It's a question we've been asking for millennia: What makes people do bad things? Are human beings naturally sinister? Do circumstances shape our character, or reveal it?
This much we know—human history is a bloody mess. We shudder at the imaginative tortures devised in the Middle Ages; the remorseless killing of millions in Nazi death camps; the horrific butchery by Rwandan death squads, hacking off the limbs of children. We rationalize that the people who performed these deeds are not like the rest of us; they are a species apart, driven by an alien, barbarous nature. And we try hard to explain why such atrocities are as likely today as a thousand years ago.
For the sake of argument, maybe we can agree that humans aspire to be good rather than evil, and we get points for motivation. We have devised religious doctrine, laws and moral codes to keep us in check. What's intriguing is how easily we slip into darkness when presented with the opportunity. Which is what the Stanford Prison Experiment starkly demonstrated. Privilege a person with power and remove the shackles of accountability and what governor remains on bad behavior? Wrong and right get confused, and soon normal, everyday people—people like you or me—are committing acts that shock their friends and families.
While the scope of SPE was limited and its design was flawed, the study touched something deep and fundamental about human behavior. Our moral compass is easily recalibrated. The powerful push the boundary of what is acceptable as long as the powerless submit. And the speed with which we can internalize a new self, a new reality, is astonishingly rapid. Six days was all it took.
We wanted to find out what the people who participated in the SPE felt about the study now, 40 years on. Did they learn something about themselves? Does it still shape who they are? Six of the principals in the experiment—guards, prisoners and researchers—share their thoughts.
No one has ever suggested the young men who acted as guards in the experiment are bad guys. What is so striking about SPE is that those guys are so very decent, so normal. When you hear them talk about the experiment now, it's obvious they regret some of their actions, and are surprised that no one stopped them sooner.
The SPE remains controversial in part because it used human subjects as lab rats—exposing the young men who were prisoners to a range of mental abuses and serial humiliations that led to real psychological trauma—and prompted a quick shutdown of the study. We learned that such a study should never be replicated, and the outcome of SPE led to a broad prohibition on putting people in harm's way in the name of scholarly inquiry.
What else did we learn? As subsequent events such as prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib attest, the primal intensity of power combined with a lack of governing authority can twist anyone into a monster, momentarily. Hard though it is to admit it, we should never forget who we really are.
Kevin Cool is the former executive editor of Stanford.
