Only obeying orders

Would you ever torture somebody? ‘Of course not’, you say. The author, Professor (of psychology) Philip Zimbardo, disagrees. His view is ‘any deed that any human being has ever committed, however horrible, is possible for any of us — under the right or wrong situational forces’. The evidence he adduces for this shocking proposition is formidable.

Take two pieces of research, starting with the Stanford Prison Experiment. Twenty young male volunteers in Palo Alto, California, most of them undergraduates, none with psychological abnormalities, were divided at random in 1971 into ten ‘prisoners’ and ten ‘guards’. The guards were instructed to be tough. Within hours they had turned into sadistic bullies and the prisoners became underfed, cowed, depressed creatures.

The character of the book’s author, who created and ran the experiment is, I believe, of great interest. After four days several of the prisoners had broken down in distress, yet it did not occur to him to end the experiment until a girl, later his bride, gave him such a tongue-lashing that he realised the experiment must stop. Furthermore he persisted, and still does, in believing what is clearly untrue, that the prisoners knew that they could leave at any moment. Zimbardo laments and apologises for his ‘role transformation from usually compassionate teacher to data-focused researcher to callous prison superintendent’. Yet he describes, with apparent approval, a later experiment in which volunteer students gave painful electric shocks to a puppy. Zimbardo himself provides, I believe, a good example of a normal person behaving abnormally. The problem is not bad apples: it is the bad barrels in which people find themselves.

The second experiment, conducted by Stanley Milgram for Yale University, you may know about. Volunteers were instructed, in order to ‘improve people’s learning’, to administer more and more powerful electric shocks to a ‘learner’ in another room, when he answered questions wrongly.