The scientist who ran a chilling experiment
Philip Zimbardo was intrigued by the dynamics of power. In 1971, the Stanford University psychologist designed a study to explore how wielding power over others might alter behavior. He recruited 24 college-aged young men, paying them $15 a day to participate. Placing them in a mock prison in the basement of a campus building, he randomly designated half the men as guards and half as prisoners. What happened next, Zimbardo later wrote, was “shocking and unexpected.” Given khaki uniforms and mirrored sunglasses, the guards grew abusive, waking prisoners up with whistle blasts and forcing them to strip, do push-ups, and clean toilet bowls with their bare hands. Anxious and enraged, the prisoners tried to revolt, and the experiment, meant to last 14 days, was halted after six. The study became famous as the Stanford Prison Experiment—a window, Zimbardo said, into the way our behavior is shaped by our social roles. “It shows normal, intelligent, young middle Americans can be quickly corrupted,” he said.
Born in the South Bronx, Zimbardo grew up in a large Sicilian family “dependent on welfare payments,” said The Times (U.K.). As a youth he sold magazines and shined shoes, and he paid his way through Brooklyn College by checking coats at a Broadway theater. After earning a doctorate from Yale, he taught at New York University, where he took part in anti-nuclear protests, before moving to Stanford in 1968. Zimbardo drew criticism for his experiment, said the San Jose Mercury News. It came out later that he had not served as a “neutral observer,”but rather, in acting as prison superintendent, had subtly encouraged the guards to be cruel. Nor were the results as clear-cut as he suggested: Not all the guards turned sadistic.
Still, for years, Zimbardo’s work was cited by those studying genocide in Rwanda, the rise of Nazism, and other atrocities, said The Washington Post. In 2004, he testified on behalf of a U.S. Army sergeant convicted of abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, arguing that the soldiers weren’t bad apples, as the Army claimed, but “good apples put in a ‘bad barrel.’” And he remained steadfast in his belief that people’s actions depend on their environment and access to power. “We all have the capacity,” he said, “to be Mother Teresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It’s the situation that brings that out.” |