Philip Zimbardo’s response to critics of his new book, The Lucifer Effect, includes a useful paragraph relevant to a wide variety of situations, ranging from the prison abuses Zimbardo addresses here to a wide variety of contexts, including the actions of Israelis and Palestinians that outsiders often find so incomprehensible.
Zimbardo says this:
Before turning to the criticism that is most personally distressing regarding understanding of the Abu Ghraib abuses, it is important to mention that while personality and social psychologists spar about the relative contributions of dispositions and situations, we have ignored the most significant factor in the behavioral equation–the System. “The System consists of those agents and agencies whose ideology, values, and power create situations and dictate the roles and expectations for approved behaviors of actors within its spheres of influence. “Bad Systems” create “Bad Situations” create “Bad Apples” create “Bad Behaviors,” even in good people. (Lucifer, p. 445-6) It is not possible to really understand what happened at Abu Ghraib without a comprehensive appreciation of the influences of the Military and Civilian chain of command operating top-down in that prison and other detention centers that were created as part of the “war on terror.” When understanding complex behavior in the real world, beyond our laboratories or classroom surveys and personality scale data collection, it is essential to begin with a systems level top-down analysis because that is where the real power lies. Such understanding gives us the necessity leverage to develop public health paradigms designed to change unacceptable situations as well as the perpetrators of evil functioning in those situations (See Haney & Zimbardo, In press).
This is a touchy issue on many accounts, but I think Zimbardo is right to remind us that we all operate within systems we had no part in creating. Part of the touchiness has to do with blame within the criminal justice context. If bad acts are caused by circumstances rather than by choice, then what justification is there for legal-system judgments of guilt and punishment?
Within the Israeli/Palestinian context that has concerned me most directly in recent years, it is common to hear people on both sides ascribe purely personality-related attributions for the destructive actions of those on the other side. Even within the recent Fatah-Hamas warfare in Gaza, supporters of one faction often jumped to personality attributions to explain the actions of those on the other.
A couple of years ago I noted a meeting in Tel Aviv with members of Breaking the Silence, a group of former Israeli soldiers who amassed photographs and testimonies documenting the abuses they and their peers had perpetrated on ordinary Palestinians living in Hebron. They generally blamed themselves for having failed to live up to their own sense of morality — a dispositional account — but they also described the situational pressures leading them and so many others to commit what they considered to be evil acts.
This is the System Zimbardo emphasizes. In teaching social psychology, the tendency is to focus on the immediate situation (if not, increasingly and unfortunately, simply on the individual’s own inner perceptions). That’s often how Zimbardo’s classic work on the Stanford Prison Experiment is presented. Here, though, Zimbardo emphasizes the larger system and looks for accountability higher up the chain. That may not be the only place to look within a criminal law context, but it’s the first place to look if the goal is to end evil-producing systems.
One of the thing that attracts me to anarchism is its opposition to hierarchical systems of authority. Most anarchists have a somewhat rosier view of human nature than do people who think strong authority is the only thing that keeps evil in check. But I’ve always liked this quote from Paul Goodman’s Humanizing our Future, which I used in an article I wrote more than twenty years ago when I was a graduate student at Michigan State University. Coincidentally, that’s where many of the signers of the criticism Zimbardo is responding to are situated:
[T]he beauty of the decentralist, anarchist position is that nobody can do much harm….[If] people are corrupt as hell, therefore don’t give anybody any power…because the people who have power are not going to be any better.
This still makes sense.
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On human nature (and optimism)… I’ve got what I recognise is crudely reductionist, if not a 19th century sort of question: how might one reconcile notions of absolute value and justice with the broadly deterministic vision of human nature suggested by the social sciences?
(addendum: if mechanistic theories of causation are wrong, as is implied by chaos and other recent theories, and randomness prevails, is the notion of justice misguided? why should we bother?)