Americans were shocked by the photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners, and now many want to know why “seemingly normal” people could behave so sadistically. Psychologists who study torture say most of us could behave this way under similar circumstances.

Q: What can the Stanford prison and Milgram experiments tell us about what has been happening in Iraq? How do these experiments help to explain what we have seen in the photos out of the Abu Ghraib prison?

A: Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo, who led the Stanford prison study in which two dozen college students were randomly selected to play the roles of prisoners or guards in a simulated jail, believes that his experiment has striking similarities to the Abu Gharib prison situation. "I have exact, parallel pictures of naked prisoners with bags over their heads who are being sexually humiliated by the prison guards from the 1971 study,” he said. Professor Zimbardo explains that prisons offer an environment where the balance of power is so unequal that even normal people without any apparent prior psychological problems can become brutal and abusive unless great efforts are made by the institution to control the expression of guards' hostile impulses. Of the Stanford and Iraq prisons, he states, "It's not that we put bad apples in a good barrel. We put good apples in a bad barrel. The barrel corrupts anything that it touches."

Prison situations are examples of enormous power differentials, said Zimbardo. Guards have total power over prisoners who are powerless. Unless there is strict leadership and transparent oversight that prevent the abuse of power, that power will foster abuse. According to Zimbardo, in the case of Abu Ghraib, where everyone – guards and prisoners alike – was trapped in an alien setting and had neither a common language nor culture, the situation was likely to produce a classic case of abuse.

To the degree that the Abu Ghraib guards were following orders from intelligence officers as some reports say, another experiment performed 40 years ago by Dr. Stanley Milgram, who taught psychology at Yale, also explains how people can end up abusing others in situations where one person has complete control over another.

Back in the early 1960s, while Milgram was teaching at Yale, he began studying the impact of authority on human behavior. He wanted to see whether ordinary people would follow an authority figure’s orders to keep administering what they thought were increasingly painful and possibly lethal electric shocks to other people. In over a dozen studies, with both Yale college students and more than 1,000 ordinary citizens, Milgram’s experiment assigned the subjects to be “teachers” who were to help “learners” improve their memories by punishing their mistakes with increasing levels of shock as they continued the learning task. The research director, who wore a white lab coat, made it clear that he was responsible for any harm to the “learners”.

These experimental findings shocked Dr. Milgram and also shocked the public once the findings were released in the news. The findings illustrated how someone in charge, in this case a researcher in a white lab coat giving instructions, could cause two-thirds of the subjects to keep raising the voltage levels to the full level of 450 volts despite the screams (and soon silence) of a learner in the next room. Social scientists have learned that in research, when subjects first observe a peer following the instructions completely, they do the same when it becomes their turn. This was the case here, where almost 100 percent of those subjects were blindly obedient to the authority figures. The learner subjects were actually confederates who were not really shocked, but led the subjects to believe they were. Milgram later identified some key conditions for suspending human morality, many relevant to Abu Ghraib:

• There is given an acceptable justification for the behavior, akin to an ideology.
• The guards (or teachers or participants) develop a distorted sense of the victims (or participants) as not comparable to themselves. Dehumanizing them as animals would be an extreme example.
• Euphemisms, such as 'learners' (instead of victims) are used.
• There is a gradual escalation of violence that starts with a small step.

Q: What percentage of people can be expected to become abusive and sadistic when power is placed in their hands?

A: According to Dr. Zimbardo and others who studied the issue, the overwhelming majority of soldiers do not commit abuses or atrocities, but a few will cross the line of human decency in any war or conflict. And, a majority of people will obey and conform to rules in a new situation. Moreover, in some cases, otherwise compassionate people will perform cruel acts at the behest of an authority figure. For example, in the original Milgram study, it was not merely the case that two thirds of the participants obeyed the experimenter’s orders until the very end. It was also the case that nearly 100 percent of Milgram’s participants delivered a very high level of shock to the victim. That is, even the most compassionate of Milgram’s original participants (those who eventually refused to obey the experimenter’s instructions) delivered what they thought was a 300-volt shock to the victim. No one in the study stopped as soon as we all would like to think any normal person would. So the Milgram study shows that some powerful situations can make anyone perpetrate a cruel act.

Q: How can ordinary people commit brutal, humiliating acts like what we saw from the Abu Ghraib pictures?

A: According to Dr. Robert Jay Lifton, a psychiatry professor at Harvard Medical School who has studied Nazi doctors and Vietnam veterans, everyone has the potential for sadism. He says that sadism is a reaction to the atrocities occurring in one’s environment. “The foot soldiers, MPs and civilian contractors are all caught up in the atrocity-producing situation. They end up adapting to the group and joining in.”

Because of the confusion in Iraq as to who the enemy is, said Lifton, the population and the U.S. military personnel experience a high level of fear, frustration and hostility, which creates a group process of atrocity rather than any kind of individual aberration. Moreover, because of our natural tendency to fear and distrust those whom we categorize as outsiders, this situation was bound to foster abuse. Both field studies of real groups and laboratory studies of newly created groups show that most people are naturally predisposed to distrust, compete with, and even attack others whom they categorize as outsiders (e.g., foreigners, members of a social or ethnic group other than their own). So it is also useful to remember that the perpetrators of abuse at Abu Ghraib were not committing these acts against their fellow Americans (or even against Iraqis they encountered in the street). Abusers undoubtedly viewed their victims as “the enemy.”

Dr. Zimbardo says that everyone has the potential to be good or evil. The human mind can guide us toward anything imaginable, to create heavens or hells on earth. It depends entirely on the special situations in which we might become enmeshed. These young men and women mistreating prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison pictures were embedded in an evil barrel, says Zimbardo.

Q: Is it inevitable, given the nature of war, that these things will happen no matter what rules or regulations exist?

A: Experts say that it is not inevitable. When there is accountability, transparency, a clear chain of command and a respect for the enemy as a human combatant, this will prevent future atrocities like Abu Ghraib, said Zimbardo.

Q: Is there something inherent in a captor – captive relationship that encourages this behavior?

A: It is the power differential, with guards having total power over prisoners, and conditions that lead them to develop a dehumanized perception of the inmates as animals, said Zimbardo. It is also having no external institutional checks on that exercise of power. Of course, social labeling plays a role, too. It was probably easier for these soldiers to view foreigners as less than human than it might have been if the victims had looked and acted like Americans.

Q: What are the most prevalent forces that influence or cause captors to abuse prisoners? Is failure of leadership always a factor?

A: It can start with a failure of leadership, said Zimbardo, but includes a host of social psychological processes, such as, diffusion of responsibility, dehumanization of the enemy, secrecy of the operation, lack of personal accountability, conditions facilitating moral disengagement, relabeling evil as “necessary” and developing justifications for evil, social modeling, group pressures to conform in order to fit a macho cultural identity, emergent norms that establish what is acceptable to the group in that setting and obedience to emergent authorities or group leaders – in this case it may have been the CIA and civilian contractors who were the "interrogator-torturers". Also the guards’ boredom, frustration, stress and revenge contribute to fostering negative outcomes.

Q: How do we prevent these atrocities from occurring again?

A: Zimbardo suggests bringing in experts in military corrections from the U.S. Navy and Airforce and model U.S. prisons. He also suggests releasing the detainees who are not clearly security threats or giving them access to lawyers and human rights services. Listed below are suggestions, according to military and psychological experts, to prevent future Abu Ghraib situations:

1. Training. According to news reports, the guards were reservists and most of them had not been trained to work in a prison or internment camp, had a low status in the military and had little or no training to interrogate terrorists or prisoners of war. Training also should include educating prison guards about how power, ambiguity, and a lack of personal accountability can so readily foster abuse.
2. Staffing. Most sources say there were too many prisoners and too few guards. Experts say this tends to encourage brutality as a crude means of inmate control. More planning is required to deal with this imbalance in creative ways.
3. Direction. The soldiers' basic charge was to guard prisoners, but that apparently became unclear when military intelligence officers came forward with vague requests to 'soften up' prisoners and 'set conditions' for interrogation. There must be clear chains of command, with superiors responsible for establishing “best practices” operating conditions – and enforcing them.
4. Supervision. Make sure the unit's commander visits the prison frequently and conducts unannounced random visits.
5. Accountability. In the absence of a clear line of command and being thousands of miles from home, oversight of the guards’ behavior obviously fell short. Explicit procedures should be established for full accountability throughout the system, from the guards up through the entire hierarchy. Guards need to know that, both ethically and professionally, they are responsible for their own behavior. Most psychologists who study prisons believe that the veil of secrecy that shrouds many prisons must be lifted to prevent abuses like those the world has witnessed at Abu Ghraib.

(Compiled from both expert interviews and news sources that include The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, The Washington Post, The New York Times and USA Today)

Psychologists Philip Zimbardo, PhD, of Stanford University; Brett Pelham, PhD, Senior Scientist of the American Psychological Association; Steven J. Breckler, PhD, Executive Director of the Science Directorate of the American Psychological Association, contributed their expertise to the Fact Sheet