Zimbardo Discusses Accountability for Torture

By Scott Horton

Stanford University's Philip G. Zimbardo is a living legend among psychologists. He designed the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE for short), one of the most significant—and most controversial—psychological experiments ever conducted. Today's New York Times features a fascinating extended interview with Zimbardo.

Q. What was your reaction when you first saw those photographs from Abu Ghraib?

A. I was shocked. But not surprised. I immediately flashed on similar pictures from the S.P.E. What particularly bothered me was that the Pentagon blamed the whole thing on a “few bad apples.” I knew from our experiment, if you put good apples into a bad situation, you’ll get bad apples.

That was why I was willing to be an expert witness for Sgt. Chip Frederick, who was ultimately sentenced to eight years for his role at Abu Ghraib. Frederick was the Army reservist who was put in charge of the night shift at Tier 1A, where detainees were abused. Frederick said, up front, “What I did was wrong, and I don’t understand why I did it.”

Q. Do you understand?

A. Yeah. The situation totally corrupted him. When his reserve unit was first assigned to guard Abu Ghraib, Frederick was exactly like one of our nice young men in the S.P.E. Three months later, he was exactly like one of our worst guards.

Q. Aren’t you absolving Sergeant Frederick of personal responsibility for his actions?

A. You had the C.I.A., civilian interrogators, military intelligence saying to the Army reservists, “Soften these detainees up for interrogation.”

Those kinds of vague orders were the equivalent of my saying to the S.P.E. guards, “It’s your prison.” At Abu Ghraib, you didn’t have higher-ups saying, “You must do these terrible things.” The authorities, I believe, created an environment that gave guards permission to become abusive — plus one that gave them plausible deniability.

Zimbardo also distinguishes his study from Milgram's psychological study of torture done at Yale:

Q. What’s the difference between your study and the ones performed at Yale in 1961? There, social psychologist Stanley Milgram ordered his subjects to give what they thought were painful and possibly lethal shocks to complete strangers. Most complied.

A. In a lot of ways, the studies are bookends in our understanding of evil. Milgram quantified the small steps that people take when they do evil. He showed that an authority can command people to do things they believe they’d never do. I wanted to take that further. Milgram’s study only looked at one aspect of behavior, obedience to authority, in short 50-minute takes. The S.P.E., because it was slated to go for two weeks, was almost like a forerunner of reality television. You could see behavior unfolding hour by hour, day by day.

Here’s something that’s sort of funny. The first time I spoke publicly about the S.P.E., Stanley Milgram told me: “Your study is going to take all the ethical heat off of my back. People are now going to say yours is the most unethical study ever, and not mine.”

The Milgram study, which probably exceeds even the Zimbardo study in significance, made its appearance on the public stage in the December 1973 issue of Harper's. It recently furnished the bookends for Rory Kennedy's documentary, now airing on HBO, “The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib.”

Also: Talking Dog Scoops Rumsfeld Interview

Under the heading of “Best April Fool's Day contenders,” try this interview conducted by the Talking Dog with former SecDef Donald Rumsfeld. The words attributed to Rumsfeld are drawn from an array of press conferences and interviews. Here's a teaser:

The Talking Dog: Let me turn to a slightly different subject... what do you believe the prospects are that we will eventually bring Osama bin Laden and the other Al Qaeda leadership to justice?

Donald Rumsfeld: We do know of certain knowledge that he [Osama Bin Laden] is either in Afghanistan, or in some other country, or dead.