[Marxism] Human behavior experiments

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, June 1, 2006
TV Review | 'The Human Behavior Experiments'
'The Human Behavior Experiments': What Can Be Done in the Name of Obedience
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY

People wonder how ordinary American soldiers, men and women, could have 
mistreated prisoners so barbarically at Abu Ghraib. "The Human Behavior 
Experiments," a documentary on both Court TV and the Sundance Channel 
tonight, suggests that actually it's surprising such things don't happen 
more often.

Dr. Stanley Milgram's infamous "electroshock" experiments at Yale in the 
1960's revealed just how banal the banality of evil is. "Human Behavior" 
shows black-and-white clips from those studies, and also reports on other, 
even more disturbing, experiments.

The fragility of human kindness and common sense was exposed again in 1971 
by Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo, a social psychologist at Stanford who recruited 
a group of undergraduate men to play guards and prisoners in a simulated 
prison. In less than a week many of the guards had of their own accord 
turned sadistic, while prisoners grew anxious and disturbed. Some of the 
photographs from that study are eerily similar to the Abu Ghraib snapshots: 
naked prisoners posed in sexually humiliating positions with bags over 
their heads.

But the most alarming scenes of all were caught by a surveillance camera in 
the back office of a McDonald's restaurant in Mt. Washington, Ky., in 2004. 
A prankster posing as a police officer ? over the telephone ? instructed an 
assistant manager, Donna Jean Summers, to strip-search a teenage employee 
the imposter said was a thief; by the end of the evening the caller had 
also persuaded Ms. Summers' fiancé to abuse the employee and force her to 
perform oral sex. Most shocking of all, at least 70 other people in fast 
food restaurants were duped into committing other kinds of offenses.

"Unless you are put in that situation at that time, how do you know what 
you would do?" Ms. Summers said in an interview. "You don't."

Many news articles and documentaries have tried to analyze what went wrong 
at Abu Ghraib. Most concluded that ill-trained soldiers were under enormous 
pressure to set the kind of conditions that would best extract information 
from prisoners, but without clear guidelines on how.

"Human Behavior," written and produced by Alex Gibney, who also made 
"Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," fills in some of the psychological 
blanks by illustrating how, in certain circumstances, people readily obey 
even far-fetched instructions. Most of all, the film shows how easily 
people lose perspective and basic decency when in the grip of a credible 
authority figure or even just a difficult group dynamic.

Old film taken from interviews with Dr. Milgram, who died in 1984, reveal a 
mild, slightly pedantic man with big glasses and a chin beard, who explains 
that the Holocaust made him want to understand better how it was possible 
for ordinary people to act "callously and inhumanely." He set out to study 
authority and explore, as he put it, "under what conditions could a person 
obey, when commanded, actions that went against conscience."

He devised a study in which subjects delivered what they thought were 
painful electric jolts to a fellow participant, merely because they were 
encouraged to do so by the scientist in charge who assured them it was 
necessary for a learning experiment. The film shows one middle-aged man 
balking after hearing what he thinks is the subject howling in pain (in 
reality it is a recording), but many more ? about 60 percent ? keep 
increasing the pain levels under calm but firm instruction from the 
experimenter, "Continue, please."

Dr. Zimbardo's prison study was even more shocking, if only because the 
students assigned to play guards were not instructed to be abusive, and 
instead conformed to their own notions of how to keep order in a prison: 
"Lord of the Flies" in sideburns and aviator sunglasses. The prisoners were 
blindfolded, stripped, assigned numbers and forced to wear skimpy hospital 
gowns and ankle chains. The guards were given handcuffs, whistles and billy 
clubs. The scientists received a shocking display of how, as one of them 
put it, "human nature transformed in a very rapid way in the face of a very 
powerful situation."

The abuse kept escalating until, on the fourth day, it turned into sexual 
humiliation. Prisoners began breaking down. Dr. Zimbardo and his team were 
so engrossed by the experiment that they too lost sight of reality. In the 
film Dr. Zimbardo recalls that it was not until his girlfriend visited the 
mock prison and threatened to break up with him that he snapped out of it 
and ended the study early.

The Stanford students knew they were taking part in a psychology 
experiment. Soldiers assigned to guard prisoners at Abu Ghraib were told 
that the survival of comrades on the front lines depended on whether they 
could break the prisoners. Dr. Zimbardo, who in 2004 served as an expert 
witness in the court martial of Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick II, who was 
convicted of assault, indecent acts and dereliction of duty at Abu Ghraib, 
said he was "an ordinary good guy who gets into this place and is totally 
corrupted."

The documentary uses several cases, from the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, 
when 38 neighbors in Queens heard or saw parts of the fatal attack and did 
nothing, to a 2005 hazing ritual that killed Matthew Carrington, a 
21-year-old student at California State University, Chico, to make a point 
about herd mentality: that people who might give help when by themselves 
will, among others, hold back and follow the cues of a majority. The person 
who goes against the group or defies authority is a rarity.

"It is the majority who conform, who comply, who obey authority," Dr. 
Zimbardo says. "And that's what nobody wants to hear."

That rule is certainly something most people prefer to forget. "Human 
Behavior" is a riveting, if unsettling, reminder.

The Human Behavior Experiments

Court TV and the Sundance Channel, tonight at 10, Eastern and Pacific 
times; 9, Central time.

Lynne Kirby and Laura Michalchyshyn, executive producers for Sundance 
Channel; Robyn Hutt, senior executive producer for Court TV; written and 
produced by Alex Gibney; Alison Ellwood and Eva Orner, producers; Julie 
Anderson, co-producer; Diana DeCilio, editor; David Strathairn, narrator; 
music by Wendy Blackstone; Salimah El-Amin, associate producer and director 
of research.

--

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