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THE EVIL OF INACTION: THE VIRTUE OF HEROIC ACTION
Philip G. Zimbardo, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor, Stanford University
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" Edmund Burke
The horrifying images of American soldiers brutalizing Iraqi prisoners must raise three important questions for me as a social psychologist: first, can I understand the conditions under which these men and women were working for the last six months that could have transformed them from good Dr Jekylls to sadistic Mr. Hydes; second, would I be equally vulnerable to the situational forces that led them to such bestiality; and third, had I been a witness to the terrible events inside Abu Ghraib prison, would I have intervened and blown the whistle.
A psychological perspective upon evil must focus on human behavior that demeans, harms, or destroys other human beings, or causes others to do so. By this definition the military police reservists , whose charge was to maintain law and order and to treat prisoners with the same dignity and humanity they would expect to receive in their place, are guilty of committing evil. However, the same reasoning would condemn the "guards" I supervised in the Stanford Prison Experiment I conducted over thirty years ago. The subjects in this experiment were normal, intelligent, psychologically healthy college student volunteers who were randomly assigned to play the role of guards in a simulated prison environment in relation to their peers assigned to play the role of prisoners.
Within days the "guards" assaulted the "prisoners", stripped them naked, hooded them, chained them, deprived them of sleep, locked them in the solitary confinement of a closet for hours, and finally began to practice sexually degrading "games" on their toy-boy victims. the study was scheduled to run for two weeks; I had to terminate it in five days.
Intelligent, morally upright young men had been transformed by the prison setting into unfeeling, cruel, even sadistic prison guards. Normal, intelligent young men, who had been assigned to be prisoners not for any crime they had committed but by the fickle toss of a coin suffered emotional breakdown under the pressure of their powerless, helpless state as prisoners. The dynamic catalyst for these remarkable changes was the prison system. There were no bad apples in the barrel; it was the barrel itself that created evil. The social and psychological factors at play in the Stanford Prison Experiment correspond almost exactly with those at play in the Iraqi prison.
The dominant factors in both the real and the simulated prison were several. 1) extreme power differentials, 2) the diffusion of responsibility for immoral deeds and the sense of anonymity that freed the guards from any awareness of personal responsibility for their actions, 3) the dehumanization of the "other," 4) the behavioral norms set by the group, 5) the absence of enforced sanctions upon unacceptable behavior, and 5) a narrowing of time perspective that trapped both guards and prisoners in an expanded "present". Also at work in the Iraqi situation were the cloak of secrecy, the absence of a standard of social acceptability, the inadequate training of the guards; the encouragement of CIA and contract interrogators to "break the will" of detainees. The only question in this recipe for disaster was not whether, but when chaos would erupt. It is evident from the expressions on the faces of the soldiers that they were oblivious to the moral significance as well as to the consequences of their actions. They were trapped in a moment out of ordinary time immersed in hedonistic mindlessness.
In their place would I have committed the same crimes? I would, of course, like to think that I would not, could not. But having conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment, I know better. Judgment is easy from a distance when one is comfortably surrounded by the social structures and props that provide us with controls, with a sense of certainty and predictability. But in a totally alien setting where the unusual becomes normative and the self is free from all the checks of inherited morality and future reality, what then? Dozens of studies that my colleagues and I have conducted reveal that the majority of decent, ordinary people can be easily seduced into crossing the line into barbarity, for the line between good and evil is not an abstract design in cyberspace but lies in the cauldron of the human heart.
I wonder whether I would be able to sound the alarm when my countrymen were violating their allegiance to country and humanity. Pressures to conform are enormous. Be a team player! Don't rock the boat! You'll be crushed if you dare to buck the system! I'm just a little guy; they have all the clout!
It was one young PhD, Cristina Maslach, who forced me to close down that awful Stanford prison I had constructed by telling me that I was responsible for the horrors she saw. It took one small voice to challenge my authority and bring the system down. In Abu Ghraib there are such heroes, and we should honor them: William Kimbro, a dog handler who refused to allow his dogs to attack prisoners despite the inducements offered him; David Sutton, who tried to stop the abuses he was witnessing by reporting it to the officers above him in the chain of command; and Joe Darby, average G I Joe, who brought visual images of the horrors to the light of day because he would not permit inhumanity to hide itself.
Social psychologists need better to understand the psychology of the resisters. All of us should honor and laud the heroic few. We should hold them up for models of rectitude for our children to emulate. We should be proud to have such countrymen.
"Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph"
The late Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia
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