brynndragon | (no subject)

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Someone on my friend's list posted this over the weekend: You Can't Be a Sweet Cucumber in a Barrel of Vinegar
It's an interview with Philip Zimbardo, a situational psychologist whose greatest work and most painful experience is the Stanford Prison Experiment, who talks about his work and Abu Ghraib. From the interview:
"It's not the bad apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working the night shift in that 'little shop of horrors.'"

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Just read through the whole thing. Fuck.

To some degree I find myself astonished by how surprised we are that the world around us affects how we behave. Of *course* our situation is a large factor in our behavior - we are not seperate from it, after all, we are immersed in it from the moment we gain awareness until we lose consciousness for the last time. One of the ways in which we control our behavior is by controlling our situation, but given that even seeing the connection is difficult how many people take the next step to consciously using it to change their own behavior?

It's interesting. I'm not so much shocked by that point. Disturbed by it, yes--I'd like to believe I'd do better than that in those situations, and that article sorta requires taking a jaundiced eye to those images. But the thing that shocks me is how little traction it sounds like his research has gotten. The Stanford Prison Experiment was 30 years ago and it sounds like what we've accomplished in that time is deciding that such research is unethical so we can't do it anymore, but not incorporating the results of that research into how we run almost anything. I could imagine that we'd have noticeably less of a crime problem overall in the society if we made our prisons places where it's possible to retain some dignity (I'm being hyperbolic, but I think you get the point).

I think it's a combination of a Somebody Else's Problem issue and a Cover Your Ass issue (for people currently in the system who have either turned a blind eye to this being done or have found themselves doing horrible things), as well as institutional inertia. Still sucks though.

Can I vote for a combination of bad apples *and* bad barrels?

No, I'm pretty much in agreement with Zimbardo on this point - bad apples very rarely get to be soldiers, they're either weeded out or transmuted in boot camp. This sounds more like a case where people either failed to notice a moldy barrel until the apples were infected or they were hoping to get some hard cider out of the fermenting process (i.e. something useful out of the whole thing, possibly intellegence or deterence against future misbehavior), or the barrel goes all the way up. Sometimes being such social creatures is a problem.

It seems to me, also, that even if a few "bad apples" -- let's suppose we're talking about Graner, England, one or two or three others -- got through the screening and training processes with their badness intact, which may be likely but isn't impossible, in a good "barrel" they wouldn't rot the others, or not many of them. In a good "barrel", i.e. a strong social ethic that condemns the kind of things they did, including rigorous accountability rather than anonymity, and a majority who adhere to that ethic, they wouldn't have gotten away with the abuses for long. That the "good" soldiers at Abu Ghraib didn't stop, expose and turn in the "bad" ones seems to me like proof enough that the barrel was rotten.

I like Zimbardo's idea of transparent prisons, where the treatment of prisoners is public knowledge. I think the idea is if the barrel is large enough it can't be nearly as bad. But I wonder how effective that would be - in the SPE the prisons were video-taped 24-7 and it didn't seem to change a damn thing. However, it might make a difference depending on who is watching at the other end. The prison warden is not the same as the press or the public.

I think that's key. If you know -- in the back of your head -- that your actions are being recorded, but that the recordings will be seen only by a superior officer or by a researcher, it's not going to have the same impact on your behavior as if you know that the video is streaming live to prisonwatch.gov.

Of course, there are other problems with that idea (though they may not outweigh the benefits) -- prisoners certainly forfeit, for the duration of their imprisonment, a large portion of their normal rights, including most of their right to privacy. But do we risk getting into humiliating exposure/cruel and unusual punishment territory if we've got a 24/7 prison-cell toilet webcam running on the taxpayer's dime? (On the other hand, if the cameras are restricted to the hallways, mess halls, rec rooms and other common areas of the prison, is that sufficient or will the abuse simply go on in the off-camera areas?) I'm just thinking out loud here.

You're not cynical enough, my friend. I bet a lot of people like the idea of prisoners being abused and may even demand it...especially if the prisoners are of a different race than the people watching.

An outstanding read! I can't believe the Stanford experiment never occurred to me in all the fuss over Abu Gharaib.

One place where that bit of research, or at least its lessons, has been noted is in pedagogy, specifically classroom management. There is a strong focus on controlling the classroom environment, because most students will misbehave somewhat in a classroom not specifically designed for learning. I see it as much bigger than that - if the entire school does not have a culture of respect for learning, then all but a few stronghold classrooms will be mediocre at best.

Sadly, changing institutional culture is a very difficult thing, and the entire staff needs to buy into it.

Hmm. I wonder if, given the cultural emphasis on the value of learning, a Jewish school like the one I went to tends to have fewer misbehaving students than a non-Jewish school? Although there were some ways in which the school seemed poorly designed to deal with kids of a certain level of smart (specifically between "average" and "ZOMG!") - I was stuck in the mediocre English class because I wasn't born with the ability to analyse poetry and liturature, but once I was taught these things at the public school I ended up in AP Lit and did well. It also seemed odd that they failed to do full-immersion Hebrew during the Hebrew part of the day starting in Kindergarden if they honestly wanted us to be fluent in it (again, I'm not a natural at languages but given such an environment I'd've actually picked it up and been quite good at it). Every once in a while I ponder writing them a letter, but I don't think they'd pay it much mind (which fits in with your last comment).

I personally figured it was a combination of the lousy conditions and resentment toward people who probably shot at their friends in the Army.

As for schools, a respect for learning probably does help keep kids in line but I wouldn't expect to get too far given the notoriously anti-intellectual nature of American culture; after a while you're just bailing the ocean with a bucket.

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