Don’t kid yourself, we can all be evil
Three devastating psychological experiments in the 20th century seemed to suggest answers to these questions.
The first — the Asch conformity experiment — showed that people could be led into denying the evidence of their own eyes by their desire to conform, blindly to accept the authority of the group.
The second — the Milgram experiment — showed that people were prepared to subject others to potentially lethal electric shocks because they were encouraged to do so by authority figures.
And the third — the Stanford prison experiment (SPE) — showed that perfectly ordinary well-balanced people could be turned into savage tyrants or cowering victims simply by the situations in which they found themselves.
Now Philip Zimbardo, the mastermind behind the SPE, has written his own account of the experiment and its meaning, and of his role in the investigations of the horrific — and, crucially, photographed — abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
The author believes passionately that anybody can “turn evil”.
He does not believe in evil as a disposition — a character trait — but as the product of a situation. Evil thus resides not in people but in the system that creates these situations.
The experiment, conducted in 1971, could not have been more simple nor, on the face of it, more harmless. Student volunteers were divided into prisoners and guards. The prisoners were taken to a mock-up jail in Stanford University where the guards imposed a regime designed to suppress individuality and humiliate.
With horrific speed the guards turned into ever more creative abusers and, occasional rebellions apart, the prisoners into pathetic cowering deindividualised wrecks. The fact that they all knew the situation was entirely artificial did nothing to stop the slide into barbarity.
At the heart of the bad-apple argument is a theory of evil. This is that it resides within individuals. Evil, for Zimbardo, is in the system, not the individual. The extraordinary and unique plasticity of the human brain enables us to create systems and roles that engender evil. That very plasticity, however, can offer hope.
Is this strictly situational explanation of evil the right conclusion to draw from these three sensational experiments?
Confronted with Auschwitz, the normal human response is: how could anybody do that? Implicit in that response is the statement: I couldn’t.
But the experiments show we could. Nothing in the volunteers’ background indicated the possibility of evil behaviour. These people were you and me.
Systems engender evil, says Zimbardo. But systems are made by humans. Society is a human construct. Blaming systems or society may reduce the burden of guilt on the individual, but it does nothing to exculpate humanity. We systematically do evil. Zimbardo blames this on the plasticity of the human brain. But who is doing the moulding?
Systemically or individually, we and we alone are responsible for these rivers of blood and oceans of tears.
From The Sunday Times
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