Everyone is a potential torturer

[LibLabUK]

All humans are capable of committing torture and other “acts of great evil”. That is the unhappy conclusion drawn from an analysis of psychological studies.

Over 25,000 psychological studies involving eight million participants support this finding, say Susan Fiske and colleagues at Princeton University in New York, US.

The researchers considered the circumstances surrounding how individuals committed seemingly inexplicable acts of abuse in the midst of the US military’s torture of Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in 2003 and 2004.

“Could any average 18-year-old have tortured these prisoners? I would have to answer: ‘Yes, just about anyone could have.’”, Fiske says.

Many forms of behaviour, including acts of cruelty, are influenced as much by authority figures, peer pressure and other social interactions as by the psychology of the individual, she says.

“If we don’t understand the importance of social context and accept that almost anybody could commit acts of torture under certain circumstances, then we are setting ourselves up for situations where Abu Ghraib will occur again,” Fiske warns.

<snip>

Robbins believes the general US prejudice against other nations is deeply ingrained. “Calling Iraqi nationals ‘insurgents’, ‘ragheads’ or ‘baddies’ automatically dehumanises them and leads to a climate of disrespect,” he says.

Source:New Scientist

[HysteryDiagnosis]

1. “Calling Iraqi nationals ‘insurgents’, ‘ragheads’ or ‘baddies’

automatically dehumanises them and leads to a climate of disrespect,” he says.

What more could a rogue regime bent on installing corporate control in sovereign nations that it deems important to its economic supremacy want for?? Nuthin. Just wait... it will get better. Wait until the whole world is boycotting U.S. goods. They say the best laid plans of mice and men... and you are seeing it right now. Shame.

[izzie]

2. Look at study done at Stanford.

Was it Milford? Name is gone right now.

[moggie]

3. I think you're conflating two famous experiments

Milgram was at Yale; his was the experiment in which subjects believed they were giving electric shocks. Then there was the Stanford prison experiment, in which subjects were divided into "prisoners" and "guards", and many of the guards indulged in sadistic behaviour. They're both very disturbing experiments.

[freeplessinseattle]

4. from what I remember not all subjects were prone to abusive behavior

but yes, the majority were. the question is what personality traits differ between the potential abusers and independent pacifists?

[moggie]

5. Stanford experiment is difficult to interpret

I think. For example, perhaps the "guards" could have rationalised that their behaviour wasn't real abuse, that they were just role-playing. And there seems some confusion over whether the "prisoners" understood that they could leave at any time.

In a way, I think I've always found the Milgram experiment more disturbing. Bullying is something which I think we all understand, on some level, even if we would never commit it ourselves (I hope and believe I never would). By comparison, the Milgram experiment seems inhumanly cold. I shudder just thinking about it.

I don't like to see these results cited in connection with Abu Ghraib. Read Seymour Hersh: the abuse there and elsewhere was not simply a matter of a few dumb grunts having sadistic fun, it came down the chain of command, however much Rumfilled and others would like us to believe otherwise. The question shouldn't be "why are soldiers and mercs so willing to abuse prisoners?", but rather "why are people in command willing to order it?".

As to your question: yes, it'd be interesting to see whether there's a correlation between a subject's prior moral or political beliefs and their behaviour in such an experiment, but I can't see it getting past an ethics committee.

[freeplessinseattle]

6. this gives me a great idea for a peper, once I get my ass back in school

I'll have to mull on creating an experiment similar to Milgrams's that would make it past the ethics, comm. such as using actors such as Milgram did. hmmm, this could get interesting, and be very useful.

[freeplessinseattle]

7. (better check my typos before handing in that "peper" though!)

[Swede]

8. There was a study or prisoners and guards years ago.

How ordinary people could be led into doing horrible things.

http://www.psichi.org/pubs/articles/article_72.asp

Our topic today is an ugly one, one that we all hate to think about, to read about, to listen to. It is Evil. It is not pleasant to think about the nature of evil, of collective violence, of genocide, ethnic cleansing, mass rape, brutal tortures, and bestial acts of human against human that challenge our basic conception of human nature.