Note, however, that 35% of Milgram's participants did not go along with the researcher. They appear to have had what may be termed 'good' dispositions. But dispositions do not guarantee immunity from evil. Philip Zimbardo questions the 'good-evil' dichotomy, arguing instead that the distinction is permeable and nebulous. Given the right - or wrong - situation, we are all capable of committing acts of evil.
In 1971, Zimbardo, then a young professor of psychology at Stanford University, was interested in studying the effects of prison roles on behaviour. Like Milgram, he put an advertisement in the newspaper, and selected twenty-two participants, after carefully screening them for any kind of abnormality. The 'prison' was located in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department. To make the situation seem more real, he had the Palo Alto police 'charge' the 'prisoners' in public mock arrests. When they arrived at the prison, they were made to strip, delouse and forced to wear specially designed smocks.
Within two days, the situation began to take over. Some guards became sadistic and devised ingenious ways to humiliate and intimidate the prisoners (physical violence was not allowed). One guard, nicknamed 'John Wayne' by the prisoners, was especially adept at devising new kinds of torment. He played sexual games in which he 'forced' prisoners to perform acts of sodomy. Some prisoners rebelled, others became passive and some appeared to have emotional breakdowns. After six days, the experiment had to be stopped, but only after Christina Maslach, Zimbardo's graduate assistant and a relative outsider (whom he later married), expressed her shock at the evil of the situation.
Zimbardo's explanation for what had transpired was the 'bad barrel' theory (already mentioned). The system (barrel-makers) create the 'barrel' (situation) that produces the 'bad apples'. Put good young men in a bad situation, and the situation will quickly override their dispositions. When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, Zimbardo was shocked, but not surprised. It was eerily redolent of the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE). He tried to help in the defence of Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick, one of the soldiers who was photographed grinning beside a pyramid of naked Iraqi prisoners. His aim was not to have Frederick exonerated, but to have his sentence made lighter. The Western legal system, however, is strongly dispositionist, and the judge rejected Zimbardo's situationist argument.
The SPE has often been referred to as the 'Lord of the Flies' effect, after the novel of the same name by William Golding. The novel is about a group of boys marooned on a tropical island (possibly after a nuclear war). Without any authority, the boys descend into aggressive behaviour, in a Hobbesian 'war of all against wall'. David Houghton describes Hobbes as a dispositionist, someone who views human nature as essentially evil (Political Psychology, pp 60 - 61). I beg to disagree. Hobbes was very much a situationist, maintaining that, absent the sovereign, people will be in 'a state of nature', perpetually at war with one another. But, given the sovereign, there will not only be peace, but flourishing.
"In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short (Leviathan, Chapter 13)."
It is not only the fear of death that motivates humans to seek peace, but also a "Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry to obtain them". That does not sound like a disposition to wickedness.
Hobbes's 'state of nature' may be regarded as a piece of didactic fiction, or, at best, a conjecture. Recent research has, however, proved him to be more right than he himself would have believed.
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