Are people born inherently evil? Can people become evil? People in the world do bad things all the time, does that mean they were born evil or did they become that way? People are not born evil but being placed in certain environments can cause one to become evil or participate in evil activities. People who are considered normal or good can be converted to evil or sadistic tyrants when placed in an evil or brutal environment. That is exactly what happened in The Stanford Prison experiment, Abu Ghraib, and the Holocaust. People were placed in dehumanizing environments and given orders which caused them to behave inhumanely.
The Sandford Prison experiment was a 1971 psychological college study created by Philip Zimbardo the Psychology professor at Stanford University, in which an ad was placed in the local newspaper to appeal to males in college who volunteered to become prisoners or prison guards in a stimulated prison created at Stanford University. This experiment was created in an attempt to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power, while focusing on the effect it had on prisoners and guards. Over 70 people applied to take part in the study and only 24 students were chosen to be a part of the experiment and be paid $15 a day. Volunteers were all chosen very carefully before the experiment and were said to have gone through psychological testing before being selected. In this experiment the volunteers were randomly assigned to either be a prisoner or a guard while Philip Zimbardo took on the role of the prison superintendent in the simulation. One day before the experiment started those volunteers selected to be guards were called in to have an orientation like meeting where the rules and regulations of the experiment were explained, the “guards” were told they could not physically hurt the “prisoners” but they could mentally and emotionally abuse them. The next day, the starting of the experiment the “prisoners” were arrested by real police officers and brought down to the university where they were booked and processed like real prison. Actual reports from the experiment show that the volunteers immediately took on the parts given to them, the guards instantly embraced the authoritative roles given to them and began to torture the prisoners psychologically while the prisoners took on their submissive roles. Guards began to strip prisoners, chain them up, deprive them of food and sleep, they even confined them into small spaces as a kind of solitary confinement. This experiment was set to last for two weeks while volunteers would take on the roles of the prisoners or guards, but numerous volunteers wanted out, in fact a few prisoners actually left the experiment early and the whole experiment only lasted six days due to the cruel and unusual punishment from guards towards inmates. This experiment was considered a failure because it ended mid experiment, however this experiment gave an insight into social behavior and the psychology of humans.
The discontinuation of this experiment was later followed by to the comparison of the Stanford prison experiment with the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. Abu Ghraib prison was a united states Army detention center during the control of Saddam Hussein until the falling of his government in the 2003 war with Iraq. The United States army invaded the prison and transformed it into a military prison, one of the many detention facilities in Iraq but It was the largest. The U.S gave General Janis Karpinski command of the prison who ran all of the prisons in Iraq. According to The New Yorker author Seymour M. Hersh “Abu Ghraib was one of the world’s most notorious prisons, with torture, weekly executions, and vile living conditions.” Abu Ghraib was said to have about 50,000 prisoners but no one really knows the exact amount because so many people were shoved into the prison at once. ( Hersh 2004 ) Seymour Hersh describes the prison as a twelve by twelve-foot human holding pit. Abu Ghraib was a military based prison used to house Iraqi prisoners of war who were believed to have been terrorists working with Saddam Hussein.” The united states thought that Saddam was responsible for chemical weapons in Iraq so a majority of the prisoners were brought in with the sole purpose of interrogation,
United States officials were in charge of interrogating detainees in order to get information. Often times the detainee had no information to give interrogators so they usually used different torture techniques in order to get answers. Interrogators were U.S military officers told to get information from these prisoners and they were expected to do it by may means necessary. Prisoners in Abu Ghraib were put in stress positions to cause mussel failure and exhaust them in order to get the information they wanted. Interrogators admitted to enhanced interrogation which was essentially torture. After the conclusion of the United States control of Abu Ghraib interrogators were interviewed, one that stood out to me was the interview of Eric Fair, in his interview he says, “Forget enhanced interrogation techniques what I did as an interrogator in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq was torture.” He then goes to explain that they hurt people, and not just hurt them in a physical sense, they tortured and destroyed them emotionally and psychologically. Prisoners in Abu Ghraib not only had to deal with torture from interrogators, but they had to deal with the traumatizing behavior of the prison guards and other employees. Prisoners in Abu Ghraib were stripped, humiliated, physical and sexual abused, raped, embarrassed and just overall tortured, most prisoners were even beaten to death or just killed with no remorse. Photos were being taken and videos were being recorded while guards gloated about all the horrible things they’ve done to the prisoners.
The situation they were placed in; Abu Ghraib a prison in the middle of a war zone with thousands of alleged terrorists evoked evil into these guards and interrogators just like those in the Stanford Prison experiment. Abu Ghraib and the Stanford prison experiment are very similar due to the fact that people who were not evil began to act cruel and dehumanize the prisoners treating them very harshly. In both the case of Abu Ghraib and The Stanford prison experiment guards were placed in high positions with unlimited authority and given power to treat the prisoners any given way, they were able to mentally abuse the prisoners because of their higher status and that’s exactly what they did, the forms of torture were even very similar. The people with high positions were not born evil or sadistic people with any inherent personality defect but people they were placed in to inhumane environments that causes then to behave inhumanely. Which most people later regretted, for example former US solider Jeremy Sivits who was responsible for some pictures that surfaced speaks in interviews about decisions he made in Abu Ghraib, he speaks about mistakes that he made during the war and expresses feelings of deep regret. He even said, and I quote “I was a nasty person for a long time because I had so much hatred inside of me – for myself.” This one quote alone explains that he was not an evil person he was just placed in an environment that caused him to react negatively. Similar events occurred during Stanford prison experiment when Zimbardo realized how he and the guards were behaving, which caused them to end the experiment earlier than expected. The comparison between these two isolated incidents leads me to the conclusion that people who are considered normal or good can be converted to evil or sadistic tyrants when placed in an evil or brutal environment due to the effect environmental factors have on people’s behavior. With everything being said these two events could be closely related to the behavior of Nazi soldiers from Concentration camps during the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was a Genocide during the second world war where Nazi Germans murdered millions of Jewish people under the rule of Adolph Hitler. During this time Jewish People were captured and thrown into Nazi concentration camps with similar torture methods as Abu Ghraib. Prisoners in concentration camps were forced to do manual labor, beaten, tortured and starved, in an effort to exterminate the entire race. Under Hitler’s Command Nazi soldiers were completely sadistic to prisoners because of the orders that had been given to them. Nazi soldiers were not evil, they were simply following orders like they were trained to do. Nazis were trained to follow orders without question, they were given orders to torture prisoners and that’s exactly what they did in concentration camps. Nazi soldiers were not evil but people who had been given a little of power and went overboard following directions for example according to an online journal titled ‘Inside the Nazi Mind at the Nuremberg Trials’ during an interview Rudolf Höss, a former nazi solider told a U.S. Army psychiatrist named Leon Goldensohn that he felt nervous while completing the orders given to him Auschwitz. The psychiatrist was trying to dig deep into his mind and asked him how he felt about all the things he did to people in concentration camps and he replied that he was just following orders, he stated “I thought I was doing the right thing, I was just obeying orders.” (Harding 2013) Hoss is a prime example of a good person turned evil due to being placed in an inhumane environment, he was not born a sadistic tyrant, but he behaved like one as he followed orders given to him by his superiors.
The events in the Stanford prison experiments prove that people behavior is not only due to predisposed traits that their born with but being placed in sadistic environments can cause people to behave that way. People are not necessarily born bad or evil, but things can quickly switch when they are placed in situations or environments that would give off evil energy. For example, Guards in Abu Ghraib were in the middle of a war zone with alleged terrorist and given orders to get information from prisoners a switch flipped and caused them to behave the way they did. The same goes for Nazi soldiers in the holocaust, they were given orders the torture prisoners in order to ensure they followed directions and that’s exactly what they did because they were given order that they were trained to follow, not because of an inherently evil personality. The Stanford prison experiment proved that People who are considered normal or good can be converted to evil or sadistic tyrants when placed in an evil or brutal environment.