Today — Easter Sunday — is the day on which we were promised, through the
resurrection of Christ, that evil would be conquered. It has not happened
yet. Evil is as potent a force in human affairs as it ever was. It is also
as much of a puzzle. What is it? Why is it? Where does evil reside? In the
universe, in society or in you and me?
Three devastating psychological experiments in the 20th century seemed to
suggest answers to these questions. The first — the Asch conformity
experiment — showed that people could be led into denying the evidence of
their own eyes by their desire to conform, blindly to accept the authority
of the group. The second — the Milgram experiment — showed that people were
prepared to subject others to potentially lethal electric shocks because
they were encouraged to do so by authority figures. And the third — the
Stanford prison experiment (SPE) — showed that perfectly ordinary
well-balanced people could be turned into savage tyrants or cowering victims
simply by the situations in which they found themselves.
Now Philip Zimbardo, the mastermind behind the SPE, has written his own
account of the experiment and its meaning, and of his role in the
investigations of the horrific — and, crucially, photographed — abuses at
Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. Zimbardo’s book The Lucifer Effect: How Good
People Turn Evil (Rider, £18.99) is a polemic. The author believes
passionately that anybody can “turn evil”. He does not believe in evil as a
disposition — a character trait — but as the product of a situation. Evil
thus resides not in people but in the system that creates these situations.
The experiment, conducted in 1971, could not have been more simple nor, on the
face of it, more harmless. Student volunteers were divided into prisoners
and guards. The prisoners were taken to a mock-up jail in Stanford
University where the guards imposed a regime designed to suppress
individuality and humiliate.
With horrific speed the guards turned into ever more creative abusers and,
occasional rebellions apart, the prisoners into pathetic cowering
deindividualised wrecks. The fact that they all knew the situation was
entirely artificial did nothing to stop the slide into barbarity.
Watching it all with forensic detachment was Zimbardo, whose future wife
Christina Maslach, a social psychologist, joined the experiment’s “parole
board”. He admits he was drawn into the increasingly desperate logic of the
situation. But Maslach was horrified and persuaded him to cut the SPE from
its planned two weeks to six days on ethical grounds. Would he do it again?
“The answer is yes. Do I feel remorse about the kids’ suffering? Yes, but I’ve
worked hard all these years to make sure the gain is worth the cost and I’ve
done it — in lectures, I work in prison reform, I helped change one legal
ruling based on the research. It did a lot of good.”
When the Abu Ghraib abuses came to light in 2004 Zimbardo saw striking
similarities with the SPE. Isolated within the confines of the prison, a
group of guards expanded their assigned roles to include horrific acts of
abuse against Iraqi prisoners. Zimbardo was struck by the instant reactions
of the army authorities — that this was just a case of a few bad apples:
“How could they possibly know that?” he asks.
For him the bad-apple theory is never right. It is the rotten barrel that
turns the apples bad. He provided evidence for the defence of one of the
guards — Ivan “Chip” Frederick — who, he argued, had no pathology preceding
the incidents to suggest he was a bad apple. His evidence was rejected and
Frederick received an eight-year sentence.
At the heart of the bad-apple argument is a theory of evil. This is that it
resides within individuals. Evil, for Zimbardo, is in the system, not the
individual. The extraordinary and unique plasticity of the human brain
enables us to create systems and roles that engender evil. That very
plasticity, however, can offer hope. Zimbardo believes that if we accept the
lessons of these experiments we can construct better systems. Furthermore we
should educate for heroism.
There was a hero at Abu Ghraib — Joseph Darby, an extravagantly ordinary
individual who passed on the pictures of abuse to higher authorities — and
in most theatres of evil, heroes emerge, albeit in a minority. Parents,
Zimbardo believes, should get away from the “don’t be a hero” advice often
given to children and replace it with active encouragement to speak out
against evil.
Is this strictly situational explanation of evil the right conclusion to draw
from these three sensational experiments?
The first thing to note is the context. Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments
were conducted in 1951, Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority experiments
in 1963 and the SPE eight years later. Milgram had specifically set out to
explain the way Germans had so easily accepted the Holocaust, and both
Nazism and Stalinism cast their terrible shadows over all these experiments.
All three studies can in fact be seen as responses to the 20th century
phenomenon of industrialised evil. Confronted with Auschwitz, the normal
human response is: how could anybody do that? Implicit in that response is
the statement: I couldn’t.
But the experiments show we could. Nothing in the volunteers’ background
indicated the possibility of evil behaviour. These people were you and me.
The simple bad-apple argument is an inadequate response to Abu Ghraib. This
was a systemic failure in the US military that created a climate in which
Iraqi prisoners could be regarded as sub-human. But bad appleism is also
challenged by Christian theology. Christ rose on this day as a sign that we
could be redeemed from the original sin.
This, for Christians, lies at the heart of theodicy — the explanation of the
ways of God to man. Evil exists because of our free will and disobedience.
Why a good, omnipotent God should allow this to happen has been the subject
of 2,000 years of agonised and inconclusive debate. But the implication of
the idea of original sin is clear: nobody can cast the first stone because
nobody is free from sin.
Furthermore the situationist conclusion drawn from these experiments has been
challenged by psychologists who point out that the responses were not
uniform. Some did indeed refuse to accept the opportunity for evil. They did
this either by walking away — a passive acceptance of evil reflecting Edmund
Burke’s statement, “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that
good men do nothing” — or heroically challenging the evil-doing system.
If there are such varied responses, such heroism, then surely character —
disposition — must play a part? Intuitively this feels convincing. It is,
for example, possible but not strictly plausible to explain Hitler solely as
a force unleashed by the system. There do seem to be people unusually
endowed with a capacity for evil. One might say such people are unleashed by
a system; but could it not equally plausibly be said that such people create
the evil system?
And finally there is an awkward logical problem with the purely systemic
explanation. Systems engender evil, says Zimbardo. But systems are made by
humans. Society is a human construct. Blaming systems or society may reduce
the burden of guilt on the individual, but it does nothing to exculpate
humanity. We systematically do evil. Zimbardo blames this on the plasticity
of the human brain. But who is doing the moulding? Only humans can be placed
in the dock.
This is the ultimate justification for the concept of original sin. Evil
exists only in the human realm. A lion is innocent of murder when it kills a
gazelle; humans are uniquely guilty when they herd others of their kind into
gas chambers. Systemically or individually, we and we alone are responsible
for these rivers of blood and oceans of tears. The human truth of the need
for a god to die for this unendurable guilt is why, in spite of our
disbelief, we still call this day Easter Sunday.
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