Abu Ghraib Abuse in Light

Abu Ghraib Abuse in Light of the Stanford Prison Experiment

In a landmark psychological experiment into group behavior and the effects of differential power, Philip Zimbardo demonstrated that even ordinary citizens without any previous history or known predisposition toward violence or abusive behavior have the potential to become cruelly abusive under circumstances that combine authority, unsupervised autonomy, and authoritative control over others.

The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment involved a makeshift "prison" setup by Zimbardo on the Stanford University campus, populated with "prisoners" and "prison guards" all randomly selected from students who had volunteered for participation in experiments without any knowledge ahead of time as to the nature of those experiments.

The behaviors unleashed by the experiment were so disturbing that Zimbardo was forced to end the two-week project after only one six days and nights (Zimbardo, 1973).

In 2004, disturbing images surfaced in connection with alleged prisoner abuse at the hands of United States military personnel assigned to the Abu Ghraib Military

Detention Center in Iraq. Those allegations of abuse were soon substantiated by video images and still photographs documenting gratuitous violence, dehumanization, and sexual abuse in the form of mimicry forced upon military prisoners by their U.S. guards (Schlesinger, 2004).

In many ways, the real-life abuses at Abu Ghraib paralleled Zimbardo's previous observations of human behavior during his 1971 experiment at Stanford. According to Zimbardo (2004), the abuses at Abu Ghraib were entirely consistent with his earlier findings and could have been predicted in advance by the hierarchical command structure, lack of training, and inadequate supervision prevailing at Abu Ghraib. Those conclusions were entirely consistent with the Final Report issued by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) in August 2004.

Zimbardo's classic experiment illustrated the connection between boredom and prisoner abuses, and detailed the guards' ridiculing prisoners, enforcing arbitrary rules, and openly exaggerating any dissention among prisoners (Zimbardo, 1973). According to the DOD Final Report (2004), Abu Ghraib military personnel also engaged in abusive conduct, in part, specifically as a function of their boredom as well. The DOD report determined that abuses linked to boredom among night-shift personnel at one facility in particular, Cell Block 1 at Abu Ghraib, were the result of assigning noncommissioned officers to the night shift duties, who described their behavior as having been "just for the fun of it" (DOD, 2004). The DOD Final Report further determined that the abuse at the Cell Block 1 facility "... would have been avoided by proper training, leadership and oversight" (DOD, 2004).

The degree of abuse at Abu Ghraib was much worse than observed in the 1971

Stanford experiment, even after factoring in the fundamental differences between real life situations and controlled experiment. If anything, the fact that ordinary civilian students proved capable of such conduct on other civilians, even without the psychological stresses of a wartime combat zone and genuinely hostile prisoners, suggests that the risk of similar abuse in genuine wartime situations is much higher.

In Abu Ghraib, mixed units with different levels of training were operating in a hostile combat zone where they were subject to hostile action (i.e. mortar attacks) by the same forces from whom their prisoners were captured. Whereas at Guantanamo detention facilities guards worked in an environment of 1-to-1 prisoner-to-guard ratio, the Abu Ghraib facility sometimes required working in a 75-to-1 ratio of prisoners-to-guards (DOD, 2004). Zimbardo's study already demonstrated that anonymity is one conditions capable of "... stirring the crucible of human nature in negative directions." The other factors listed by Zimbardo include diffusion of responsibility, dehumanization, peers who model harmful behavior, bystanders who do nothing, and a settling of power differentials" (Zimbardo, 2004).

The Abu Ghraib environment combined all these factors in addition to genuine animosity, because the prisoners under guard had actually been engaged in hostile actions against U.S. forces, and because their guards were already subject to all the additional stresses and deprivations of wartime and separation from home. Furthermore, Zimbardo