chapter thirty-three

BAD APPLES OR BAD BARREL?

May 2004

 

The country was in an uproar. Photographs of prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib, a prison in Iraq, had surfaced. When I first looked at those images, the horror made me ill, but it was the images of Lynndie England that held my attention: Lynndie England, a petite tomboy, giving a jaunty thumbs-up and pointing at the genitals of a young Iraqi who is naked except for a hood over his head; Lynndie England holding a leash that encircles the neck of a naked Iraqi man lying on his side on a cell block floor, his face contorted in pain and humiliation; Lynndie England, laughing, arms around her boyfriend while bloodied, naked Iraqis writhe in pain in front of them.

I know it was the juxtaposition of her femaleness and youth—that smirk—that was partly responsible for my wave of nausea. I should know better, but I simply expect more compassion from women. Looking at those photographs, I didn’t care who bore more responsibility: the higher-ups who either ordered her to do what she did or were responsible because they created the toxic system in which it could occur, or Lynndie England herself. The woman was barbaric. She was evil. All of the adjectives that Bugliosi and Steve Kay had used for Leslie and Pat came to mind. Even now, as I write this and look at the photos, I can barely contain my rage.

When social psychologist Philip Zimbardo saw those images, he was also appalled but not surprised. He said he understood what happened inside the walls of that prison. Three decades earlier, he’d conducted research demonstrating that brutal institutions produce brutal behavior even among mentally healthy individuals with no previous sign of psychopathology.

In 1971, seeking to expand Stanley Milgram’s work on obedience, Zimbardo set up a mock prison and recruited Stanford University undergraduates to staff it and to act in the role of prisoners. The Stanford Prison Experiment became so brutal that the project, designed to last fourteen days, was called off after only six. The students assigned to be guards were so abusive that the students assigned to be prisoners began to show signs of extreme stress and anxiety to such a degree that five of them had to be released from the study even earlier. Zimbardo himself was not immune to the negative conditions. In his role as prison warden, he overlooked the abusive behavior of the prison guards until a graduate student, Christina Maslach, his girlfriend and future wife, was so horrified at what she observed that she pled with him to abort the project. And he did.

The experiment revealed the extent to which ordinary, normal, young men would succumb to or be seduced by the social forces inherent in that behavioral context. “The line between good and evil, once thought to be impermeable, proved instead to be quite permeable,” he later wrote in The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2007). And it happened in a very short time.

When Lynndie England’s family and friends saw the images of her brutalizing prisoners, they said this was not the Lynndie they knew and Zimbardo agreed. He became an expert witness for the defense in her court-martial. The military hierarchy, including Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, maintained that she and her brutalizing cohorts had something twisted inside of them that had caused them to act aberrantly. It wasn’t the fault of the military. England and her buddies were “bad apples.” Zimbardo countered that the apples weren’t bad, the barrel was.

What made him so sure? The students who participated in the Stanford Prison Experiment who behaved so brutally toward their charges had been normal, ordinary kids when he’d accepted them for the project. He maintained that the same dynamic was operating in Abu Ghraib: brutal systems produce brutal people. In his book, he describes the shock of recognition he felt when he saw the photographs, photographs that made him relive the worst scenes from the Stanford Prison Experiment. He claimed that the bags placed over prisoners’ heads, the forced nakedness, the sexually humiliating “games” were comparable to the abuses imposed by his clean-cut college students on their student prisoners. When placed in a situation that granted them absolute power, only a few were able to resist abusing that power. He confessed that he was not among the ones who resisted.

What does any of this have to do with Pat and Leslie? Though they weren’t inmates in a physical prison, they were in a psychological one, and many of the same variables that existed at Abu Ghraib and at the Stanford Prison Experiment prevailed under Manson’s lethal rule. In all three situations, the reduction of the cues of social accountability produced deindividuation, the stripping away of one’s core identity.

There has been no shortage of challenges to the conclusions of the Stanford Prison Experiment. One is that the participants were not, as Zimbardo claimed, “average, healthy guys.” Though none of the participants were overt, diagnosable sadists before the study, an ad seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life” would likely attract a subset of “normal.” The other principal criticism has to do with expectations. Years later, a couple of the men who’d been assigned the role of guards said they behaved tyrannically because they thought that’s the way Zimbardo wanted them to behave.

Neither of these criticisms invalidate the usefulness of Zimbardo’s research for my purposes. The young people who were attracted to Manson did not represent a cross section of normal people; they, too, while not being overt sadists before meeting Manson, were a subset of presumably normal people who were vulnerable to manipulation. That’s precisely why Manson picked them. And Pat and Leslie didn’t come up with murder on their own. As with Zimbardo’s guards, the ones who now say they were acting out Zimbardo’s expectations, the women were acting out what Manson ordered them to do.

The point, or at least one of them, is that certain leaders in certain situations produce brutal, at times extremely brutal, behavior. If the guards at Abu Ghraib were mistreating the prisoners because they thought it was expected of them, it rather proves the point that situations and leadership matter.

The research may be flawed, but I believe Zimbardo’s inquiry into the conditions that promote barbaric behavior is invaluable in understanding the way techniques are able to erode or destroy the very souls of human beings.