There’s a little bit of evil in everyone, lecturer tells Bucknell crowd
By ANNA TELATOVICH atelatovich@sungazette.comArticle Photos
Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology and director of the center for interdisciplinary policy, education and research on terrorism at Stanford University, suggested during a lecture Tuesday night at Bucknell University that each person change their thoughts to “maybe, me too.” Zimbardo explained that under certain circumstances, each individual is capable of doing evil.
A crowd of hundreds gathered in the Leanne Freas Trout Auditorium to listen to Zimbardo’s presentation of “The Lucifer Effect.”
The Lucifer Effect, according to Zimbardo’s Web site, is defined as the “transformation of human character” that occurs after a series of factors create a “perfect storm which leads good people to engage in evil actions.” The Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq was Zimbardo’s example of evil.
Zimbardo showed the horrifying images that came out of Tier 1-A of Abu Ghraib prison in April 2004. Before displaying the photographs, Zimbardo presented his hypothesis that, “The soldiers were good, but it was the barrel that was bad, that corrupted them.”
One of the first factors that added to “the perfect storm” of corruption was that the prison guards were Army Reservists, which Zimbardo called “not real soldiers,” who had “no training in a combat zone.” The fact that the prison guards’ superior, Janis Karpinski, never visited Tier 1-A to enforce control was another factor, Zimbardo said.
When investigations into the scandal began, it was a hunt for “bad apples,” Zimbardo said. To such questions, an individual and not causes can be the only answer.
According to Zimbardo, internal forces like pathologies and character defects create “bad apples,” social forces that corrupt individuals are the “bad barrel,” and the system influences, like political and economic situations, are the “bad barrel makers.”
To understand why the scandal occurred, people must make a “paradigm shift” from looking at the individual’s characteristics to the situational and systemic forces.
Adding support to Zimbardo’s hypothesis was years of psychological studies. One study he sited was an experiment by Stanley Milgram which took individuals and put them in positions of “teacher” and “learner.” Teachers wore lab coats and were responsible for sending electric shocks to the learner when a question was missed. When the teacher no longer wanted to participate, the experimenter told them to continue. In the study, nobody dropped out of the experiment.
He also cited the suicide and murder of 912 Americans under the authority of Jim Jones in 1978 as another example of following authority without resisting. This is an example of a modern “Lucifer Effect” — blindly obeying authority. “There are more crimes committed in the name of obedience than disobedience,” Zimbardo said.
He used another study to emphasizes that deindividuation increases violence. Deindividuation is a way to make oneself seem anonymous and is put into action by groups like the Ku Klux Klan, who hide their face when attacking.
“Anything that makes you feel anonymous,” makes one feel as if they “have permission to behave violently,” Zimbardo said.
This deindividuation was enacted in Abu Ghraib by prisoners not wearing military uniforms and painting their faces.
Another study proved that “dehumanizing victims” increases violence, and is a tactic used by the military, Zimbardo said. When an enemy is referred to as “animals,” studies prove that violence will be inflicted more intensely then when the enemy is referred to as “nice guys” or are not described at all.
This goes to show “sticks and stones can break your bones, but names can kill you,” Zimbardo said.
Zimbardo may be best known for his Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, which he cited Tuesday. In the experiment, participants were assigned as guards and prisoners. The prisoners were given numbers and no longer called by their names — an act of dehumanizing them.
The guards began to make prisoners perform “menial tasks” like push ups when the rules were broken. “But that gets boring,” Zimbardo said. “Boredom is the main motivator of evil,” which is another factor promoting the Abu Ghraib scandal.
In the 1971 experiment, prisoners were stripped naked, hooded and sexually degraded, images that were repeated in Abu Ghraib. Placing hoods over the victim’s faces in both situations was a way to isolate them. It’s “easy to be violent and aggressive to a remote victim,” Zimbardo said.
The Stanford experiment ended prematurely, after six days, when each prisoner began to break down.
After the Abu Ghraib scandal became public, former Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger released a report saying: “The landmark Stanford study provides a cautionary tale for all military detention operations.”
Zimbardo asked the audience to think again, that perhaps under the same set of circumstances, that they, too, may be caught up in the same type of evil that occurred in Abu Ghraib.
He suggested heroism as the antidote to evil, which can be promoted by increasing the “heroic imagination ... encourage everyone to think of themselves as a hero in waiting,” he said.
But, “the same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination can inspire the heroic imagination,” he said.
In Abu Ghraib, the same situation that encouraged some to take the photographs encouraged Sgt. Joseph M. Darby to expose the scandal.
Zimbardo was the 11th Ralph Spielman lecturer to appear at the Bucknell campus. Spielman, born in Germany in 1914, chaired the Bucknell sociology department during the late 1950s and ‘60s. He died in 1978.
