Ordinary healthy people become cruel perpetrators under conducive social roles.

Evidence

In his landmark simulated-prison experiment, Philip Zimbardo randomly assigned healthy, normal college students to be prisoners or prison guards (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973; Zimbardo, 2007). The roleplaying quickly turned into a harsh reality. The guards began to harass and humiliate the prisoners and punish them severely for the slightest disobedience. As further testimony to the transformative power of the simulated prison environment, Zimbardo recounted how he found himself crossing the line from observant researcher to authoritarian prison warden. With guards escalating their abuse and inmates exhibiting increasing physical and emotional distress and a growing sense of helplessness, the simulated prison had spun out of control and had to be terminated prematurely. In his book The Lucifer Effect, Zimbardo provides an insightful analysis of the social forces that were at play in turning American military prison guards into callous perpetrators who humiliated, debased, and physically abused detainees in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison (Zimbardo, 2007). Demonstrating that local situations have their basis in higher-level social systems, Zimbardo deepens the causal analysis by embedding the influences operating at the local prison situation within higher-level pressure from governmental officials to use physically painful methods of interrogation to extract information from the detainees. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 681

Categorization

• XREF: Zimbardo here echoes the moral-disengagement mechanism of displacement of responsibility already established chapter 1, and connects to readings on how institutional roles (like police/immigration agents) rationalize policy implementation. — connects to: Cruelty escalates through harm-doing that changes actors, not just prior hatred. — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 55; Plundering a people’s food supply provokes violent revenge, not submission — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 139; Focusing on unique perpetrators obscures the social forces that define them — Leonard S. Newman and Ralph Erber (eds.), Understanding Genocide: The Social…, 959 (+5 more)
• FICTION: The researcher-turned-warden detail — Zimbardo catching himself crossing the line — is a compelling character beat for fiction about someone joining an oppressive institution and slowly becoming its instrument.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 681