Background:

According to Phillip Zimbardo,”What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?” These are some of the questions posed in the Zimbardo Prison Experiment conducted at Standford University in 1971.

The Zimbardo Prison Experiment was conducted to examine the roles people play in prison situations, Zimbardo converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison. He advertised for students to play the roles of prisoners and guards for two weeks.

More than 70 applicants answered the ad and were given diagnostic interviews and personality tests to eliminate candidates with psychological problems, medical disabilities, or a history of crime or drug abuse. The study comprised 24 male college students (chosen from 75 volunteers) who were paid $15 per day to take part in the experiment. Prisoners were treated like every other criminal, being arrested at their own homes, without warning, and taken to the local police station. They were fingerprinted, photographed and booked. Then they were blindfolded and driven to the psychology department of Stanford University, where Zimbardo had had the basement set out as a prison, with barred doors and windows, bare walls and small cells. Within hours of beginning the experiment some guards began to harass prisoners. They behaved in a brutal and sadistic manner, apparently enjoying it. Zimbardo concluded people will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play, especially if the roles are as strongly stereotyped as those of the prison guards (McLeod, 2016).

The Zimbardo Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment of 1963 demonstrate that human beings, on the one hand, tend to take on the roles that they are assigned and even change their personality to do so, and, on the other hand, tend to obey authority even when such seems to be the wrong thing to do.

The ethical implications of these studies demonstrate how the real, or perceived, idea of authority can impact our morals and ethical behavior.

There are numerous historical examples including the National Socialist Movement seen in Germany in the first first half of the 20th century and more recently in the horrors of Abu Ghraib.

What became known as “the Abu Ghraib Scandal” came to public attention in 2003 when Amnesty International (AI) published reports of human rights abuses by the U.S. military and its coalition partners at detention centers and prisons in Iraq. These included reports of brutal treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison. In 2003, the Associate Press released a special report on such alleged abuses. The report described horrible abuse of the prisoners at the hands of their American captors: “They confined us like sheep,” the newly freed Saad Naif, 38, said of the Americans.” They hit people. They humiliated people” (Hersh, 2004).

The lack of ethical conduct by several members of the United States military begs to question, if personnel thought certain acts conducted at Abu Ghraib were “morally wrong,” why did they conduct such actions and dehumanize detainees? Did authority instruct them it was ok to do so?