It is the Summer of 1971. Phil sits in his office, patiently watching. He sees everything his prisoners do, and everything his guards do to his prisoners. He wonders how hostile and devilishly inhumane things get, yet he watches. He lets the scenes unfold. Because only when he lets his prison run wild would he get closer to what he’s searching for.
This is the setting of the 2015 film, The Stanford Prison Experiment. It’s also a true story.
Phil here is Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University. The Stanford Prison of Experiment of 1971, now infamous, was his attempt to understand how social situations distort morality and turn mostly good people into evil. It was a dramatic simulation, done with 24 college students divided randomly into two groups of prisoners and guards. After converting a hallway at Stanford University into a temporary prison, arrests were staged, the prisoners were documented and put in to prison cells with steel bars, and the guards stood on duty. There was even a “Hole” for solitary confinement. The corridor was the prison yard, the only space outside the cells where prisoners were allowed. “The Stanford County Jail” was meticulously planned.
The experiment, originally designed to run for 2 weeks, had to be called off after 6 days.
Why? The guards began abusing the prisoners so much it got out of control. Prisoners suffered emotional break-downs under the verbal and physical assault, and the guards seemed to be enjoying it. In other words, Philip Zimbardo had turned an otherwise perfectly normal set of college students to maniacs. He did it simply by giving them a platform, an elaborate role play of which the setting was perfect to exercise abusive authority.
Based on this study, and the lifelong work that followed afterwards (which included a study of the mistreatment of prisoners in Abu Ghraib by the US Army) Zimbardo is convinced that all of us, given the right motivations, are capable of unspeakable act of evil. In a 2004 Ted Talk, he pointed out that transformation of character (in this case, from good to evil) could manifest because of the following reasons:
- Dispositional: You’re a Bad Apple. You choose to be evil, it’s inside you.
- Situational: You’re essentially a good person, but some external factors force you to become evil. You’re in a Bad Barrel.
- Systemic: The broader political, economic, cultural and social factors contribute to push you towards evil. You’re a victim of the Bad Barrel-Makers.
He says:
That line between good and evil is permeable. Any of us can move across it… I argue that we all have the capacity for love and evil — to be Mother Theresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It’s the situation that brings that out.
I watched the movie and the TED Talk two years ago. Recently, it occurred to me that I never did give any serious thought to what parallels could be drawn between this story of evil and what I see in the world around me.
Interestingly enough, one of the first things I thought of was our universities. Perhaps the systemic element appealed to me.
Every single year, heinous crimes are committed under the guise of “ragging” in almost all state universities in the country. The abuse is not only verbal, its glaringly physical and even sexual. The oppressors are students themselves, taking out the full breadth of their misguided superiority complexes on freshmen. Usually, no one takes notice. Even when deaths occur, the initial outcry dies down in a matter of days, and the perpetrators go back to their old ways. The authorities are in complicity. Despite all its absurdity and wickedness, ragging has simply become a part of university life in Sri Lanka.
A sizable chunk of the university crowd, including the ones who’ve been subject to it, regard ragging as an essential element of the orientation process. Now, they’re not referring to the inhumane and extreme acts, but to the more arguably “fun” ones (like walking up to a girl and offering her a flower on your knees.) I disagree. Every act involves some form of humiliation of one’s self or another’s. More importantly, they serve as a vehicle of brutal satisfaction to the perpetrators, one that gives them the sense of unjust authority over others. That should never be allowed.
“As you know, madness is like gravity…all it takes is a little push.” – The Joker
So, what allows a destructive and regressive sub-culture like this to flourish? Zimbardo gave us the answer when he articulated the systemic nature of evil. What we’ve done for years on end is normalizing and institutionalizing the exercise of unjust power. The educational institutions we hold in high regard as bastions of knowledge have simply turned into passive sponsors of crime. It’s alarming how, even after making the act of ragging a criminal offense, it’s being continued gleefully by the corrupt few.
It’s unnerving how much Zimbardo’s prison and our universities have in common. One of his observations was how institutions anonymize the perpetrators of evil. This detaches them from their real selves and gives them the freedom to resort to evil ways. In our universities, intricate networks of pro-rag students, academia, alumni and authorities provide the luxury of anonymity to individual perpetrators.
In Zimbardo’s study, the prisoners were dehumanized by giving them a number, in our universities the same things happens when freshmen are given profane nicknames (or “cards” as they’re known in local discourse.)
There’s more. Zimbardo also identified the role of blind obedience to authority and uncritical conformity to group norms in transforming good characters to evil. Sounds familiar?
All this brings us to an shocking realization. The students who humiliate their fellow freshmen are not necessarily evil. Yes, there could be a few bad apples, as could be anywhere, but circumstances draw the rest into this. They find themselves in the wrong situations that are enabled by all the wrong systems we’re cherished for years. Unknowingly, they too are victims. They find themselves in a position of power and just give in. This is power without oversight that should never have ended up in their hands.
If you’re reading through this thinking, “I’ve never been part of any ragging, nor do I support it. I’m not evil,” hold your horses for a bit. You and I are a part of this, too. The following quote from the movie sums it up:
I was running experiments of my own. I wanted to see just what kind of verbal abuse people could take before they start objecting, before they start lashing back. And it really surprised me that nobody said anything to stop me. Nobody said ‘Come on man, you can’t say those things to me, those things are sick.’ Nobody said that. And nobody questioned my authority at all. And it really shocked me. I started to abuse people so much it started to get so profane. And still, people didn’t say anything.
When we choose to show passive tolerance to this horrendous act, we’re no better than the perpetrators themselves. And the cliched (yet profound) articulation, “Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.,” comes to mind.
That is why I think it’s important that more people — yes, even the ones like me who have never set foot in a state university — talk about this. False ideologies like ragging should be deplored, for we will be saving legions of young people not from who they are, but from who they could turn into.
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