Dehumanization and 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 as less than human — outside the moral order, reduced to the status of 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 examines what dehumanization is, why it is so important to The Lucifer Effect, and how it is explored in that work as Zimbardo recounts his experience with the Stanford Prison Experiment and addresses the Abu Ghraib scandal.

What Is Dehumanization?

Dehumanization is one of the most horrific experiences that can occur to a human being. Every person 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 of 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 also central to Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs and his model of human motivation.

The reason dehumanization occurs remains something of a mystery for some researchers, though it is not a modern phenomenon at all. Individuals have acted inhumanely toward one another since the beginning of recorded history. 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, in which Cain, acting out of hatred and jealousy, slew his brother because his brother's offering to God was deemed more acceptable than his own. 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 just below the surface of social civility, waiting like a virus for the moment to emerge. That moment comes when the better virtues and habits of a person begin to wear thin, making them vulnerable to their baser instincts.

Stress, deprivation, and abuse are all factors that can lead to dehumanization, as Zimbardo points out. Power, control, authority, pride, and hatred are factors as well. In the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo showed how normal, everyday college students could become cruel and abusive toward their peers when placed in a simulation of power. Students were selected to participate in an experiment in which half would act as prisoners and half as prison guards. Though everyone understood the roles were not real, something astonishing happened as Zimbardo observed the effects. The students acting as guards became, in general, vicious and abusive — power-hungry and intolerant. The students acting as prisoners became submissive, frightened, and abject.

What Zimbardo had been attempting to understand was how ordinary people move from being non-violent individuals who largely respect others to being abusive individuals who dehumanize those around them. The motivation for his experiment grew from World War II and the widely circulated accounts of ordinary Germans operating death camps. Zimbardo wondered how — if those accounts were true — ordinary people could become so inhumane, and whether the same could happen to anyone. His Stanford Prison Experiment suggested that the answer was yes. Inhumanity is present in every human being like a switch waiting to be thrown; the wiring is already in place. All it takes is an impetus — a provocation from one's worst impulses. There is something fallen in human nature, and that is what Zimbardo examines in The Lucifer Effect. If pushed or prodded to a certain point, most people will give in to what he calls the Luciferian impulse that runs like a subterranean current beneath the surface of the self.

The Importance of Dehumanization to The Lucifer Effect

Dehumanization is a central concept in Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect because it is the process that enables moral disengagement. The Golden Rule is reversed: instead of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, it becomes "Do unto others before they do unto you." There is a nefarious, guilty impulse underlying this reversal, which suggests that those who engage in dehumanization suspect others of the same inhumanity. Before one can dehumanize another, however, one must first lose touch with one's own humanity — that is the key.

As Zimbardo shows, one can lose touch with one's humanity either by being oppressed and brutalized, or by being filled with an inflated sense of power over others — exalting oneself while degrading those deemed inferior. The Lucifer Effect occurs when a person loses their sense of their own humanity, because it is precisely this sense that sustains moral awareness — the ethical framework by which individuals should conduct themselves. A morally grounded mind remains aware of its own humanity, its real and ideal self, and its weaknesses and flaws. This internal self-awareness acts as a constraint against the undercurrent of viciousness and spite that can rise, as Zimbardo implies, like the devil if given ground.

The connection between the Stanford Prison Experiment and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib is rooted in the Lucifer Effect: the loss of humanity by those in power and the systematic dehumanization of those under their control. The dynamic at Abu Ghraib mirrored what Zimbardo had observed in his own experiment decades earlier.

Conclusion

By focusing on the way negativity affects a person's psyche and moral judgment, Zimbardo examines dehumanization both in terms of the ecology in which one operates and the internal dynamic that results from one's interactions with that environment. In short, culture plays a role in how well one maintains one's own sense of humanity — but environment also plays a decisive role in determining how one responds.

The other factor Zimbardo considers is the role of leadership. When individuals perceive that their leaders are sanctioning inhumane behavior, they are less likely to question it. This is also the analysis offered by Hong in his review of The Lucifer Effect. Discussing the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Hong states, "the abuse at Abu Ghraib was sanctioned at the highest levels" (58). Zimbardo reached a similar conclusion regarding his own experiment, recognizing that he was partly to blame for the way it spiraled out of control. The participants trusted him to manage the environment, and they perceived that if he — the authority — was not intervening, they must not be doing anything wrong. This mirrors the broader way people rationalize violations of moral law: if what they were doing were truly wrong, surely an authority would intervene to stop it.

The problem of dehumanization is one that every society must ultimately confront, and that is Zimbardo's overarching point. In the end, it falls to society's leaders to set the moral tone and establish clear expectations. It is also their duty to oversee the conduct of institutions under their authority, because people will look to figures of authority to confirm whether their behavior is acceptable. If those authorities do not object, then society as a whole can very easily come to resemble Abu Ghraib prison — a place where inhumanity was permitted to continue because the environment was toxic, the guards had surrendered their own humanity, and the leadership failed to intervene. Just as happened in the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Lucifer Effect was taking hold.

Hong, J. K. "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil." Army Lawyer, 2012, pp. 55–58.

Maslow, Abraham. "A Theory of Human Motivation." Psychological Review, vol. 50, no. 4, 1943, p. 370.

Rogers, Carl. Client-Centered Therapy. Riverside Press, 1951.

Unkefer, Dean. 90 Church.

Zimbardo, Philip. The Lucifer Effect. Random House, 2007.