. Some 24 young men were randomly divided into the role of prisoner or guard and consigned to a simulated prison. According to the textbook account, the guards very quickly became brutal, the prisoners became passive and the result was so toxic that the study—scheduled for two weeks—had to be abruptly halted after only six days.
In 1961 Hannah Arendt reported on the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi functionary in charge of deportations to the death camps, observing that he acted out of ordinary motives . In the same year, Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale, ran his infamous study on obedience. Participants were told to apply electric shocks to someone in another room each time they erred in a memory task.
The two events seemed to show that perpetrators of brutality were not inherent monsters after all but regular people. The implication was that in certain circumstances, any one of us could act monstrously. The Stanford prison study, which ran from August 15th to 21st 1971, seemed to take Milgram’s point a step further. It appeared to show that an authority figure wasn’t even needed to stand over people to get them to act inhumanely.
This is troubling. The interpretation not only ignores the role of authority figures in producing toxic behaviour, but it excuses the perpetrators from blame. It’s just what we do. We can’t be held responsible. Such a conclusion is not an extrapolation from Dr Zimbardo’s argument: it is his argument. After prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq came to light, Dr Zimbardo acted as an expert witness for the defence. He argued that the abusive guards, just like the young men in his Stanford study, were more victims than perpetrators—helplessly succumbing to toxicity in a toxic environment.those arguments.
Changing industry is a very big struggle. I was still mutilated by China and Chinese all over the world. So I changed the industry several times, all my life have been destroyed! Now I only have thousands dollars! But I must save the good people all over the world.
horrible