Phillip Zimbardo was a big name in psychology when I was in graduate school in the late 60's and early 70's. Long before we has social phobia, which of course requires medication, Zimbardo was studying shyness and developed behavioral treatment for it. But he is probably best known for the Stanford Prison Experiment, which revealed, much to everyone's discomfort and horror, how brutal and sadistic ordinary people could become when put in control of other human beings. In my day, this study was one way we attempted to understand the behavior of concentration camp guards.
But we have a far more contemporary situation for viewing what Zimbardo found and that is in our own treatment of detainees in the current so-called war on terrorism. and most notably the shame of Abu Ghraib.
In his final lecture before his retirement from Stanford last week, Zinbardo lambasted the current administration for its policies on detainee torture --
Philip Zimbardo said abuses committed by Army reservists at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison were not isolated incidents by rogue soldiers. Rather, sadism was the inevitable result of U.S. government policies that condone brutality toward enemies, he said.
Individual military personnel -- those who stripped prisoners and leashed them like dogs -- are only as culpable as the people who created the overall environment in which the soldiers operated, Zimbardo told undergraduates enrolled in introductory psychology.
"Good American soldiers were corrupted by the bad barrel in which they, too, were imprisoned," said Zimbardo, 73. "Those barrels were designed, crafted, maintained and mismanaged by the bad barrel makers, from the top down in the military and civilian Bush administration."
He went on to say:
Decades later, Zimbardo applied his analysis to American soldiers at Abu Ghraib. He testified as an expert witness in the court martial of Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, the highest-ranking officer implicated in the scandal.
Frederick received a maximum eight-year prison term for abusing and humiliating detainees. He was stripped of nine medals and 22 years of retirement pay.
Zimbardo -- who spent months interviewing Frederick and his friends and relatives, and poring over Frederick's work history and personal background -- argued that his sentence should be lessened.
Based on academic research, Zimbardo said, very few people could resist the situational pressures of Abu Ghraib -- particularly Army reservists, themselves subject to hazing and abuse by active duty soldiers.
"There's only one rung lower than reservists, and that's the detainees," Zimbardo said while flashing dozens of "trophy photos" of Iraqi prisoners in naked piles, being menaced by snarling German shepherds, covered in blood or with their eyes missing.
It seems a very good note on which to close an academic career.