Influential studies by Solomon Asch, Stanley Milgram and Philip
Zimbardo – three of the most famous in psychology’s short history
- are mostly interpreted as telling a bleak story about groups
and the willingness of individuals to shun personal responsibility
and abuse power. However, there has been a shift in recent years
towards a more nuanced view. One by one, these classic experi-
ments, with their dark messages, have been revisited and reinter-
preted. An iconoclastic band of social psychologists has conducted
new research showing the ability of groups to resist tyranny, and for
shared identity to foster cooperation between individuals. There’s
been a similar revision of attitudes about crowd behaviour, which
has traditionally been seen as volatile and dangerous – especially in
the face of an emergency. The new message from psychology is that
not all crowds are potential mobs. Sometimes groups can bring out
the best in us.
Tyranny and the abuse of power
Perhaps the most famous and dramatic example of a group situation
apparently causing good people to do bad things is the Stanford Prison
Experiment of 1971. Philip Zimbardo recruited twenty-four young men
and allocated half of them to play the role of guards and half to play the
role of prisoners. Zimbardo went to extreme lengths to make the prison
situation feel authentic, even recruiting the local police to “arrest” the
prisoner participants on the day that the experiment began. The guards
were dressed in khaki uniforms and mirror sunglasses; the prisoners in