DANGEROUS MOBS VS. WISE CROWDShappen. In striking contrast to Zimbardo’s study, the guards in the BBC
Prison study failed to establish a group identity. This time, it was the
prisoners who formed a cohesive, shared identity, which led them to
organize themselves effectively and gave them social power, to the extent
that they rebelled and overthrew the established regime.
A self-governing “commune” then emerged for a short time. This
fell apart when a minority of participants refused to go along with the
commune’s self-imposed rules and the law-abiding majority lacked the
will to discipline them. In the end, the recalcitrant minority attempted
to establish a hard-line tyrannical system, far more extreme than the
original guard-prisoner setup. At this point the experiment was brought
to a premature conclusion.
Reicher and Haslam interpreted their study in line with “social iden-
tity theory”, according to which power resides in the ability of a group to
establish a sense of shared identity. This can be harnessed for negative,
abusive ends (as happened with the guards in Zimbardo’s study) or it can
be harnessed for the common good, as when the prisoners overthrew
the guards in the BBC study. By this account, there is nothing natural or
inevitable about the corruption of individuals by a group mentality. It is
only when people fail to unite according to fair, democratic values that a
vacuum is created within which tyranny can emerge.
CONFORMITY
The groundwork for Zimbardo’s perspective on group tyranny was actually
laid some years earlier by the Polish-born social psychologist Solomon
Asch. In the 1950s at Swarthmore College, Asch had groups of between
six and nine people match the length of a target line with one of three
comparison lines, with each person stating their verdict publicly. Crucially,
all bar one of the group members were actually accomplices working for
Asch, and on twelve of eighteen trials they were instructed to unanimously
match the target line with the wrong comparison-line. Asch’s finding was
that in about a third of the misleading trials, participants chose to go along
with the majority view, even though their own eyes told them it was wrong.
As with Zimbardo, people have traditionally seen Asch’s work as
showing how easily individual will is surrendered to the group mentality,
even one that’s patently in error. But again, some psychologists have
dissented from the conventional interpretation. According to two such
voices – Ronald Friend, now Emeritus Professor at Stony Brook and
Yvonne Rafferty at Pace University in New York – Asch himself actually