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what happens when the learner complains of a heart condition, wants to quit and later screams out followed by a thud and silence? The learner's inability to respond to the teacher's testing because of death or being unconscious must be continually shocked since omission equals commission. It does not make sense at all since how could the teacher be helping improve the memory of the learner who is incapacitated or dead? But all too many participants stopped engaging in such primitive, obvious critical thinking exercises as their stress mounted.
e) Altering the semantics of the act and action, from hurting victims to helping learners by punishing them.
f) Creating opportunities for diffusion of responsibility for negative outcomes; others will be responsible, or it won't be evident that the actor will be held liable.
g) Starting the path toward the ultimate evil act with a small, insignificant first step (only 15 volts).
h) Increasing each level of aggression in gradual steps, that do not seem like noticeable differences (only 30 volts).
i) Gradually changing the nature of the Influence Authority from "Just" to "Unjust," from reasonable and rational to unreasonable and irrational.
j) Making the "exit costs" high, and the process of exiting difficult by not permitting usual forms of verbal dissent to qualify as behavioral disobedience.
Such procedures are utilized across varied influence situations where those in authority want others to do their bidding, but know that few would engage in the "end game" final solution without first being properly prepared psychologically to do the "unthinkable." I would encourage readers to do the thought exercise of applying these compliance principles to the tactics used by the Bush administration to get Americans to endorse going to war against Iraq.
Lord of the Flies and the Psychology of Deindividuation
William Golding's (1962) Noble prize-winning novel of the transformation of good British choir boys into murderous beasts centers on the point of change in one's external physical appearance leading to a change in one's mental state and behavior. Painting one's self, changing one's outward appearance, made it possible for some boys to disinhibit previously restrained impulses to kill a pig for food. Once that alien deed of killing another creature was accomplished, then they could continue on to kill with pleasure, both animals and people alike. Is it psychologically valid that external appearance could impact internal and behavioral processes? That is the question I answered with a set of experiments and field studies on the psychology of deindividuation (Zimbardo, 1970).
The basic procedure involved having young women deliver a series of painful electric shocks to each of two other young women whom they could see and hear in a one-way mirror before them. Half were randomly assigned to a condition of anonymity, or deindividuation, half to one of uniqueness, or individuation. The four college student subjects in each deindividuation group had their appearance concealed, given identifying numbers in place of their names. The comparison individuation subjects were called by their names and made to feel unique, although also in a four-woman group and asked to make the same responses of shocking each of two woman "victims" - all with a suitable cover story, the big lie that they never questioned.
The results were clear: Women in the deindividuation condition delivered twice as much shock to both victims as did the women in the individuated comparison condition. Moreover, they shocked both victims, the one previously rated as pleasant and the other unpleasant victim, more over the course of the 20 trials, while the individuated subjects shocked the pleasant woman less over time than they did the unpleasant one. One important conclusion flows from this research and its various replications and extensions, some using military personnel.

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Anything that makes someone feel anonymous, as if no one knows who they are, creates the potential for that person to act in evil ways if the situation gives permission for violence.
Halloween Disguises and Aggression in Children .
We know that people also mask themselves for hedonistic pleasures, as at Carnival rituals in many Catholic countries. Children in America put on masks and costumes for Halloween parties. Scott Fraser (1974) arranged for elementary school children to go to a special, experimental Halloween party given by their teacher. There were many games to play and for each game won, tokens were earned that could be exchanged for gifts at the end of the party. Half the games were non-aggressive in nature, and half were matched in content but involved being aggressive to win the contest, with physical confrontations between two children in order to reach the goal. The experimental design was an ABA format; no costumes initially while the games were played, then the costumes arrived and were worn as the games continued, and finally, the costumes were removed and the games went on for the third phase; each phase for about an hour. The data are striking testimony to the power of anonymity. Aggression increased significantly as soon as the costumes were worn, more than doubling from the initial base level average. But when the costumes were removed, aggression dropped back well below initial level base rate. Equally interesting was the second result, that aggression had negative instrumental consequences on winning tokens, it cost money to be aggressive, but that did not matter when the children were costumed and anonymous. The least number of tokens won was during the second, anonymity phase, where aggression was highest.
Cultural Wisdom of Changing Warriors' Appearances .
Let's leave the laboratory and fun and games at children's parties to the real world where these issues of anonymity and violence may take on life and death significance. Some societies go to war without having the young male warriors change their appearance, while others always include ritual transformations of appearance by painting or masking the warriors (as in Lord of the Flies ). Does that change in external appearance make a difference in how warring enemies are treated? Harvard anthropologist, John Watson (1974) posed that question after reading my Nebraska Symposium chapter. The Human Area Files were his data source to collect two pieces of data on societies that did or did not change appearance of warriors prior to going to war and the extent to which they killed, tortured or mutilated their victims. The results are striking confirmation of the prediction that anonymity promotes destructive behavior?when permission is also given to behave in aggressive ways that are ordinarily prohibited. Of the 23 societies for which these two data sets were present, the majority (12 of 15, 80 %) of societies in which warriors changed their appearance were those noted as most destructive, while that was true of only one of the eight where the warriors did not change appearance before going to battle. So cultural wisdom dictates that when old men want usually peaceful young men to harm and kill other young men like themselves in a war, it is easier to do so if they first change their appearance, to alter their usual external facade, put on uniforms or masks or paint their faces. With that anonymity in, out goes their usual internal focus of compassion and concern for others.
The Theoretical Model of Deindividuation and Bandura's Model of Moral Disengagement
The psychological mechanisms involved in getting good people to do evil are embodied in two theoretical models, the first elaborated by me (1970) and modified by input from subsequent variants on my deindividuation conceptions, notably by Diener (1980). The second is Bandura's model of moral disengagement (1988) that specifies the conditions under which anyone can be led to act immorally, even those who usually ascribe to high levels of morality.
Bandura's model outlines how it is possible to morally disengage from destructive conduct by using a set of cognitive mechanisms that alter: a) one's perception of the reprehensible conduct (engaging in moral justifications, making palliative comparisons, using

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euphemistic labeling for one's conduct): b) one's sense of the detrimental effects of that conduct (minimizing, ignoring, or misconstruing the consequences); c) one's sense of responsibility for the link between reprehensible conduct and their detrimental effects (displacing or diffusing responsibility), and d) one's view of the victim (dehumanizing him or her, and attributing the blame for the outcome to the victim).
Dehumanization In Action: ?Animals" By Any Other Name Are College Students.
A remarkable experiment by Bandura, Underwood, and Fromson (1975) reveals how easy it is to induce intelligent college students to accept a dehumanizing label of other people and then to act aggressively based on that stereotyped term. A group of four participants were led to believe they were overhearing the research assistant tell the experimenter that the students from another college were present to start the study in which they were to deliver electric shocks of varying intensity to them (according to the dictates of a reasonable cover story). In one of the three randomly assigned conditions the subjects overheard the assistant say to the experimenter that the other students seemed "nice." In a second condition, they heard that the other students seemed like "animals," while for a third group the assistant did not label the students in the alleged other group.
The dependent variable of shock intensity clearly reflected this situational manipulation. The subjects gave most shock to those labeled in the dehumanizing way as "animals," and their shock level increased linearly over the ten trials. Those labeled "nice" were given the least shock, while the unlabelled group was in the middle of these two extremes. Thus, a single word - "animals" -- was sufficient to incite intelligent college students to treat others so labeled as if they knew them enough that that they deserved to be harmed. On the plus side, that arbitrary labeling resulted in others being treated with greater respect if someone in authority labeled them positively. What is also of interest is a close examination of the graphed data shows that on the first trial there is no difference across the three experimental treatments in the level of shock administered, but with each successive opportunity, the shock levels diverge. Those shocking the so-called "animals" shock them more and more over time, a result comparable to the escalating shock level of the deindividuated female students in my earlier study. That rise in aggressive responding over time, with practice, or with experience, belies a self-reinforcing effect of aggressive or violent responding - it is increasingly pleasurable.
What my model adds to the mix of what is needed to get good people to engage in evil deeds is a focus on the role of cognitive controls that usually guide behavior in socially desirable and personally acceptable ways. It can be accomplished by knocking out these control processes, blocking them, minimizing them, or reorienting them. Doing so, suspends conscience, self-awareness, sense of personal responsibility, obligation, commitment, liability, morality and analyses in terms of costs/ benefits of given actions. The two general strategies for accomplishing this objective are: to reduce cues of social accountability of the actor (no one knows who I am, nor cares to), and reducing concerns for self evaluation by the actor. The first cuts out concerns for social evaluation, for social approval, and does so by making the actor feel anonymous. It works when one is functioning in an environment that conveys anonymity and diffuses personal responsibility across others in the situation. The second strategy stops self-monitoring and consistency monitoring by relying on tactics that alter one's state of consciousness (through drugs, arousing strong emotions, hyper-intense actions, getting into an expanded present-time orientation where there is no concern for past or future), and by projecting responsibility outward onto others.
My research on deindividuation and that of other social psychologists (see Prentice-Dunn & Rogers, 1983) differs from the paradigm in Milgram's studies in that there is no authority figure present urging the subject to obey. Rather, the situation is created in such a way that subjects act in accordance to paths made available to them, without thinking through the

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meaning or consequences of those actions. Their actions are not cognitively guided as they are typically, but directed by the actions of others in proximity to them, or by their strongly aroused emotional states, and by situationally available cues, such as the presence of weapons.
Environmental Anonymity Breeds Vandalism .
It is possible for certain environments to convey a sense of anonymity on those who live or behave in their midst. Where that happens, the people living there do not have a sense of community. Vandalism and graffiti may be interpreted as an individual's attempt for public notoriety in a society that deindividuates them.
I did a simple field study to demonstrate the ecological differences between a places where anonymity ruled versus a sense of community dominated the scene. I abandoned used, but good condition cars in the Bronx, New York City and in Palo Alto, California, one block away from New York University and Stanford University, respectively. License plates were removed and hoods raised slightly -- to serve as ethological "releaser cues" for the potential vandals' attack behavior. It worked swiftly in the Bronx, as we watched and filmed from a vantage point across the street. Within 10 minutes of officially beginning this study, the first vandals surfaced. This parade of vandals continued for two days, when there was nothing left of value to strip, then the vandals began destroying the remains. In 48 hours we recorded 23 separate destructive contacts by individual or groups, who either took something from the abandoned vehicle or did something to wreck it. Curiously, only one of these episodes involved adolescents, the rest were by adults, many well dressed and many driving cars, so that they might qualify as at least lower middle-class. Anonymity can make brazen vandals of us all. But what about the fate of the abandoned car in Palo Alto? Our time-lapse film revealed that no one vandalized any part of the car over a 5-day period. When we removed the car, three local residents called the police to say that an abandoned car was being stolen (the local police had been notified of our field study). That is one definition of "community," where people care about what happens on their turf even to the person or property of strangers, with the reciprocal assumption that they would also care about them.
I now feel that any environmental, societal conditions that contribute to making some members of society feel that they are anonymous, that no one knows who they are, that no one recognizes their individuality and thus their humanity, makes them potential assassins and vandals, a danger to my person and my property -- and yours (Zimbardo, 1976).
The Faces of the "Enemy:" Propaganda images condition men to kill abstractions
We need to add a few more operational principles to our arsenal of weapons that trigger evil acts among men and women who are ordinarily good people. We can learn about some of these principles by considering how nations prepare their young men to engage in deadly wars and prepare citizens to support the risks of going to war, especially a war of aggression. This difficult transformation is accomplished by a special form of cognitive conditioning. Images of the "Enemy" are created by national propaganda to prepare the minds of soldiers and citizens to hate those who fit the new category of your enemy. This mental conditioning is a soldier's most potent weapon, without it, he could probably never fire his weapon to kill another young man in the cross-hairs of his gun sight. A fascinating account of how this "hostile imagination" is created in the minds of soldiers and their families is presented in Faces of the Enemy by Sam Keen (1991), and his companion video. Archetypes of the enemy are created by propaganda fashioned by the governments of most nations against those judged to be the dangerous "them," "outsiders," "enemies." These visual images create a consensual societal paranoia that is focused on the enemy who would do harm to the women, children, homes, and god of the soldier's nation, way of life, and so forth. Keen's analysis of this propaganda on a world-wide scale reveals that there are a select number of categories utilized by "homo hostilis" to invent an evil

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enemy in the minds of good members of righteous tribes. The enemy is: aggressor; faceless; rapist; godless; barbarian; greedy; criminal; torturer; death; a dehumanized animal, or just an abstraction. Finally, there is the enemy as worthy, heroic opponent to be crushed in mortal combat -- as in the video game of the same name.
Ordinary Men Murder Ordinary Men, Women, and Children - Jewish Enemies .
One of the clearest illustrations of my fundamental theme of how ordinary people can be transformed into engaging in evil deeds that are alien to their past history and to their moral development comes from the analysis of British historian, Christopher Browning. He recounts in Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (1993) that in March, 1942 about 80 percent of all victims of the Holocaust were still alive, but a mere 11 months later about 80 percent were dead. In this short period of time, the Endl?ung (Hitler's 'Final Solution') was energized by means of an intense wave of mass mobile murder squads in Poland. This genocide required mobilization of a large-scale killing machine at the same time as able-bodied soldiers were needed on the Russian front. Since most Polish Jews lived in small towns and not the large cities, the question that Browning raised about the German high command was "where had they found the manpower during this pivotal year of the war for such an astounding logistical achievement in mass murder?" (p. xvi).
His answer came from archives of Nazi war crimes, in the form of the activities of Reserve Battalion 101, a unit of about 500 men from Hamburg, Germany. They were elderly, family men too old to be drafted into the army, from working-class and lower middle-class backgrounds, with no military police experience, just raw recruits sent to Poland without warning of, or any training in, their secret mission -- the total extermination of all Jews living in the remote villages of Poland. In just 4 months they had shot to death at point blank range at least 38,000 Jews and had another 45,000 deported to the concentration camp at Treblinka. Initially, their commander told them that this was a difficult mission which must be obeyed by the battalion but any individual could refuse to execute these men, women and children. Records indicate that at first about half the men refused and let the others do the mass murder. But over time, social modeling processes took their toll, as did any guilt-induced persuasion by buddies who did the killing, until at the end up to 90 percent of the men in Battalion 101 were involved in the shootings, even proudly taking photographs of their up-close and personal killing of Jews.
Browning makes clear that there was no special selection of these men, only that they were as "ordinary" as can be imagined -- until they were put into a situation in which they had "official" permission and encouragement to act sadistically and brutishly against those arbitrarily labeled as the "enemy." Let's go from the abstract to the personal: Imagine it was your father shooting to death a helpless mother and her infant child, and then imagine his answer to your question, "Why did you do it, daddy?"
The Spurious Creation of Evil Terrorists and Spread of National Fears Leading to the War on Iraq
Fast forward to our time, our nation, and the fears of terrorism instilled by the destruction of the World Trade Center Towers since that unforgettable day of September 11, 2001. The initial press and official reaction was to label the perpetrators of this horrific deed, as "hijackers," "murderers," "criminals." Soon the label changed to "terrorists" and their deeds described as "evil." "Evil" became the coin of the realm of the media and the administration, being used with ever more frequency and with an ever widening net of inclusiveness. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of 9-11, was the first culprit designated as evil. But when he proved elusive and escaped from the war zone in Afghanistan, it became necessary for the administration's war on terrorism campaign to put a new face and a new place on terrorism. Of course, terrorism which works its generation of fear and anxiety by being faceless and placeless. Several countries were labeled by our president as the "axis of evil," with the leader of one of those countries, Iraq,

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designated as so evil that he, Saddam Hussein, had to be removed from power by all means necessary.
A propaganda campaign was created to justify a pre-emptive war against his regime by identifying the clear and imminent threat to the national security of the United States posed by the alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD) this evil leader had at his disposal. Then a link was erected between him and terrorist networks to whom he would sell or gift these WMD. Over time, many Americans began to believe the falsehoods that Saddam Hussein: was involved in the 9-11 terrorist attacks; was in complicity with Osama bin Laden, and had operationally ready an arsenal of deadly weapons that threatened U. S. security and well being. Magazine images, newspaper accounts, and vivid TV stories contributed to the Evilization of Saddam Hussein over the course of one year.
The vulnerability to terrorism that Americans continued to experience personally and deeply -- in part sustained and magnified by the administration's issuing of repeated (false) alarms of imminent terrorist attacks on the homeland - was relieved by going to war. The public and Congress strongly supported a symmetrical war to rid Iraq of the feared WMD, and destroy Hussein's evil menace. Thus, the United States for the first time in its history believed it was justified in waging an aggressive war that cost billions of dollars, untold thousands of deaths of soldiers and civilians, totally destroyed a nation, weakened the UN, and may enmesh the U. S. in a long, Vietnam-like "no exit" scenario.
When no WMD were uncovered despite the alleged best intelligence reports and aerial photos of them presented by the Secretary of State to the UN, collective cognitive dissonance has maintained the belief that is was still a necessary and good war against evil (Festinger, 1957). Who cares what the truth really is about the deceptive reasons for going to war if the United States is now safer, and their president is a commander-in-chief of decisive action -- as his image crafters have craftily depicted in the media. This national mind control experiment deserves careful documenting by unbiased social historians for the current and future generations to appreciate the power of images, words and framing that can lead a democratic nation to support and even relish in the unthinkable evil of an aggressive WAR.
The Socialization into Evil: How the "Nazi Hate Primers" Prepared and Conditioned the Minds of German Youth to Hate Jews
The second broad class of operational principles by which otherwise good people can be recruited into evil is through education/ socialization processes that are sanctioned by the government in power, enacted within school programs, and supported by parents and teachers. A prime example is the way in which German children in the 1930's and 40's were systematically indoctrinated to hate Jews, to make them the all-purpose enemy of the new German nation. Space limitations do not allow full documentation of this process, but I will include several examples of one way in which governments are responsible for sanctioning evil.
In Germany, as the Nazi party rose to power in 1933, no target of Nazification took higher priority than the re-education of Germany's youth. Hitler wrote, "I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin to my young men. A violently active, dominating, brutal youth -- that is what I am after." ( The New Order , 1989, pp. 101-2). To teach the youth about geography and race, special primers were created and ordered to be read starting in the first grade of elementary school (see Brooks, 1989). These "hate primers" were brightly colored comic books that contrasted the beautiful blond Aryans with the despicably ugly caricatured Jew. They sold in the hundreds of thousands. One was titled: Trust No Fox in the Green Meadows and No Jew on His Oath . What is most insidious about this kind of hate conditioning is that they were presented as facts to be learned and to be tested upon, or from which to practice new penmanship. In the copy of the "Trust No Fox" text that I reviewed, a series of cartoons

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illustrates all the ways in which Jews deceive Aryans, get rich and fat from dominating them, are lascivious, mean and without compassion for the plight of the poor and the elderly Aryans.
The final scenarios depict the retribution that Aryan children get first by expelling Jewish teachers and children from their school -- so that "proper discipline and order" can now be taught, prohibiting them from community areas, like public parks, then expelling them from Germany. The sign in the cartoon reads ominously, "One-way street." Indeed, it was a unidirectional street that led eventually to the concentration camps and crematoria that were the center piece of Hitler's Final Solution for genocide of the Jews. Thus, this institutionalized evil was spread pervasively and insidiously by perverting education away from critical thinking exercises that open student minds to new ideas and toward thinking critically and close-mindedly about those targeted as the enemy of the people. By controlling education and the propaganda media, any national leader can produce the fantastic scenarios depicted in George Orwell's (1981) frightening novel, 1984 .
The institutionalized evil that Orwell vividly portrays in his fictional account of state dominance over individuals goes beyond the novelist's imagination when its prophetic vision is carried into operational validity by powerful leaders of a cult, or by agencies and departments within the current national administration of the U. S. I have outlined the direct parallels between the mind control strategies and tactics Orwell attributes to "The Party" and those that Reverend Jim Jones used in dominating the members of his religious/ political cult, Peoples Temple (Zimbardo, 2003a). Jones orchestrated the suicide/ murders of more than 900 American citizens in the jungles of Guyana twenty five years ago, the finale of his grand experiment in institutionalized mind control. I learned from former members of this group that not only did Jones read 1984 , he talked about it often and had a song commissioned by the church's singer entitled "1984 is coming," that everyone had to sing at some services. I will leave it to the reader to explore the similarities between the mind control practices in 1984 and those being practiced on U.S. citizens in the past few years (see Zimbardo, 2003b).
The Stanford Prison Experiment: A Crucible of Human Nature Where Good Boys Encountered an Evil Place
Framing the issues we have been considering as who wins when good boys are put in an evil place, casts it as a neo-Greek tragedy scenario, where "the situation" stands in for the externally imposed forces of "the gods and destiny." As such, we can anticipate an outcome unfavorable to humanity. But in more mundane psychological terms, this research synthesized many of the processes and variables outlined earlier; those of anonymity of place and person that contribute toward creating states of deindividuation, of dehumanization of victims, of giving some actors (guards) permission to control others (prisoners), and placing it all within a unique setting (the prison) that most societies throughout the world acknowledge provides some form of institutionally approved sanctions for evil though the extreme differentials in control and power that prison foster.
In 1971, I designed a dramatic experiment that would extend over a two-week period to provide our research participants with sufficient time for them to become fully engaged in their experimentally assigned roles of either guards or prisoners. Having participants live in that setting day and night, if prisoners, or work there for long 8-hour shifts, if guards, would also allow sufficient time for situational norms to develop and patterns of social interaction to emerge, change and become crystallized. The second feature of this study was to ensure that all research participants would initially be as normal as possible, healthy physically and mentally, and without any history of being involved in drugs or crime or violence. This was essential if we were to untangle the situational versus dispositional knot: What the situation elicited from this collection of similar, interchangeable young men versus what was emitted by the research

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participants based on the unique dispositions they brought into the experiment. The third feature of the study was the absence of any prior training in how to play the randomly assigned roles of prisoner and guard, to leave that up to each subject's prior societal learning of the meaning of prisons and the behavioral scripts associated with the oppositional roles of prisoner and guard. The fourth feature was to make the experimental setting as close to a functional simulation of the psychology of imprisonment as possible. The details of how we went about creating a mind set comparable to that of real prisoners and guards is given in several of the articles I wrote about the study (see Zimbardo et al., 1973; Zimbardo, 1975).
Central to this mind set were issues of power and powerlessness, dominance and submission, freedom and servitude, control and rebellion, identity and anonymity, coercive rules and restrictive roles. In general, these social psychological constructs had operational reality by putting all subjects in appropriate uniforms, using assorted props (handcuffs, police clubs, whistles, signs on doors and halls), replacing corridor hall doors with prison bars to create prison cells, having no windows or clocks to tell time of day, institutional rules that removed/ substituted individual names with numbers (prisoners) or titles for staff (Mr. Correctional Officer, Warden, Superintendent), and that gave guards control-power over prisoners.
Subjects were recruited from among nearly 100 who answered our advertisements in the local city newspaper. They were given a background evaluation that consisted of a battery of five psychological tests, personal history, and in-depth interviews. The 24 who were evaluated as most normal and healthy in every respect, were randomly assigned half to the role of prisoner and half to be guards. The student-prisoners underwent a realistic surprise arrest by officers from the Palo Alto Police Department, who cooperated with our plan. The arresting officer proceeded with a formal arrest taking the "felons" to the Police Station for booking, after which each prisoner was brought to our prison in the reconstructed basement of our Psychology Department.
The prisoner's uniform was a smock/ dress with a prison ID number. The guards wore military-style uniforms and silver-reflecting sunglasses to enhance anonymity. At any one time there were 9 prisoners on "the yard," 3 to a cell, and 3 guards working 8-hour time shifts. Data were collected in terms of systematic video recordings, secret audio recordings of conversations of prisoners in their cells, interviews and tests at various times during the study, post-experiment reports, and by direct, concealed observations.
For a detailed chronology and fuller account of the behavioral reactions that followed, readers are referred to the above references, and to Zimbardo, Maslach, & Haney (1999), and to our new web site: www.prisonexp.org. For current purposes, let me simply assert that the negative situational forces overwhelmed the positive dispositional tendencies. The Evil situation triumphed over the Good people. Our projected 2-week experiment had to be terminated after only 6 days because of the pathology we were witnessing. Pacifist young men were behaving sadistically in their role of guards, inflicting humiliation and pain and suffering on other young men if they had the inferior human status of prisoner. Some guards even reported they were enjoying doing so. Others, who had been intelligent, healthy college students were behaving pathologically, many having "emotional breakdowns," as in stress disorders, so extreme that five of them had to be terminated within that first week. Their fellow prisoners who adapted better to the situation were those who mindlessly followed orders, became blindly obedient to authority, who allowed the guards to dehumanize and degrade them ever more with each passing day and night. The only personality variable that had any significant predictive value was that of F-scale authoritarianism: the higher the score, the more days the prisoner survived in this totally authoritarian environment.
I terminated the experiment not only because of the escalating level of violence and degradation by the guards against the prisoners that was apparent when viewing the video tapes of their interactions, but also because I was made aware of the personal transformation that I was

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undergoing personally (see the analysis by Christina Maslach of how she intervened to help bring light to that dark place and end the study, in Zimbardo, et al., 1999). I had become a Prison Superintendent, the second role I played in addition to that of Principal Investigator. I began to talk, walk and act like a rigid institutional authority figure more concerned about the security of "my prison" than the needs of the young men entrusted to my care as a psychological researcher. In a sense, I consider that the most profound measure of the power of this situation was the extent to which it transformed me. Finally, we had extended debriefing sessions of guards and prisoners at the end of the study, and for periodic checkups over many years. Fortunately, there were no negative lasting consequences of this powerful experience.
Before moving on, I would like to share parts of a letter sent to me recently (email communication Oct. 18, 2002) by a young psychology student, recently discharged from military service. It outlines some of the direct parallels between the aversive aspects of our simulated prison many years ago and current despicable practices possible in some military boot-camp training. It also points up the positive effects that research and education can have.




"I am a 19 yr. old student of psychology [who watched] the slide show of your prison experiment. Not too far into it, I was almost in tears... I joined the United States Marine Corps, pursuing a childhood dream. To make a long story short, I had become the victim of repeated illegal physical and mental abuse. An investigation showed I suffered more than 40 unprovoked beatings. Eventually, as much as I fought it, I became suicidal, thus received a discharge from boot camp....
The point I am trying to make is that the manner in which your guards carried about their duties and the way that Military Drill Instructors do is unbelievable. I was amazed at all the parallels of your guards and one particular D.I. that comes to mind. I was treated much the same way and even worse in some cases.
One incident that stands out was in an effort to break platoon solidarity, I was forced to sit in the middle of my squad bay (living quarters) and shout to the other recruits "if you guys would have moved faster, we wouldn't be doing this for hours" referencing every single other recruit holding over their heads very heavy foot lockers. The event was very similar to the prisoners saying #819 was a bad prisoner. After my incident and after I was home safe some months later, all I could think about was how much I wanted to go back to show the other recruits that as much as the D. I.'s told the platoon that I was a bad recruit, I wasn't.
Other behaviors come to mind like the push ups for punishment, shaved heads, not having any identity other that being addressed as and referring to other people as "Recruit So-and-so" which replicates your study. The point of it all is even though your experiment was conducted 31 yrs. ago, my reading the study has helped me gain an understanding I was previously unable to gain before, even after therapy and counseling. What you have demonstrated really gave me insight into something I've been dealing with for almost a year now. Although, it is certainly not an excuse for their behavior, I now can understand the rationale behind the D. I.'s actions as far as being sadistic and power hungry."
The Failure of the Social Experiment of U. S. Corrections .

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As much joy that such personal reactions bring to someone whose vision has always been for psychological research to make a difference in people's lives, I have been saddened in reflecting on the lack of impact of the Stanford Prison Experiment on corrections in the United States. When Craig Haney and I recently did a retrospective analysis of our study with contrasting views of U.S. and California correctional policies over the past 30 years, our conclusions were disheartening (Haney & Zimbardo, 2000). Prisons continue to be failed social experiments using a dispositional model of punishment and isolation of offenders rather than any sense of modifiable situational determinants of crime, or of basic rehabilitation practices that might reduce persistently high rates of recidivism. The United States is now the prison center of the universe, with more than 2 million citizens incarcerated, greater than any other nation, and growing. What our analysis revealed was that prison conditions had significantly worsened in the decades since our study as a consequence of the politicization of prisons, with politicians, prosecutors, DAs, and other officials taking a hard line on crime as a means of currying favor of an electorate made fearful of crime by media exaggerations. Misguided policies about sentencing for crack cocaine use and sale, and the "Three Strikes" rulings have put a disproportionately large number of Blacks and Hispanics behind bars for long sentences. There are now more Black men wasting away in the nation's prison system than fulfilling their potentials in our higher educational system.
The Evil of Inaction
Our usual take on evil focuses on violent, destructive actions, but non-action can also become a form of evil, when helping, dissent and disobedience are called for. Social psychologists heeded the alarm when the infamous Kitty Genovese case made national headlines. As she was being stalked, stabbed and eventually murdered, 39 people in a housing complex heard her screams and did nothing to help. It seemed obvious that this was a prime example of the callousness of New Yorkers, as many media accounts reported. A counter to this dispositional analysis came in the form of a series of classic studies by Bibb Latan. and John Darley (1970) on bystander intervention. One key finding was that people are less likely to help when they are in a group, when they perceive others are available who could help, than when those people are alone. The presence of others diffuses the sense of personal responsibility of any individual.
A powerful demonstration of the failure to help strangers in distress was staged by Darley and Dan Batson (1974). Imagine you are a theology student on your way to deliver the sermon of the Good Samaritan in order to have it videotaped for a psychology study on effective communication. Further imagine that as you are heading from the psychology department to the video taping center, you pass a stranger huddled up in an alley in dire distress. Are there any conditions that you could conceive that would not make you stop to be that Good Samaritan? What about time press? Would it make a difference to you if you were late for your date to give that sermon? I bet you would like to believe it would not make a difference, you would stop and help no matter what the circumstances. Right? Remember you are a theology student, thinking about helping a stranger in distress, which is amply rewarded in the biblical tale.
The researchers randomly assigned students of the Princeton Theological Seminary to three conditions that varied how much time they thought they had between being given their assignment by the researchers and getting to the communication department to tape their Good Samaritan speeches. The conclusion: Don't be in a victim in distress when people are late and in a hurry, because 90 percent of them are likely to pass you by, giving you no help at all! The more time the seminarians believed they had, the more likely they were to stop and help. So the situational variable of time press accounted for the major variance in helping, without any need