One of the most crucial works of the mainstream psychology of good and evil. The author presents interestingly the analysis of the Stanford experimentation and shows a close connection to what later happened in the Abu Ghraib prison. It presents the mechanisms and factors that make a common man a torturer and a victim of the system. It proves the anticipation of changing or preventing unwanted behaviours of an individual or group, by knowing what forces, values and inclinations are exerted by them.
We thank PWN for sharing a section for publication. We encourage you to read the full book.
I want I could say that writing this book was a passion for me, but it wasn't for 1 minute in the 2 years that I've devoted to finishing it. First, the review of all the recordings from the Stanford Prison experimentation was emotionally painful for me, as was the repeated reading of the protocols drawn up on their basis. Time clouded in my memory the degree of the elaborate wickedness which many guards did, the degree of the suffering of many prisoners, and the degree of my passiveness—the sin of omission—through which these actions lasted so long.
I besides forgot that the first part of this book was actually started 30 years ago, under a contract with another publisher. However, I stopped writing shortly after the beginning due to the fact that I was not ready to share experience so freshly gained.
I am glad that I did not endure and that I did not force myself to finish writing due to the fact that it is only now that the time has come.
I'm smarter and able to capture this complex substance from a more mature perspective. In addition, similarities between abuse in Abu Ghraib and the events of the SPE have given our experimentation an additional up-to-date, giving fresh light to the intellectual mechanisms that have contributed to the creation of terrible abuses in this real prison.
The second, emotionally exhausting, obstacle to writing became my personal, large commitment to an in-depth survey of torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib. As an expert witness to the defence of 1 of the prison guards of the Military Police, I became a more investigative reporter than a social psychologist. I have worked to research everything that only active this young man: from in-depth interviews with him and conversations and correspondence with members of his family, by checking his past in the prison service and in the army, to his relation with the remainder of the military staff who served with him. I tried to empathize with his situation during the night shift on 1A from 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. all night for forty nights without interruption.
As an expert witness to the defence testifying to his trial, I was granted access to all of the hundreds of digitally documented images of depravity. It was a hideous and painful task. In addition, I was provided with all the reports available at the time prepared by various military and civilian investigation committees. Since I was told that I would not be allowed to take detailed notes with me, I had to remember as much of the key details and conclusions they contained. This cognitive challenge coincided with a terrible emotional tension that increased erstwhile Sergeant Ivan “Chip” Frederick received a severe punishment dimension and I became an informal intellectual advisor to him and his wife Marty. Over time, I became “Uncle Phil” to them.
I was angry and frustrated at the same time, first seeing the military's deficiency of readiness to accept any of the many mitigating circumstances I pointed out, which straight contributed to his behavior, and which should have affected the simplification of a severe prison sentence. The prosecutor and the justice refused to accept any ideas according to which situational impacts could affect individual behaviour. They represented the standard concept of individualism, divided by most people in our cultural circle. According to this concept, the wine was wholly “at disposal” as a consequence of the thoughtful, free choice of Sergeant “Chip” Frederick to engage in doing evil. My frustration was exacerbated by the fact that many "independent" investigative reports clearly blame for violations of the law on the shoulders of elder officers – on their inefficiency or passive management in the "not present janitor" style. These reports, by generals or erstwhile high-level government officials, made it clear that
The military and civilian chain of orders led to the creation of an "evil incubator" in which a fistful of good soldiers were turned into "worm apples".
If I had to compose this book shortly after the end of the Stanford Prison Experiment, I would be happy to prove that the situation factors that form our behaviour on many occasions are much stronger than we think, or more than we can accept. However, I would have missed a broader position regarding the superior force that could make evil good. By this force I mean the strategy – a complex of factors that form the situation context. Social psychology has accumulated much evidence to support the thought that under certain circumstances situational influences triumph over individual dispositions. In many chapters I mention to this evidence. However, most psychologists do not appreciate the importance of deeper sources of power, in political, economic, religious, historical, and cultural patterns that specify certain situations as legal or violating legal standards.
A full knowing of the dynamics of human behaviour requires us to see the scope and limits of individual forces, situation forces and strategy forces.
The change or prevention of undesirable behaviour of individuals or groups requires an knowing of what kind of strength, qualities and weaknesses they bring to the situation. Then we request to full recognise the complex of situational forces affecting a given behavioral environment. Changing them, or learning how to avoid them, can reduce adverse individual reactions to a greater degree than preventive actions aimed solely at changing people in a given situation. This means adopting a public wellness model alternatively of a standard medical care model aimed at treating individual diseases and illnesses. However, until we realize the actual power of the system, invariably hiding behind the veil of various kinds of classifications, and we do not full realize its set of rules and regulations, the behavioral change will be transient and the situational change will appear. In my full book I repeat like a mantra that
an effort to realize the situational and systemic contribution to individual behaviour of the individual does not justify the individual himself,
Nor does she bear her work for engaging in immoral, illegal, or wicked activities.
Reflecting on the reasons that led me to devote much of my professional career to learning the psychology of evil – violence, anonymity, aggression, vandalism, torture and terrorism – I cannot neglect to announcement the situational force that shapes me. Mature in poverty, in the fresh York ghetto in the South Bronx, mostly shaped my priorities and outlook on life. Life in the urban ghetto is simply a conflict for endurance by developing useful “street” strategies. This involves a constant calculation of who has power that can be utilized against you or on your behalf, whom to avoid and who to fraternize with. This means decoding subtle situational guidelines, telling erstwhile to stand up and erstwhile to fit in, it means creating common commitments and discovering what is essential to transform from a copycat into a leader.
In those days, before heroin and cocaine settled in the Bronx, the ghetto brought together people who were not in possession and their children, for whom, for deficiency of toys and method devices, the most precious treasure were another children – company to play with. any of these kids were victims or violent; any of the kids I thought were good ended up doing very bad things. Sometimes the reason was obvious. For example, Donny’s father punished him for all perceived transgression, stripping him bare and making him kneel on rice grains in a bathtub. On another occasions, this “torturing father” was a charming person, especially with respect to the ladies who lived in the tenement house. As a young teenager, Donna, broken by these experiences, ended up in prison. Another kid was taking his frustrations out of the skin of cats alive. As part of the initiation process in our gang, we all had to steal, fight with another children or do various bold acts and humiliate the girls and judaic children going to the synagogue. no of these things were considered wicked or even bad; they were simply an expression of obedience to the leader of the group and of obedience to the rules of the gang.
Hard and without anesthesia
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For us kids, the power of the strategy was embodyed by the great, evil caretakers who chased us out of cages, and the soulless miners who could evict full families, utilizing the power apparatus to throw their things out on the street for not paying rent. He inactive sympathizes with that public disgrace. But our biggest enemy was the police, who could have attacked us while we were playing jerk on the streets utilizing a broomstick and a rubber ball. Without giving any reason, they confiscated our playing clubs and banned us from playing on the streets. Within a mile of where we lived, there was no playground, so the street was everything to us, and our pink rubber ball posed no large threat to the citizens. I remember erstwhile we hid the clubs, seeing the cops coming, but the cops pulled me out to tell me where they were. erstwhile I said no, 1 of the cops threatened to arrest me, and erstwhile he shoved me into a police car, I smashed my head on the door. After that, I never trusted adults in uniform until they proved themselves worthy.
With specified education, completely without parental supervision – in those days children and parents never got active in the streets – there is no uncertainty where my curiosity of human nature came from, and especially its dark side. So the problem of Lucifer's effect has matured in me for many years, from the time spent in the sandbox in the ghetto, through my formal education in social psychology, to a place where, asking serious questions, I answer them with empirical evidence.
The structure of this book is somewhat unusual. It begins with a chapter in which the subject of the transformation of human character is presented, erstwhile good men and angels are able to do bad, wicked, even devilish things. The fundamental question arises,
How well we truly know ourselves, can we confidently foretell what we would be able to do,
Or what we would never do under entirely fresh circumstances for us. Like God’s favourite angel, Lucifer, can we besides succumb to temptation to do to others what is unimaginable?
The chapters devoted to the Stanford Prison experimentation (SPE) show in item our in-depth transformation survey that each student went through while playing the randomly assigned roles of prisoners or guards in a fake prison – which became besides real. Chapter by chapter, events are presented chronologically in cinematographic format, as a individual communicative told in the present time, with a minimum dose of intellectual interpretation. It was only after this survey – and it had to be discontinued prematurely – that we begin to wonder what we learned, describe and explain the materials collected, and reflect on the intellectual processes that played a function here.
One of the leading conclusions from the Stanford Prison experimentation was that
The ubiquitous and yet subtle power of a individual controlling the situational variables can completely dominate the individual's will to resist.
This proposal will be deepened in a number of further chapters, which will analyse this phenomenon in the context of investigation in social sciences. We see how a group of investigation participants – both college students and another volunteers recruited from average citizens – behaves constructively, submits, obeys orders and easy succumbs to the temptation to do things they could not imagine being outside the sphere of influence of the situational forces. A set of dynamic intellectual processes have emerged that can push good people to do bad things, including: deindividation, obedience to authority, passiveness in the face of danger, self-justification and rationalization. 1 of the fundamental processes affecting the transformation of ordinary, average people in heartless or even inhospitable promoters of evil is dehumanization. It acts as a intellectual blindness that obscures reasoning and instills the belief that others are little than men. It makes any people start to see others as enemies worthy of annoying torture and destruction.
With specified a set of analytical tools at our disposal, we take a look at the origin of the horrendous abuse and torture of prisoners, carried out by the American Military Gendarmerie in the Iraqi prison in Abu Ghraib. The presumption that these immoral acts were the sadistic work of respective soldier thugs, the alleged worm apples, is undermined by the examination of parallels between situational influences and intellectual processes occurring in this prison and in our prison in Stanford. We examine the Place, individual and Situation in depth to draw conclusions about the causal forces influencing the improvement of behaviours that have been established on the disgusting "photo-trophys" taken by soldiers during the harassment of their prisoners.
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Join us!Then it will be time to decision from individual level to situation level in the explanation chain and then to strategy level. Based on half a twelve investigative reports on these abuses and another evidence from various sources of law and human rights, I accept the prosecutor's attitude to bring the strategy to justice. Due to the limitations of our legal system, requiring individuals, not situations or systems, to be tried for unlawful actions, I bring charges against the quartet of elder military officers, and then extend the charge of co-judgment in giving orders to civilian decision-making structures operating within the George Bush administration.
The reader, as a judge, in the case of each of the defendants will decide whether to consider the evidence adequate to confirm that he is guilty of the alleged acts.
This alternatively grim journey to the core of the darkness of human nature will change direction in the final chapter. It contains good news about what we as individuals can do to face situational and systemic influences. In all the studies used, as in our real life examples, there were always individuals who resisted and who did not succumb to temptation. What drew them distant from evil is not any inconceivable, magical nobility, but alternatively something like an intuitive knowing of intellectual and social tactics of resisting. I will present a set of specified strategies and tactics that will enable everyone to cope better with unwanted social influences. These tips are based on a combination of my own experiences and the wisdom of my colleagues, social psychologists, who are experts in influence and conviction. (This has been supplemented and expanded as part of a module available on the website dedicated to this book – www.lucifereffect.com).
In the end, erstwhile the majority resists, and only a fewer resist, it is for resisting powerful forces that propel to submission, conformism, and obedience, rebels can be considered heroes, or peculiar individuals, distinguished among us, average mortals, through their bold acts and their life sacrifices.
Here we admit that specified extraordinary people be – a handful, ready to sacrifice – but they are exceptions in the ranks of heroes.
They belong to a uncommon species that sets an example by sacrificing their lives for humanitarian purposes. Unlike them, most of the another people we consider heroes are the heroes of the moment, the situation in which the call to the service fell. So the journey with the lead of Lucifer's effect reveals at the end its affirmative aspect, allowing us to celebrate the average hero who lives in each of us. Unlike the "banality of evil", which assumes that average people may be liable for the most vile acts of cruelty and degradation of their fellow men, I presume the "banality of heroism" which develops the banner of heroics of average men and women, rushing to service in the name of humanity, erstwhile their time comes to act. erstwhile the bells ring, they'll know they're beating for them. They call for what is best in human nature, which rises above the powerful force of the situation and the system. A wonderful expression of the triumph of human dignity over evil.
