There are certain questions Germans do not like to confront. But a German film has packed there cinemas there by asking just such a question: how do ordinary people change when they are given power over others? Das Experiment, directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel, is loosely based on one of the most famous experiments in the history of psychology, the 1971 Stanford prison experiment. The study illustrated theories of obedience and aggression arising partly from the history of Germany under Nazi rule: that ordinary people could carry out antisocial acts if put in extreme situations.
"Power is an aphrodisiac," says ProfPhilip Zimbardo, who led the 1971 experiment. "When you give ordinary people a position of power, their behaviour changes dramatically. The study shows how easy it is to turn good people into devils." His experiment began with a classified advertisement in a Californian newspaper: "Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life" read the ad, promising participants $15 a day for up to two weeks.
From more than 70 applications, researchers used interviews and personality tests to eliminate candidates with a criminal record or any noted psychological problems. In the end, the number was whittled down to 24, and arbitrarily divided into two groups of nine, one of prisoners and one of prison wardens, with six stand-bys.
The experiment began without warning on the morning of August 17th, 1971, when police cars drew up in front of the houses of the nine applicants selected to be prisoners. Researchers had arranged with the local police to have them arrested, and as surprised neighbours looked on, the equally surprised prisoners were handcuffed and whisked away in police cars with wailing sirens. At the police station, they were finger- printed and put in holding cells until they were brought, blindfolded, to "Stanford county jail" - in reality, the basement of a University building. Researchers had redecorated the basement to resemble a prison, installing cell-doors, boarding up all windows and removing all clocks. Unknown to the prisoners and guards, they also installed hidden microphones and cameras.
The nine men selected to be guards were given no training, but told they were to maintain order in the prison in whatever way they felt necessary. Their first task was to strip-search the prisoners and issue them with the prison uniform, a numbered smock resembling a potato sack which each prisoner wore at all times, with no underwear. Prisoners also wore heavy chains on their right ankles to remind them at all times that they were captives.
The first day of the experiment began quietly, but trouble broke out on day two when prisoners used their beds to barricade themselves into their cells, taunting the guards - who Researchers also set up a make-believe parole board to hear parole applications from prisoners. After only four days, the prisoners no longer believed that they were free to leave at any time. They no longer perceived their incarceration as an experiment.
After just five days, the guards had won control of what had been a spirited group of middle-class college students and reduced them to blindly obedient prisoners. The guards stepped up their harassment during the night, unaware of the researchers' surveillance. They forced prisoners to clean toilets with their bare hands, while one particularly sadistic guard made them participate in homosexual role-playing.
What began as an experiment had, in less than a week, descended to psychological warfare. Fearing for the safety and sanity of the prisoners, the psychologists ended the experiment, after just six days.
The researchers later organised a meeting between the former prisoners and guards. Emotional prisoners asked the guards why they had been so sadistic; the guards replied that anyone in their situation would have done the same.
Without realising it, they were echoing the words used to describe the Nazi colonel Adolf Eichmann: that "normal people can take ghastly actions".
"I began to feel that I was losing my identity," one prisoner said afterwards. "I don't regard it as an experiment or a simulation because it was a prison run by psychologists instead of run by the state. I began to feel that ... the person that had decided to go to prison was distant from me ... I was 416. I was really my number."
Thirty years on, Zimbardo has mixed feelings about his experiment. It was ethical because there was no deception, he claims. However, it was also unethical "because people suffered and others were allowed to inflict pain and humiliaion on their fellows over an extended period of time".
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