Paulos: Psychology Offers Insight Into War

June 6, 2004 -- Surprisingly perhaps, academic psychology sheds considerable light on various aspects of the Iraqi predicament. Let me briefly list a few examples, ranging from the war's motivation to recent events involving Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg.

Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo in 1971 devised a now-classic experiment in which young men were given a daily stipend and assigned to be either prisoners or guards in a role-playing exercise. The "guards" were told not to employ violence, but to keep the "prisoners" under strict control. Although it was a game in a sense, the dynamic that developed was ugly and brings to mind the events at Abu Ghraib.

Zimbardo wrote recently "The terrible things my guards (at Stanford) did to their prisoners were comparable to the horrors inflicted on the Iraqi detainees. My guards repeatedly stripped their prisoners naked, hooded them, chained them, denied them food or bedding privileges, put them into solitary confinement, and made them clean toilet bowls with their bare hands."

The point of the experiment, which was stopped early, was to demonstrate the power of situation-generated forces to shape our behavior. These forces are not irresistible, however, else every prison in the world would be a scene of abuse. Needless to say, authorities should be aware of them and instill discipline in order to counter their effects.

Even more chilling is psychologist Stanley Milgram's classic experiment on obedience, in which perfectly ordinary people obey experimenters' demands to deliver what they think are excruciatingly painful electric shocks to other participants. Again the situation seemed to exert a disturbing power over the experiment's participants.

Psychologists have written studies on other more subtle sorts of conformity. In small groups, for example, interactions among members can easily engender extreme actions. If they want to be valued by the group, members freely express opinions in line with what they perceive to be the group's attitudes and suppress those that run counter to those of the group.