Ideas for my first experiments in human aggression came from discussions we had in a research seminar about William Golding’s ‘Lord of the Flies.’
At that moment, the Stanford Prison Experiment was changed into the Stanford Prison, not by any top-down formal declarations by the staff but by this bottom-up declaration from one of the prisoners themselves.
Yesterday was too early. Tomorrow will be too late. Today is the day of reckoning for each of us.
While the entire US population has increased by about a third since 1980, the federal prison population has grown at an astonishing rate – by almost 800 per cent. It’s still growing – despite the fact that federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 per cent above capacity. Even though this country comprises just 5 per cent of the world’s population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
That very day I resolved not to save all of my change until I turned forty. I resolved to have what I termed a little midlife crisis each day of my life in the hope of avoiding a larger one once I reached forty.
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “The line between good and evil is in the center of every human heart.
Added to my distress was the realization that many of the “independent” investigative reports clearly laid the blame for the abuses at the feet of senior officers.
Power said to the world, “You are mine.” The world kept it prisoner on her throne. Love said to the world, “I am thine.” The world gave it the freedom of her house. – Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds22.
A life well lived is the best antidote to that fatal truth. Be active, not a passive worrywart. Find magic in the moment, joy in making someone smile. Listen to a lover’s sigh; look into the dancing eyes of a child you made feel special. Most of all, marvel at the wonder that eons of evolutionary time and all your unique experiences have joined to comprise the symphony that is YOU.
A twisted sort of shyness has evolved as the digital self becomes less and less like the real-life operator. The ego is the playmaker; the character is the observer, as the external world shrinks to the size of Billy’s bedroom.
The fundamental human need to belong comes from the desire to associate with others, to cooperate, to accept group norms. However, the SPE shows that the need to belong can also be perverted into excessive conformity, compliance, and in-group versus out-group hostility. The need for autonomy and control, the central forces toward self-direction and planning, can be perverted into an excessive exercise of power to dominate others or into learned helplessness.
Einstein himself is reported to have said: When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.
There is an important message here about the power of words, labels, rhetoric, and stereotyped labeling, to be used for good or evil. We need to refashion the childhood rhyme “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me,” to alter the last phrase to “but bad names can kill me, and good ones can comfort me.
No one played devil’s advocate, a figure that every group needs to avoid foolish or even disastrous decisions like this. It was reminiscent of President John Kennedy’s “disastrous” decision to invade Cuba in the Bay of Pigs fiasco.11.
Bad systems” create “bad situations” create “bad apples” create “bad behaviors,” even in good people.
Pappas was so affected by this sudden horror that he never again took off his flak jacket. It was reported to me that he always wore his jacket and hard helmet even while showering.
Most of us hide behind egocentric biases that generate the illusion that we are special.
The rationale is this: our research will attempt to differentiate between what people bring into a prison situation from what the situation brings out in the people who are there.
Another way of looking at it is, you’re putting good people in an evil situation to see who or what wins.
Any deed, for good or evil, that any human being has ever done, you and I could also do – given the same situational forces.