Human Behaviour in Experiments and the Iraq Prison Photos

The Stanford University Prison Experiment, 1971

Nearly every undergraduate who has taken an introductory psychology course in the last three decades will have read about the Stanford prison experiment run in 1971 by Philip Zimbardo. In that experiment, researchers divided a set of 24 ordinary healthy university students into two groups: placed within a simulated prison environment, one group would play the role of prisoners, while the other would play the role of guards. Originally slated to run for two weeks, the experiment had to be halted after just 6 days when the role playing ‘guards’ began abusing the ‘prisoners’, stripping them, putting bags over their heads, chaining them, forcing them to clean toilets with their hands, and sexually humiliating them. Meanwhile, the ‘prisoners’ rapidly began showing signs of severe psychological distress. For some bizarre reason, the BBC recently tried to replicate the experiment, in 2002, but with far more caution and far more stringent controls. It, too, had to be halted early.

Experiments like these suggest that in situations of stress, secrecy, and such powerfully unbalanced roles — even though the experimental subjects may intellectually realize full well that they are participating in a make-believe setting — this type of abusive behaviour is highly likely to emerge. This is exactly the kind of setting, and exactly the kind of behaviour, revealed by the Iraqi prisoner abuse photos. Rather than being exceptional behaviour, that of a few ‘bad apples’, this behaviour is the norm. This is what happens to ordinary people placed in that type of situation; there’s no need to distinguish between Americans or British or Iraqis or Arabs or Muslims: this is what people do. Those soldiers who committed crimes in Abu Ghraib are not people categorically unlike us, who have reflected badly on our otherwise sterling reputations: they are people just like us. As Zimbardo put it in an interview with CNN, "from Bush on down, we’re saying it’s a few bad apples, it’s isolated. But what’s bad is the barrel" (i.e., the situation itself).

Prison Crimes: Ordinary vs. Heroic Behaviour

What is extraordinary is the behaviour of those few individuals who stand up for what they believe is right in this situation, including those few soldiers who ultimately helped bring the crimes to a halt: they are heroes. While public reaction so far has characterized this as a few bad apples against a backdrop of good old fashioned American values, I believe it is much more accurate to characterize it as a few heroes (whose actions we have actually heard very little about) against a backdrop of the common, basic, human reality that emerges in those situations.

This is absolutely not, in any way, to excuse or condone crimes committed in the Iraqi prison; nor is it to excuse the role of senior management and command figures who permitted the situation to have arisen in the first place. (Well-informed senior managers or military commanders would have known that the type of situation which arose in Abu Ghraib is apt to result in precisely the kinds of behaviours that it ultimately in fact did. That situation should never have been allowed to have arisen. Likewise, the perpetrators of these crimes are no less criminals simply because their crimes are psychologically unsurprising.) Rather, my intention is to highlight the fact that to the extent our national self concept says we are fundamentally not like that, our national self concept may simply be wrong. (See the companion article on “National Self Concept and the Iraq Prison Photos”.) My intention is also to highlight the fact that to the extent the Muslim media may like to paint these crimes as having anything to do with the fact the victims were Muslims, they too may be wrong. While attending to our national self concepts, I believe we have missed a real opportunity to reflect on aspects of what it means to be human beings.

We may all like to think of ourselves as being the sort of people who would resist such pressures and who would stand up for what we believe to be right in such a situation. I certainly would like to think of myself that way. But like it or not, it’s very unlikely that everyone is right: it’s very unlikely that everyone would actually become a hero, rather than a criminal.

Additional Resources on the Stanford Prison Experiment

The following list includes a few of the articles and web sites available on the Stanford prison experiment and parallels with the Iraq prison crimes; the first site listed is dedicated to the original experiment itself. (Links open in a new browser window.)

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