You can’t be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel

Posted by Benjamin on: 10.03.2007 /

Wanted to draw your attention to an article by Dr. Phil Zimbardo. Dr. Zimbardo is a psychologist at Stanford University who is perhaps most famous for running the Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971. The Stanford Prison Experiment, along with Stanley Milgram’s obedience study, which is also mentioned in the article, are both fascinating and disturbing studies which demonstrate, ala Lord of the Flies, that we are far more deeply affected by, and vulnerable to, the influence of our environments and of authority than we would like to imagine, and that this vulnerability means that any one of us could relatively quickly be led to engage in criminal and inhumane behaviours which are against our deepest held beliefs, ethics, or morals. You can watch a great 51 minute documentary which was produced about the Stanford Prison Experiment, called “Quiet Rage, The Stanford Prison Experiment” on Google Video.

The original video of Dr. Stanley Milgram’s Experiment, “Obedience”, is available in 6 parts on YouTube

Following is a quote from the article by Dr. Zimbardo.

The other important thing in all of this is the “evil of inaction.” I’ve been focusing on the perpetrators, but there are two important groups that I want to focus on more in my research and my future writing. What about all the people who observed what was happening and said nothing? There were doctors, nurses, and technicians. There is a photo in which two soldiers piled the prisoners up in a pyramid, and there were 12 other people standing around, watching. If you watch this happening and you don’t say, “This is wrong! Stop it! This is awful!” you give tacit approval. You are the silent majority who makes something acceptable. If I get in a cab in New York and the cab driver starts telling me a racist or sexist joke and I don’t stop him, that means he will now tell that joke over and over again, thinking that his passengers like it. He takes my silence as approval of his racism. There is not only the evil of inaction among all those people in that prison, but also the people in society in general who observe evil and allow it to continue by not opposing it.

In our prison study it was the “good guards” maintained the prison. It was the guards on the shift where you had the worst abuses who never did anything bad to the prisoners, but not once, over the whole week, did they ever go to one of the bad guards and say, “What are you doing? We get paid the same money without knocking ourselves out.” Or, “Hey, remember those are college students, not prisoners.” No good guard ever intervened once to stop the activities of the bad guards. No good guard ever came a minute late, left a minute early, or publicly complained. In a sense, then, it’s the good guard who allows this to happen. It’s the good parent who allows a spouse to abuse their children without opposing it. That’s something that’s really important for us to consider.

The other important group for us to recognize are the heroes in our midst. When you take a situationist approach you say the majority of people in these settings will go all the way and step across the line. Because evil is so fascinating, we have been obsessed with looking at evildoers. Well, what about the ones who didn’t go all the way? We’ve ignored them, but those are, by definition, the heroes.

The hero is somebody who somehow has the inner qualities, inner resources, character, strength, or virtue—whatever you want to call it from Marty Seligman’s Positive Psychology perspective—to resist those situational pressures. And we know nothing about those people. There has never been a psychology of heroism. For example, after the Holocaust it took 30 years before anyone asked the simple question of whether anybody helped the Jews. We were so obsessed with the evil of the Nazis that they didn’t ask the question. When they asked, the answer was, Yes! In every country there were people who helped Jews. There were people who put their lives, and potentially the lives of their whole families, on the line to hide Jews in barns and attics when, if they were caught, they would be killed. Those are heroic deeds. When those people were interviewed years later, typically they said it was no big deal. They couldn’t understand why other people didn’t do it. It looked like they were a little more religious, but there is no research that studies the moment of decision when you are about to engage—to go along or to resist, to obey or to disobey. This is the kind of psychological research that would be exciting to do.

It can’t ever been done again because all this research is now considered unethical, but in the case of Abu Ghraib we have a hero. A reserve specialist, a low-level guy, saw these pictures on a CD that his buddy gave him. He immediately recognized that this was immoral and wrong for Americans to ever do. At first he slipped the CD containing the images under the door of a superior officer. And then, interestingly, the next day he owned up to it. He said, “I was the one who put it there. I think this is wrong. You should take some action.” I talked to some military people who say that it took enormous internal fortitude to do that, because as an army reservist in the military police in that setting, you are the lowest form of animal life in the military. It’s only because he personally showed the pictures that they couldn’t disown the fact that the abuse was happening, although they tried.
The paradox is that he’s an incredible hero who is now in hiding. He’s under protective custody. Soldiers in his own battalion say he disgraced them. Apparently there are death threats against him. But this whistle-blower’s deed stopped the abuse. There’s no question that it would have gone on. It’s only because there is graphic visual evidence of how horrible these deeds are that the abuse stopped and led to more than a half dozen investigations. Again, here is somebody who fascinates me, because he is the rare person we would all like to imagine that we would be.

We like to think we’re good, and down deep we’d all like to say, “I would be the heroic one. I would be the one who would blow the whistle.” The limit of the situationist approach comes when we see these heroes, because it appears that somehow they have something in them that the majority doesn’t. We don’t know what that special quality is. Certainly it’s something we want to study. We want to be able to identify it so we can nurture it and teach it to our children and to others in our society.

From “You can’t be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel” by Dr. Phil Zimbardo

–So do you think you would be a “hero”? Or would you be like the majority in these two experiments, and at Abu Ghraib, either committing these awful acts, or silently going along? Why or why not?

–Your reactions to the experiments or the article?

–How could we apply the ideas and results of these experiments toward becoming more just/compassionate/kind in our daily lives?