“The guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night,” says the report, when they thought no one was watching. “Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuses of power.” Those sentences aren’t from a report on the abuse of prisoners in Iraq. They’re the words of Stanford University psychologist Philip G. Zimbardo, past-president of the American Psychological Association, describing what happened during his classic experiment that simulated prison life in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.
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Thanks for posting this link, Sal. The lessons of that notorious experiment and of the untrained, unsupervised guards in Iraq cannot be allowed to slip away forgotten.