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When he saw TV pictures of
American Gls torturing Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison, psychologist Philip
Zimbardo had a chilling sense of deja vu. Some 30 years ago, he'd created
the now infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, which had brought out similar
shockingly brutal behaviour from clean-cut all-American types of recruits.
Things had gotten so horribly out of hand that Zimbardo was forced to call
of the experiment after six days: the 'guards' randomly selected from normal
boys-next door types, became transformed into vicious sadists and the
;prisoners", who also had no previous record of mental flew or weakness,
were relentlessly bullied into becoming into real psychological wrecks.
So what makes seemingly
harmless 'good' people do unspeakably evil things to fellow humans ? Even if
you are a 'good apple, Zimbardo, now a professor emeritus at Stanford,
explains in his best-seller The Lucifer Effect, that being in a 'bad barrel'
will corrupt you; just as Lucifer turned from God's favourite angel into a
devil, perfectly good people can turn into monsters if prompted by social
influences.
"It's hard to imagine how a seeming game of "cops and robbers" played
college kids, with a few academics watching, could have descended into what
became a hellhole for many in that basement," he adds. "The situation won;
humanity lost. Out of the window went the moral upbringing of those young
men, as well as their middle- class civility. Power ruled, and unrestrained
power became an aphrodisiac. Power without surveillance by higher
authorities was a poisoned chalice that transformed character in
unpredictable directions."
In retrospect, Zimbardo
believes that most of us tend to be fascinated with evil not because of its
consequences but because evil is a powerful demonstration of power and
domination over others. Similar findings came from Stanley Milgram's classic
study of obedience to authority --- in which two-thirds of subjects in a
study ostensible about memory went all the way in delivering what they
thought was a lethal shock to another person (an actor, feigning agony
unbeknown to the torturers). The moral is to be constantly aware of how thin
the
line separating good and evil is. Nor is it an abstraction, says Zimbardo
quoting Solzhenitsyn: that line at the centre of every human heart. It's a
decision one has to make every day, where to be. |
