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Among the dozen investigations of the Abu Ghraib abuses, one found that the landmark Stanford study provided a cautionary tale for all military detention operations. In differentiating the comparatively benign environment of the Stanford prison experiment, this report makes obvious that in military detention operations, soldiers work under demanding combat conditions that are far from benign. The insinuation is that those combat conditions might be anticipated to produce even more severe abuses of power than were observed in the mock prison experiment (Zimbardo, 2007).
Discussion
The Stanford prison experiment is but one of a host of studies in psychology that reveal the extent to which peoples behavior can be transformed from its usual set point to deviate in unimaginable ways. If the goals of the criminal system are simply to blame and punish individual perpetrators then focusing almost exclusively on the individual defendant...
if, however, the goal is actually to reduce the behavior that is now called criminal and to assign punishments that correspond with culpability, then the criminal-justice system is obligated to confront the circumstances and the role in creating and perpetuating it.
Conclusion
The significant message then is to be sensitive about our susceptibility to subtle but influential situational forces and, by such consciousness, be more able to conquer those forces. Group pressures, power symbols, dehumanization of others, forced anonymity, leading ideologies that facilitate unauthentic ends to validate immoral means, lack of observation, and other situational forces can work to alter even some of the best of us into something that we are not.
References
Zimbardo, P.G. (2007). Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: a Lesson in the Power of Situation. Chronicle of Higher Education, B6-B7.
Participants in the study did receive a psychological testing battery but in the study it is reported that scores were not known until the close of the experiment. This may mean that the aggressive behavior seen in the experiment was not due to the effect of the situation on the person, but rather the interaction of the person in the situation. Members of the study staff (minus Dr. Zimbardo,
Social Psychology Studies: Explaining Irrational Individual Behavior by Understanding Group Dynamics Social psychology is, as its name suggests, a science that blends the fields of psychology, which is the study of the individual, and sociology, which is the study of groups. Social psychology examines how the individual is influenced by the group. It looks at the influence of group or cultural norms on individual behaviors, thoughts, and feelings. However, because group
In fact, during the study, the guards became more sadistic when they thought no one was watching them. Zimbardo notes, "Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners" (Zimbardo). This may be the same reason guards at Abu Ghraib tortured and humiliated their charges, and the study seems to indicate this could happen in just about any prison anywhere, if the guards
My Lai Massacre The Milgram Experiment, Philip Zimbardo, and Understanding the My Lai Massacre In the twentieth century the United States military was engaged in numerous wars and the U.S. government depicted these wars as forces of good, freedom, and morality (Americans) fighting against forces of evil, tyranny, and barbarism (America's enemies). The realities of American military behavior in these wars, however, did not always justify such a simplistic characterization. American troops
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
more tactically satisfactory mothers in the form of cloth giving no food. Other young monkeys were given a choice between wire mothers that did not provide food and cloth mothers who did give food. A second control group was given normal mothers. Unsurprisingly, the monkeys all preferred the cloth surrogates, whether they gave food or not, under most circumstances. They study concluded that if simulated adequately, surrogate motherhood was