THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGY
fashion. Zimbardo subsequently acted as an
expert defence-witness for one of the guards,
re-asserting his theoretical position that the
abuses occurred because of the situation that
the US authorities had created – a case of
“bad barrels, not bad apples”.ZIMBARDO CHALLENGED
Zimbardo’s study provided a striking coun-
terpoint to the prevailing view of that time
which saw the roots of tyranny and abuse
as residing in the disposition of specific
individuals, and for years his message went
largely unchallenged. In 2001, however, that
all changed when the two British psycholo-
gists Stephen Reicher at the University of
St. Andrews and Alexander Haslam at the
University of Exeter decided, with the help
of the BBC, to recreate the prison study – as
far as this was ethically possible.
Reicher and Haslam were concerned that
Zimbardo’s study failed to recognize that
groups can come together not only to abuse
power, but sometimes to resist tyranny.
The kind of group dynamics that emerge
depends largely on the extent to which indi-
viduals within a group identify with a shared
cause. In the Stanford experiment, Reicher
and Haslam pointed out that Zimbardo had played a key role in his own
study. He’d been the “prison superintendent” and he provided the prison
guards with a leader and a purpose with which they could identify. In
fact, at one stage Zimbardo even instructed the guards: “You can create
in the prisoners ... a notion of arbitrariness, that their life is totally
controlled by us, by the system, you, me – and they’ll have no privacy ...
We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general
what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness.”
In what became known as the BBC Prison Study, Reicher and Haslam
allocated participants to the role of guards and prisoners, but rather
than providing leadership to the guards, they sat back to see what would
US Army reservist Charles
Graner, the ringleader of
the Abu Ghraib prisoner
abuse, posing with the
corpse of a detainee,
Manadel al-Jamadi, who
had arrived at the prison in
good health. Graner, who
had a history of violence
and racism, was found
guilty of five different
charges of prisoner abuse
and was sentenced to ten
years in prison.