English 101-02
December 5, 1996
"The Education of a Torturer" is an
account of experiments that has similar results
to that of
Milgram's obedience experimentsthat were performed in 1963. Though both
experiments vary
drastically, both have one grim outcome, that is that, "it is ordinary
people, not
psychopaths, who become the Eichmanns of history."
The Stanford experiment was performed by
psychologists Craig Haney, W. Curtis
Banks, and Philip
Zimbardo. Their goal was to find out if
ordinary people could become
abusive if given
the power to do so. The results of the
six day experiment are chilling.
The
experiment took
ordinary college students and had some agree to be prisoners and the rest
would be guards
for the prisoners. Both groups received
no training on what to do or act
like. They had to get all of their knowledge of
what to do from outside sources, such as
television and
movies. The guards were given uniforms
and night sticks and told to act
like an ordinary
guard would. The prisoners were treated
like normal criminals. They
were finger
printed and booked, after that they were told to put on prison uniforms and
then they were
thrown into the slammer (in this case a simulated cellblock in the
basement was
used). All of the participants in this
experiment at first were thought to be
similar in
behavior but after one week, all of that changed. The prisoners became
"passive,
dependent, and helpless." The
guards on the other hand were the exact
opposite. They became "aggressive and abusive
within the prison, insulting and bullying
the
prisoners."
After the experiment was finished, many of the
mock guards said that they enjoyed
the power. Others said that they had no idea that they
were capable of being so corrupt.
The experimenter
was shocked at the results as well saying, "It was degrading....To me,
those things are
sick. But they (the prisoners) did
everything I said. They abused each
other because I
requested them to. No one questioned my
authority at all."
I have a hard time believing the statement that
they experimenter said. He had
reviewed the work
of Stanley Milgram's experiment and how individuals became so
violent. Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo had to of known
that if they gave the power to take
control of a
situation the guards that the power would be abused. The experiment took
place in 1986 and
though there had been many years passed since Milgram's experiment
was conducted in
1963, people then and still today try to get to the top of every situation.
In this case, the
guards were given the power, and it probably took a day or so before they
began to abuse
they power and abuse the inmates. If
only they experiment would have
been conducted a
year later, Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo may have been able to foresee
the outcome by
reading Robert Reich's "An American Morality" which includes a
parable
entitled
"Rot at the Top." The last
line in the parable just goes to prove my point, "Power
corrupts,
privilege perverts." I agree with
this totally because I can't think of anytime that
I have seen
somebody not take advantage of the power given to them in some way or
form.
Haney, Banks, and Zimbardo did have one good
thing come out of this
experiment. That is that they used ordinary people just
like Milgram years earlier and put
them to the
test. They subjects obviously failed
because all of them showed that, "it is
ordinary people,
not psychopaths, who become the Eichmanns of history."
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