The question “ What Makes Good People Turn Bad ?” in itself settles the issue of whether good people can turn bad. As Philip Zimbardo argues in his Ted Talk dubbed The Psychology of Evil , psychologists neither condone nor support evil in humans (Zimbardo, 2008). However, psychologists have concluded that humans have the potential for doing evil. Indeed, when humans commit evil acts, Zimbardo argues that the right quest should not be for who committed evil but for what circumstances caused the evil to happen. Every human has the potential for being good, evil or a hero depending on the circumstances. Some examples of how humans can transit into evil are the Stanford prison experiment and the Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse. The first case involved university students who have no known record of evil predisposition (Zimbardo, 2008). Similarly, the second case involved members of the US military who by their professional affiliation are trained in discipline. The two sets of individuals found themselves in a situation that gradually led them to undertake acts of evil, which did not make them evil in themselves.
The Power of the Situation
There is an argument about whether the Stanford prison experiment was a standard prison experiment or a farce, based on its prerequisites. In the experiment, Professor Zimbardo selected a number of university students at random and screened them for any obvious physical or psychological issues. He then randomly divided them into two groups and chose one group to act as prisoners and the other as prison guards. Zimbardo played the role of prison superintendent. A key component of the experiment was anonymity as the students acting as guards wore uniforms and large goggles that made it hard for those acting as prisoners to identify them. Further, Zimbardo gave prison guards wide discretionary powers to obtain cooperation from the prisoners. In a gradual but definitive cascade, the prison guards resulted in punitive measures to bring the prisoners to heed (Zimbardo, 2008). Eventually, the punishment advanced to torture and dehumanization including beatings and sexual degradation. In an interesting twist, Zimbardo, a lecturer who, with hindsight should have stopped the abuse did not stop or admonish the guards. Indeed, the experiment only ended when Zimbardo’s fiancée pointed out that the events in the experiment amounted to reprehensible evil. Even after the rebuke, the experiment continued for another day. The factors that occasioned the evil acts in the experiment included a sense of unanimity, unabridged power and a gradual cascade into evil. The gradual cascade made the perpetrators immune to the evil deeds they perpetrated even after they resulted in actual torture.
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Understand Identity, Disposition, and Group Factors
An important component of the Stanford prison experiment was the manipulation of the identities of the participants. Before the experiment, the participants were ordinary students who both sought to do the right thing and knew their rights (Zimbardo, 2008). When Zimbardo commenced the experiment, he changed their identities by altering their power status. For the guards, their power status changed when they received instruments of power such as uniforms and simple control tools such as whistles and buttons. Secondly, Zimbardo used words to change the identity of the guards by informing them that they had a free hand to use coercion to control their prisoners. On the other hand, Zimbardo changed the identity of the prisoners by treating them in a manner that actively changed their circumstances. He organized actual police officers to arrest the student and assigned as prisoners, cast them away in actual police cars and booked them as part police procedure. After bookings, the situation escalated when police officers blindfolded the prisoners and forcefully threw them in cells (Zimbardo, 2008). The prisoners knew about the experiment but their mistreatment was real and it affected what they thought about themselves. Eventually, they may have begun to wonder if somehow the experiment had become a reality, more so as the ill-treatment escalated.
As the experiment continued, the two groups changed exponentially but in different ways. The prisoners changed by gradually acquiring a form of learned helplessness. They gradually realized that the harassment and torture would continue no matter how hard they protested and sought to leave. Gradually, the prisoners began to see their predicament as a reality, a fact that precipitated actual mental breakdowns in some of the prisoners. The guards also changed but in their propensity for evil. As Zimbardo argues in his Ted Talk, the first act of evil is always a minor one (Zimbardo, 2008). When the actor finds a combination of impunity and exhortation, the acts of evil keep on escalating. Eventually, the actor will commit evils that would not have been possible without gradual progression. The prison guards gradually increased in their acts of evil as their initial reservations disappeared until they resulted in shocking acts of evil including sexual degradation.
As the experiment continued, the participants identified more with their assigned groups. A sense of solidarity begun to form among the prisoners who sympathized with one another due to their common predicament. Similarly, a form of unity of purpose developed among the guards as they had a shared sense of power and a shared obligation to break the resolve of their prisoners. The solidarity among the prisoners precipitated a revolved in the make-belief prison. The prisoners worked together to oppose the guards. Similarly, the guards joined ranks in an effort to quell the riot. Indeed, some of the guards volunteered to work extra shifts in order to help quell the rebellion. As the show of force between the two groups continued, the guards resulted in extreme measures such as forcing the prisoners to repeat their numbers and refusing rebellious prisoners from emptying refuse buckets. As the resolve of the two groups increased, the guards gradually abused their power by torturing the prisoners (Zimbardo, 2008). Perpetration of evil in the experiment was a slippery slope that kept getting worse.
Abu Ghraib torture and Prisoner Abuse
The Abu Ghraib scandal that involved the torture and abuse of prisoners took place in the Abu Ghraib detention center in Iraq in 2003. From a political perspective, 2003 was a challenging time in the war in Iraq. The US military had easily defeated the Iraqi Army and deposed Saddam Hussein. However, a cascade of rebellions and terror attacks made peace impossible in several Iraq cities. American intelligence forces needed information about the rebellions in order to quell them (Zimbardo, 2008). The intelligence officers collected Iraqi prisoners whom they believed had information about the insurgencies and violent attacks. However, in spite of all standard interrogation techniques, the prisoners did not give any tangible information. The integrators thus gradually encouraged prison guards and military police to use underhand tactics to encourage the prisoners to diverge information. During normal interrogation hours, military intelligence and CIA officers would apply standard interrogation techniques. However, at night and in the absence of supervisors, guards would try to harass the prisoners to increase the propensity for cooperation the following day. The prisoners continued to resist, which augmented the efforts of the guards. Eventually, coercion methods enhanced to include acts of torture and human rights abuses such as rape, sodomy, wounding and in extreme cases murder (Apel, 2005). The torture and human rights abuses continued for three months until a whistleblower forwarded video evidence to a senior military officer. The resultant investigation revealed the magnitude of the torture as the prison guards had been using mobile phones to record their atrocities (Relman, 2016). Based on a careful evaluation of the Abu Ghraib scandal, there is a congruency between the grounds for torture with the Stanford prison experiment. In both incidences, individuals with unabridged powers found themselves under pressure and without supervision (Apel, 2005). They began to abuse their power but found no reprimands, opposition or remonstration. Mild coercion graduated into mild torture and eventually into reprehensible human rights abuses. Eventually, ordinary members of disciplined forces ended up committing acts that led to consequences as grievous as the deaths of their prisoners.
Reflection
Analyzing the Stanford prison experiment and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal caused me to remember an incident in my life where I abused power to the detriment of others. My extended family often holds camping expeditions that culminate in a get-together. As part of the get-together, the adults hold a kind of meeting where they discuss pertinent issues facing the family or family members since the previous camp. Ordinarily, the children would be under a chaperone while the teenagers try to hold a mock version of the adult's meeting. The most prestigious position in the teenagers' meeting fell to the oldest teenager who has not yet attained the age of joining the adult meeting. Normally, the teenagers' meeting was a farce featuring practical jokes, laughter, and an exasperated leader. I was determined to make a difference as a leader when my turn eventually came. I called the meeting to order and promptly ordered the first practical joker, a fourteen-year-old to kneel a short distance from the teenage meeting.
The younger group grumbled in solidarity and I ordered them all to kneel next to the first teenager. The group acquiesced but took it as a joke and they kept snickering. To ensure order, I commanded them to start moving on their knees as I caned strugglers. By the time an adult noticed what was going on, they had moved for about 100 feet and some were already bleeding. I could not help feeling like a monster when I realized that I had caused them actual injuries. In retrospect, I have come to realize that I had been allowed what I considered as unabridged power to control the group. However, the group believed that it was all a game. However, when I started taking the presumed power literally, the group's attitude changed and they started obeying my commands even though the orders were detrimental to them. A presumption of power gradually became actual power and eventually destructive power.
References
Apel, D. (2005). Torture culture: Lynching photographs and the images of Abu Ghraib. Art Journal , 64 (2), 88-100.
Relman, E. (2016). Retrieved from https://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/torture/pentagon-releases-198-abuse-photos-long-running-lawsuit-what-they
Zimbardo, P. (2008). Ted Talk: The psychology of evil. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsFEV35tWsg#action=share
