Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo (who we know from the Zimbardo Time Inventory), has drawn a link between the abusive behaviour conducted three years ago at Abu Gharib, and an experiment he conducted 33 years earlier, where he randomly assigned 24 male college students to be guards or prisoners in a two-week study. He told the guards to keep order, to let nobody escape and to commit no violence. The guards began hitting captives with fists by Day 2. Subsequent behaviour became even more abusive. For more on this story, see here.
3 comments:
The main take-away from this for me is Zimbardo's assertion that "inner character seldom survives if familiar social guideposts, such as family and normal routines, fall away".
This provides the link between his work and the research being conducted at Geary on how peer-effects impact upon behaviour.
I come back to Akerlof's work on identity and preferences. He was very influenced by Milgrom's work on obedience. Conformity and role-playing are also areas that economists are starting to get their head around. Another area that i think economists need to integrate further is the effects of anonymity on other-damaging behaviour. Ive just been reading jonathan glover's moral history of the 20th century where the theme of how technology makes it possible to slaughter people you will never see runs through the book.
Its "Abu Ghraib" by the way which means "Father of the stranger"! One of the the tribes near where I was the Ghraib.
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