guards refuse to allow them to be emptied till morning.
The shortest guards, Burdan and Ceros, have become henchmen of their shift leaders. Both are very bossy, quite aggressive vocally—shouting in the prisoners’ faces—and decidedly more physical with the prisoners.
Some analysts might claim that they are using their weapons to compensate for their smaller stature. But whatever the psychological dynamic involved, it is clear that they are becoming the meanest of the guards.
The prisoners are all about the same average height, about five-eight to five-ten, except for Glenn-3401, who is the shortest of all, around five-two, and tall Paul-5704, who is tallest at maybe six feet two. Interestingly, 5704 is moving into the leadership position among the prisoners.
In fact, why is the whole night shift continuing to hang around after a long, tedious night?
