Inhumanity in the Stanford Prison Experiment
Introduction

According to Philip Zimbardo, dehumanization is the act of marginalizing another human being to the point where that person is seen to be less than human, outside the moral order—i.e., an animal. The moral order suggests that people should respect the lives of other human beings. When that order is ignored, dehumanization occurs. This paper will look at what dehumanization is, why it is so important to “The Lucifer Effect,” and how it is pursued in “The Lucifer Effect” that Zimbardo describes as he recounts his own past experience with the Stanford Prison Experiment and in the context of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

What is Dehumanization?

Dehumanization is one of the most horrific experiences that can occur to a human being. Every human being has a sense of self-worth, a sense of pride, a sense of self, and even an ideal self, as Carl Rogers explains in his psychological theory on human motivation. Even the most miserable of human beings, the most depressed and suicidal, want love, respect, approval and esteem, as the memoirs of Dean Unkefer indicate. The need for esteem, love, friendship and social support is part of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and human motivation model as well.

The reason dehumanization occurs is still something of a mystery for some researchers, though dehumanization is not really a modern phenomenon at all. Individuals have acted inhumanely towards one another since the beginning of time, and one need only look to the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, to read about the first instance of fratricide—the murder of Abel by his brother Cain. That is a clear instance of dehumanization by Cain, who, acting out of hatred and jealousy, slew his brother when his brother’s offering to God was deemed more acceptable than Cain’s. That such stories appear again and again throughout human history suggests that there is something fallen in human nature, something prone to evil that can live and exist just below the surface of human politeness, waiting like a virus for the time to attack—that time when the better virtues and habits of the human being begin to wear thin and weaken, making the person vulnerable to his baser nature.

Stress, deprivation, abuse—all of these are factors that can lead to dehumanization, as Zimbardo points out. Power, control, authority, pride, and hatred—these are factors as well. In Zimbardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, he showed how normal, everyday college students could become cruel and abusive towards their peers when engaging in an experiment on power. College students were selected to participate in an experiment wherein half of them would act as prisoners and half of them would act as prison guards. Though everyone knew the roles were not real, something astonishing happened as Zimbardo observed the effects of this role playing experiment on the participants. The students acting as guards became, in general, vicious and abusive, power-hungry and intolerant. The students acting as...…at Abu Ghraib was sanctioned at the highest levels” (58). Zimbardo also found this to be true in his own Stanford Prison Experiment, wherein he realized that he was partly to blame for the way the experiment spiraled out of control. The participants trusted him to control it and to control the environment, and they perceived that if he, the authority, was not going to intervene then they must not be doing anything wrong. It is the same way people act with respect to violating the moral law in general. The reason that if what they were doing was bad, God would intervene to punish them.

Conclusion

The problem of dehumanization is one that every society ultimately has to deal with, and that is Zimbardo’s overall point. In the end, it comes down to society’s leaders to set the stage, set the moral tone, and establish expectations. It is also their duty to oversee the conduct of society in general because as the authorities they are the ones that people will look to in order to make sure that their behavior is acceptable. If the authorities do not object then all of society can very easily become like Abu Ghraib prison, where inhumanity was allowed to go on because the ecology was toxic, the guards had surrendered their own humanity, and the leaders did nothing to intervene or stop the abusive practices. Just as happened in the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Lucifer Effect was taking place.

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