1. Why Good People do Bad Things
Philip Zimbardo (1933-) You Can’t Be a Sweet Cucumber in a Vinegar Barrel
Why Good People do Bad Things

2. Dispositionialists vs. Situationists
Zimbardo begins his article pointing out that sociologists who grew up in privileged circumstances tend to be dispositionalist sociologists. That means: they explain social and individual behavior chiefly by appeal to personal dispositions of individuals. Symbolic Interactionists like Goffman and Hall can be dispositionalists, too, since they think the individual self-programs. Sociologists from unprivileged, poor backgrounds tend to be situationists. That means: they explain social outcomes and individual behavior chiefly by pointing to the situations in which individuals find themselves and how these affect their behavior.

3. Who Crosses the Line Between Good and Evil?
We all want to believe that only bad people (people with bad dispositions, i.e., bad character) cross that line. That is, we want to believe the line between good and bad is impermeable (cannot be passed through). This is completely understandable, and most people are never in situations that will test whether that is true or not. Phillip Zimbardo has put ordinary people in such situations and in doing so, he thinks he has found compelling evidence that this is not true. The line between good and evil is permeable: anyone can pass through it under the right circumstances.

4. Zimbardo’s Early Experiments
Experiment at NYU: “We took women students at New York University and made them anonymous. We put them in hoods, put them in the dark, took away their names, gave them numbers, and put them in small groups. And sure enough, within half an hour those sweet women were giving painful electric shocks to other women within an experimental setting.”
Zimbardo concluded from this and other versions of this study that “…[A]ny situation that makes you anonymous and gives permission for aggression will bring out the beast in most people.”

5. The Bronx “Car Vandalism” Experiment
Zimbardo arranged to leave a used car with the hood up, and license plates removed, in a neighborhood in the Bronx near New York University (NYU) and again in Palo Alto, near Stanford University.
Question #1 for the class: in which of these places did people vandalize the abandoned car (i.e., remove tires, radiators, empty the trunk and the glove compartment), and in which place did they actually not only leave it alone, but behave in ways that suggested they wanted to protect the abandoned vehicle from damage?
Question #2: why the difference in behavior in the two places?

6. The Killing Power of Stereotypes
Zimbardo seems to have shown that if you encourage people to regard others as ‘worthless animals’, they are capable of doing monstrous harm to those people. This is the ‘power of stereotyping’.

7. What Happens if you Put Good People in an Evil Place?
In 1971, Zimbardo constructed what he and colleagues called The Stanford Prison Experiment. Here is Zimbardo’s description of the experiment:
“We put good, ordinary college students in a very realistic, prison-like setting in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford. We dehumanized the prisoners, gave them numbers, and took away their identity. We also deindividuated the guards, calling them Mr. Correctional Officer, putting them in khaki uniforms, and giving them silver reflecting sunglasses like in the movie Cool Hand Luke. Essentially, we translated the anonymity of Lord of the Flies into a setting where we could observe exactly what happened from moment to moment.”

8. Institutional Power vs. the Will of Individuals to Resist
Zimbardo was trying the same test that Milgram did with his shock experiment at Yale. He views the two experiments as testing what happens when you put institutional power in competition with individual will to resist institutional power. The individuals in the experiment were college-age students on summer vacation in sunny California. Their personalities were tested, and all results placed them well within the norms for their age group. As Zimbardo says, “This was 1971, so these were peaceniks, civil rights activists, and anti-war activists. They were hippy kids with long hair.” Within a few days, the kids assigned to be guards “became abusive, red-necked prison guards..”

9. Results
“Every day the level of hostility, abuse, and degradation of the prisoners became worse and worse and worse. Within 36 hours the first prisoner had an emotional breakdown, crying, screaming, and thinking irrationally. We had to release him, and each day after that we had to release another prisoner because of extreme stress reactions. The study was supposed to run for two weeks, but I ended it after six days because it was literally out of control. Kids we chose because they were normal and healthy were breaking down. Kids who were pacifists were acting sadistically, taking pleasure in inflicting cruel, evil punishment on prisoners.”

10. What Does This Mean?
Some interpreters of the Stanford Prison Experiment have assumed that it was meant to answer the question that began every episode of the radio drama The Shadow: “…What evil lurks in the hearts of men?” These interpreters take it that the experiment shows that people have evil dispositions that can be brought out under the right circumstances. Some other critics of the experiment fault it for setting up a set of conditions that would encourage people to violate norms of conduct. These critics find that the people who were assigned to be guards were encouraged to act as guards. Zimbardo insists that his study was only meant to show how powerful situational factors are in determining social behavior, even behavior that would under normal circumstances be regarded as deviant.

11. Jason’s Own Interpretation
It seems to me that some critics fail to recognize that the purpose of the study was not to test whether people who were completely free to behave in any way they liked (as guards) would behave in deviant ways. The purpose, as anyone familiar with situationalist sociological theory would know, was to see whether situational cues will lead people who would otherwise not violate norms of conduct to do so anyway. The theory explicitly asserts that institutional power is coercive and that it competes with the individual will to resist institutional power. For this reason, I think critics who emphasize that the Stanford Prison Experiment was coercive toward the guards miss the point of the experiment. Of course it was somewhat coercive. But the encouragement given for bad behavior hardly rose to the level of the badness of the behavior that resulted! What do you think?

12. Disturbingly Similar Real-World Events: Abu Ghraib
“There are stunning parallels between the Stanford prison experiment and what happened at Abu Ghraib, where some of the visual scenes that we have seen include guards stripping prisoners naked, putting bags over heads, putting them in chains, and having them engage in sexually degrading acts. And in both prisons the worst abuses came on the night shift. Our guards committed very little physical abuse. There was a prisoner riot on the second day, and the guards used physical abuse, and I … continually told them that they could not use physical abuse.”

13. “These are exact parallels between what happened in this basement at Stanford 30 years ago and at Abu Ghraib, where you see images of prisoners stripped naked, wearing hoods or masks as guards get them to simulate sodomy. The question is whether what we learned about the psychological mechanisms that transformed our good volunteers into these creatively evil guards can be used to understand the transformation of good American Army reservists into the people we see in these trophy photos in Abu Ghraib. And my answer is, yes, there are very direct parallels.”

14. Zimbardo’s Explanation for the Results
Several concepts are needed to understand the behavior of the guards. Deindividuation: Zimbardo’s word for the anonymity which each guard was able to maintain in the experiment. When you cannot be identified as the agent of an act, he speculates, this allows you more freedom to act in ways that violate your own individual code of conduct. Social Modeling: If, as happened at Abu Ghraib, someone takes the lead in acting deviantly, others will follow. Dehumanization: The prisoners, all young men, were dressed in ways that feminized them, thus making them inferior men. This was also seen at Abu Ghraib, where those prisoners were identified as worthless by many guards.

15. Boredom: one thing that seemed to play a role at Abu Ghraib was the fact that the soldiers had many hours to spent in a uniform, boring environment. Some of their behavior was likely a result of needing to use the prisoners to entertain themselves, not out of evil intent but only to pass the time without unrelenting stretches of boredom. Lack of mission-specific training: both in Abu Ghraib and in the Stanford Prison Experiment, the guards were not give much instruction as to how to handle the difficulties that would arise for anyone in their situation. This increased the likelihood that they might behave badly because they were not really prepared for the unusual situation they faced.

16. Zimbardo’s final conclusion about Abu Ghraib: “Coming from New York, I know that if you go by a delicatessen, and you put a sweet cucumber in the vinegar barrel, the cucumber might say, "No, I want to retain my sweetness." But it's hopeless. The barrel will turn the sweet cucumber into a pickle. You can't be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel. My sense is that we have the evil barrel of war, into which we've put this evil barrel of this prison—it turns out actually all of the military prisons have had similar kinds of abuses— and what you get is the corruption of otherwise good people.” Sidenote: Zimbardo testified at the trial of one of the guards tried and convicted for their behavior at Abu Ghraib. He tried to get the judge to recognize that the ‘higher ups’ who were responsible for the conditions these guards faced shared responsibility for the outcome. The judge rejected that plea, throwing the book at the guard.

17. The Hero of Abu Ghraib: An army reservist who was shown a CD of the videos taken of the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib took the CD and shared it with a superior officer, anonymously at first, but then admitting directly to the officer that he was the one who had shared the information. This man is the kind of person everyone wants to believe he or she would be if put in the same situation. Sadly: His behavior was regarded by fellow soldiers in the US Army as a ‘betrayal’ of his fellow soldiers, and so he had to be put in protective custody so he would not be another casualty of Abu Ghraib. This despite the fact that without his act of conscience, the abuse of prisoners would have continued indefinitely.