How “good people” are turned into perpetrators — You an I included

An article by Valentina Bianchini

You are a college student at Stanford University, California. As you are still half-asleep, enjoying your lazy Sunday, police officers rush into your place and arrest you over armed robbery and burglary.

At this point, you feel a bit shocked, but also quite amused. You know this is just part of the social psychology experiment you signed up for a few days before, conducted by Dr. Philip Zimbardo. What nobody is aware of — not even Dr. Zimbardo — is the escalation of violence which is very soon going to take place within the experiment.

Dr. Zimbardo is a researcher in social psychology at Stanford University. He became famous for his “Stanford Prison Experiment” (SPE) (Zimbardo, 2011), where he recruited 24 college students to play guards and prisoners in a simulated prison in the basement of the university. His intuition was that the environment plays a far underestimated role in enabling violence compared to one’s personality.

The results of the simulation have been astonishing. Within a couple of days only, the guards started behaving aggressively towards the prisoners, physically and psychologically abusing them, while the prisoners showed signs of intense psychological distress.

In fact, Zimbardo himself got sucked into the simulation he had put together, which led him to take on the role of superintendent of the prison.

The experiment was terminated after just six days, instead of 14, which was the original plan, due to the escalation of violence.

Now you might think that some people in the study — Zimbardo not excluded — must have had a disturbed personality or some kind of mental illness, considering the results of the experiment. However, keep in mind that there were no initial differences between the guards and the prisoners, who were all healthy young adults. So how was it possible that normal people turned into perpetrators and victims in just a few days?

Five ingredients for evil

After the prison simulation, Zimbardo identified five specific factors contributing to creating the perfect environment for triggering the worst side of any individual.

1. Group conformity

Although it is well known in social psychology that humans strive for group belonging (Pittman & Zeigler, 2007), this desire can lead individuals to give up their critical thinking out of fear of losing their status as a group member.

For instance, Asch (1955) found that 70% of participants conformed to the group’s wrong evaluation when comparing the length of two lines, which were observably different. Human beings are likely to conform to the group even when they know that the decision is wrong, because keeping one’s opinion against the group comes at an emotional cost (Berns, 2005).

In the context of the SPE, group pressure might have led the guards to harass the prisoners in a way that they would have never dared to do if acting alone.

2. Obedience to authority

Although we have been generally raised to think that following the rules is a good thing, obedience has also a very dark side. Milgram’s experiment (1963) of blind obedience to authority is in this sense emblematic.

Participants were asked to punish another subject in a learning task by giving him electric shocks. In reality, the subject was an actor pretending to be in pain. To Milgram’s surprise, 65% of participants obeyed the researcher’s demands and inflicted electric shocks they thought were deadly, persisting even when they thought that the learner had fainted because of the shocks he received!

3. Deindividuation

This phenomenon refers to the sense of anonymity experienced in certain group situations, accomplished by reducing one’s sense of social judgment (nobody knows who I am) and by decreasing self-judgment, for example by taking drugs. That enables individuals to enter a special state of mind and not feel accountable for their actions (Postmes and Spears, 1998).

Deindividuation is an important component of the SPE: the guards were wearing uniforms and sunglasses to increase anonymity. The prisoners were wearing uniforms too, had their heads shaved, and were identified by a number. Similar practices are also present in the military, in real prisons, and among the police, to name a few examples.

4. Dehumanization

Dehumanization occurs when human beings are stripped of certain human characteristics by being compared to an animal or a machine. (Haslam et al., 2007).

Consider the effect of being referred to as an animal — which often happened in the SPE, as in many real prisons. Although it might seem that being called a name cannot have that much of an impact, in reality just labelling a group of people in a dehumanizing way is enough to enable more aggressive behaviour towards them (Bandura, 1975).

5. The Bystander effect

Take the case of the murder of Kitty Genovese: the woman was stabbed to death while 38 witnesses, hearing her screams, did nothing to help her. The bystander effect takes place when individuals, witnessing a catastrophic event as a group, diffuse responsibility, each one thinking it is somebody else’s job to do something about the situation. (Darley & Latané, 1968)

In the context of the SPE, Zimbardo himself admits having been a bystander, as he witnessed the violence happening and did nothing to stop it. External visitors of the “prison”, such as a priest, a lawyer, family members of the prisoners, also played the role of bystanders.

According to Zimbardo’s research, these are the five elements that, combined together, create the “slippery slope” that is most likely to lead any individual to commit terrible atrocities. Outside the context of the SPE, these conditions help us understand other situations in which human beings engaged violent behaviour, such as the torture of prisoners in Abu Grahib, the genocide in Rwanda, the mass suicide of Peoples Temple, the Holocaust (Zimbardo, 2011).

It is important to remark that by suggesting an explanation for violence, in no way do I mean to justify it — neither was that the objective of Zimbardo’s research. On the contrary, by understanding which factors play a role in allowing such things to happen, we intend to prevent those harming behaviours.

Yes, you too

If, while reading this article, you catch yourself thinking that you would be the exception, that you would have opposed the prison system because you have the moral strength to resist and to be faithful to yourself, consider that our mind actually uses self-protection automatic schemas (thought patterns) that trick us into thinking that: you might be wrongly convinced that you would never be capable of abusing another human being because you are a good person, whereas other people do such things because something is wrong with them. (Heider, 1955).

So, I invite you to stay conscious of these tricks of the mind and to embrace the complexity of our motives and behaviour. Only by adopting a humble mindset can we be better prepared to actually resist these powerful situational factors.

3 steps to be heroes

The good news is that you can train yourself to resist contextual forces that might otherwise lead you and others into violence — you can become a situational hero.

There are three steps you can start your training from (Zimbardo, 2011):

1. Be mindful of new situations. In unknown situations our brain tends to rely on the opinion of the group and on heuristics (mental shortcuts which are practical but not always correct) the most (Helder, 1955). Therefore, we need to stay particularly cautious in new settings and be aware of the five environmental factors that might trick our mind (see “Five ingredients for the evil” in this article).
2. Be responsible. Remember that you are accountable for each one of your actions — and non-actions too. For example, think twice when a member of authority is giving you orders that don’t feel right to you. You should also keep the bystander effect in mind and take action next time you witness a critical situation.
3. Value your independence. You can balance the side effects of group belonging by making time to cultivate your independence. For example, you could do something with people that don’t belong to the same group, or try to critically think through opinions, decisions and norms shared in the group.

We have seen in this article how all of us, given the “right” contextual conditions, might potentially be able to commit or to indirectly contribute to the worst atrocities.

Luckily, there is hope, as we can train ourselves as situational heroes who successfully resist those dangerous environmental forces that might otherwise lead us into harming other people. Therefore, I challenge you to practice each of the three steps to become a hero for the next five weeks and see if you feel any changes in yourself.

Good luck and let us know how it was!

References

• Asch SE. Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. In: Groups, leadership, and men. Oxford: Carnegie Press, 1951.
• Bandura, A., & Walters, R. H. (1977). Social learning theory (Vol. 1). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-hall.
• Bandura, A., Underwood, B., & Fromson, M. E. (1975). Disinhibition of aggression through diffusion of responsibility and dehumanization of victims. Journal of research in personality, 9(4), 253–269.
• Berns, G. S., Chappelow, J., Zink, C. F., Pagnoni, G., Martin-Skurski, M. E., & Richards, J. (2005).
• Darley, J. M., & Latané, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: diffusion of responsibility. Journal of personality and social psychology, 8(4p1), 377.
• Haslam, N., Loughnan, S., Reynolds, C., & Wilson, S. (2007). Dehumanization: A new perspective. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1(1), 409–422.
• Heider, F. 1955. The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, New York: Wiley.
• Milgram, S. (1963). Behavioral study of obedience. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 67, 371–378.
• Neurobiological correlates of social conformity and independence during mental rotation. Biological psychiatry, 58(3), 245–253.
• Pittman, T. S., & Zeigler, K. R. (2007). Basic human needs.
• Postmes, T., & Spears, R. (1998). Deindividuation and antinormative behavior: A meta-analysis. Psychological bulletin, 123(3), 238.
• Zimbardo, P. G. (2011). Lucifer effect. The Encyclopedia of Peace Psychology.