On 28 April 2004, the American news programme 60 Minutes II broadcast photographs taken in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. The images, picked up immediately by the world's media, have since become scorched on our consciousness: naked Iraqi prisoners stacked in a human pyramid, presided over by grinning US soldiers; a female soldier leading a naked Iraqi around by a leash; other Iraqis forced to simulate fellatio; a hooded inmate balanced on a cardboard box, electric wires attached to his fingers.
One of the stunned Americans watching 60 Minutes II back in 2004 was eminent psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo, in Washington that night on business. Zimbardo, more than anyone else in the country, had been there before. In 1971, as a young psychologist at California's Stanford University, he had conducted an experiment into the psychology of imprisonment, dividing a group of undergraduate students into 'guards' and 'prisoners'. That August, Zimbardo witnessed levels of cruelty he'd never have predicted or imagined. Within no time, liberal undergraduates became sadists, tormenting prisoners, even forcing them, in an uncanny premonition of George W Bush's Iraq 33 years later, to simulate sodomy with one another.
After six days, Zimbardo called a halt to the experiment. Although the 'guards' knew the 'prisoners had done nothing criminally wrong to deserve their lowly status', he writes in his new book, 'some ... were transformed into perpetrators of evil'. The experiment taught him that 'most of us can undergo significant character transformations when we are caught up in the crucible of social forces'.
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