Wired has a series of photos from Philip Zimbardo’s presentation at TED 2008:
Zimbardo devised and ran the famous Stanford prison experiment. His new book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding how good people turn to evil, is sitting on my to-read pile. In his TED talk, he argues that there are “seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil”:
- mindlessly taking the first small step
- dehumanization of others
- de-individualization of self (anonymity)
- diffusion of personal responsibility
- blind obedience to authority
- uncritical conformity to group norms
- passive tolerance of evil through inaction or indifference
- and that particularly in new or unfamiliar situations
Zimbardo was an expert witness for one of the Abu Ghraib guards – Sgt Ivan ‘Chip’ Frederick:
I tracked down his performance evaluations as prison guard in the states, the basis of his 9 medals and awards, corresponding with his wife, Martha and sister, Mimi, and engaging psychologists to provide personality and pathology assessments. I have also been able to get special insights into the nature of that horrid prison from military officers who have worked there.
As an expert witness, I also had access to many of the independent investigations into these abuses and all of the digitally documented images of depravity that took place on Tier 1A Night Shift. So in putting Chip Frederick on trial, I give a detailed depiction of what it was like to walk in his boots for 12-hour night shifts without a day off for 40 straight nights.
Chip got sentenced to an 8-year hard time in military prison, dishonorably discharged, disgraced and deprived on his 22 years of retirement savings, divorced by his wife and is now nearly broken. We see his transformation from good guard to bad guard to prisoner as one instance of the Lucifer Effect.
In an interview, Zimbardo argues that:
The situational forces that were going on in [Abu Ghraib] — the dehumanization, the lack of personal accountability, the lack of surveillance, the permission to get away with anti-social actions — it was like the Stanford prison study, but in spades.
Those sets of things are found any time you really see an evil situation occurring, whether it’s Rwanda or Nazi Germany or the Khmer Rouge.
