When you put good people in a bad place
For two weeks, twenty male participants are hired to play prisoners and guards. The 10 "prisoners" are locked up and have to follow rules, and the 10 "guards" are told to maintain order. The experiment gets out of hand and things turn unpleasant, then ugly and finally shockingly violent. This is the premise of Das Experiment, an entertaining German film starring Moritz Bleibtreu, which was released in 2002. The film is based on the infamous 1971 "Stanford Prison Experiment" in which a makeshift prison (complete with cells and surveillance cameras) was set up in a research lab. The planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended after only six days because of what the situation did to the students who participated. In only a few days, the guards became sadistic and the prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.
People change under situational pressure. Some become drunk on power and do terrible things. This is what happens when you put good people in a bad place. It goes without saying that the results are much worse when you put bad people in a bad place.
Comments
I took Psych 1 at Cal from Christina Meslach, Philip Zimbardo's wife. SHe had him in to give a lecture, in which he spoke of the SPE. He said it wasn't just the students that fell into role playing, but he became the Prison Warden.
He is an excellent lecturer.
Posted by: andrewdb | May 6, 2004 9:59 AM
Sir,
Would it be so simple as to blame the surrounding environment and thus abrogate personal responsibility as your citation of the Stanford study suggests.
Unlike Stanford students, soldiers receive alot of training to do their jobs effectively, morally and legally under situational pressures. Buttressing this training is a system of institutional discipline and command aimed at catching abberations.
The failure here is far greater than you allude to. The US Army was certainly aware of how situational pressure might otherwise affect good people; They had the benefits of not only Stanford like research, but research from the real-life laboratory and testing ground of Vietnam to fall back on, with years to analyze the results and implement their lessons on training.
When training and individual responsibility bent under situational pressure, the system of discipline and command should have corrected the contortion. In a real-life experience, a former commanding officer early in the Bosnian war would ruthlessly discipline anyone using the term "raghead" to describe Bosnians; Lest the first steps to de-humanization gain traction.
The failure of training, individual responsibility, leadership and finally of systemic discipline is at fault here. The failure is not of "people because they're in a bad place", rather it is more like "Evil things happen when good people stand around and do nothing."
regards
George Petrolekas
Lt Col
Posted by: George Petrolekas | May 8, 2004 2:20 AM