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Photographs from Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison sickened eminent psychologist Philip Zimbardo when he saw them on TV three years ago, but it wasn't the first time he had seen such sadism imposed by prison guards. "It was eerie and all too familiar," he says. In an experiment 33 years earlier on the Stanford University campus where he taught, Zimbardo created his own little prison of horrors. He randomly assigned 24 male college students to be guards or prisoners in a two-week study. He told the guards to keep order, to let nobody escape and to commit no violence. Trouble started immediately. The guards began striking captives with their fists by Day 2. Soon they were stepping on prisoners' backs as they did pushups. Guards awakened fellow students at night and took all blankets away. Prisoners were shut into a tiny dark closet for long periods. Within a few days, partially nude captives were forced to simulate sex acts. The experiment was halted after six days; half the prisoners had been released early because of severe stress reactions, such as trembling, crying and screaming. As for the guards, Zimbardo says, they continued to resemble the all-American boys as they were profiled in the psychological tests they took before the experiment. In his new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, $27.95), Zimbardo says: •Nearly everyone would treat others viciously or look the other way at abuse under certain conditions, such as those in the Stanford experiment and at Abu Ghraib. •So-called inner character seldom survives if familiar social guideposts, such as family and normal routines, fall away. •Few people will challenge a widely accepted injustice. Just as Lucifer turned from God's favorite angel into a devil, good people can turn evil if prompted by social influences, Zimbardo says in the book. It's due in stores March 27. Zimbardo sees key similarities in social circumstances at the Iraqi prison and the mock prison at Stanford. Abusive guards were relieved of individual identity and accountability at both places. Soldiers in the Iraqi photos often wore no uniforms or wore masks. At Stanford, guards were simply called "Mr. Correctional Officer," and they wore reflecting sunglasses. Supervision was lax in both places, and the worst abuses came at night when guards felt least observed. Steps to dehumanize prisoners also preceded sadistic acts in both places. The college boys put bags on their prisoners' heads; hooded prisoners are shown at Abu Ghraib. Sanitary conditions were poor, hours were long and boring, and neither the students nor guards in Iraq had special training. One investigation ordered by the Defense Department mentions the Stanford experiment and calls the potential for abusive treatment at Abu Ghraib "entirely predictable." "That doesn't mean everyone isn't responsible for their behavior," Zimbardo says. But he says that even as most people are heavily swayed in bad situations, they'll return to their normal, decent selves once they're moored again in everyday routines. Americans are vulnerable to social influences because they emphasize individualism, says theologian Stanley Hauerwas of Duke Divinity School. "Everyone is encouraged to be an individual, to deny the influence that communities have on us. But that causes us to look around even more for cues on how we should be acting. It sets us up for extreme conformity and the kind of group scene we saw at Abu Ghraib." Parents who want to raise truly autonomous children shouldn't shield them from the atrocities of Nazi Germany and My Lai, says Robert Roberts, a Baylor University philosophy professor who specializes in ethics. "Kids need to hear that very ordinary, upstanding citizens did this. If you're not on your guard, you could wind up doing these things. … They need to hear that heroes are rare, and that could inspire them to higher goals." Others say Zimbardo is off-base. "He's overstating the case," says psychologist Everett Worthington of Virginia Commonwealth University. People often do inhumane things because they're told it's for a higher good, not because they're evil, he says. For example, soldiers at Abu Ghraib said they were told by military intelligence to soften prisoners up for questioning. "They thought they were doing their duty, and that's how it starts, but then things got out of hand," Worthington says. Zimbardo, an expert witness for Sgt. Ivan Frederick, an Abu Ghraib guard who pleaded guilty to maltreatment of detainees and other charges and was sentenced to 81/2 years in prison, disputes that the torturers were "a few bad apples," as the Pentagon said. He calls them good apples put in a "bad barrel" by the U.S. Army. Army Lt. Col. Mark Ballesteros, a Pentagon spokesman, disagrees: "Out of the hundreds of thousands of service members who have deployed … a very small percentage have been found to have committed misconduct of any kind and an even smaller percentage involving detainees." Also, tough, explicit rules to prevent abuse of detainees were set by the Defense Department last fall, he says. Whether the rules will prevent trouble is open to debate. "People can be very creative," Worthington says. Whistle-blowers are important, but we know very little about people such as Army Reservist Joseph Darby, who turned in the Abu Ghraib guards, Zimbardo says. "We know enough about what causes people to abuse," he says. "We're overdue in learning about the heroes in our midst."
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