A Level Psychology at Spalding Grammar School

One of President Obama's first acts in office has been to close down the notorious prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. This huge fortified jail was originally set up to hold Cuban and Haitian refugees but since 2001 it's been used to hold and interrogate terror suspects captured in Afghanistan or Iraq. The US terms these people "enemy combatants" and, since they weren't waging a conventional war (part of an army, wearing uniforms, etc) they don't get the full protection of the Geneva Convention. Naturally, the US is keen to quiz these prisoners on terrorist plots and naturally there have been all sorts of accusations of brutality and torture. Some Muslim prisoners have claimed guards insult their religion and flush copies of the Qur'an down the toilet. The Red Cross accuses the prison of using beatings and sleep deprivation and there have been four suicides and hundreds of suicide attempts.

Why does such stuff go on? Psychologist Philip Zimbardo claims to have the answer. Back in the '70s he conducted the Standford Prison Experiment (SPE). This took a couple of dozen nice college boys and asked them to play the part of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison set up in the university basement. It was supposed to run for a month but had to be shut down after 6 days. Inspired by one particular guard (nicknamed "John Wayne" by the rest), the guards became sadistic and brutal, thinking up fiendish ways to torment the prisoners. But it didn't end there. Everyone involved - the guards, the prisoners, even Zimbardo acting as the "prison warden" - seemed to lose their sense of perspective. In hindsight, it's clear everyone identified too closely with their roles; the guards became guards, the prisoners became prisoners. 

Zimbardo decided that a "slide into tyranny" was inevitable whenever you took a group of people and gave some of them powerful roles and others powerless ones. He's had pretty much the last word on the subject for years. Back in 2004 he was in the news again when stories surfaced about American guards at the Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq. These guards tormented and abused their prisoners, stripping them, forcing them to perform sex acts and filming their sadistic deeds. Everyone was stunned that all-American kids (some of them women!) could descend to this level but Zimbardo was quick to point out the moral of the SPE,  "how ordinary people could be readily transformed from the good Dr. Jekyll to the evil Mr. Hyde".

Interested? Watch this great video lecture by Philip Zimbardo on the psychology of tyranny.

That's why Reicher & Haslam's study is important. They're the first people to try to replicate the SPE, with lots of safety checks to stop things spiralling out of control. They've also tried to gather quantitative data and explore the different variables that turn some people into vicious bullies and others into courageous rebels. On the surface, they got similar results - their study was cancelled on Day 8 when a group of participants tried to set up a harsh regime of punishment and revenge. However, they found things worked out differently along the way: the guards were weak and divided whereas the prisoners had high morale and felt powerful. They found that key individuals could really swing a group to their side. When they introduced a new prisoner with negotiation skills (codenamed pDM), the prisoners and guards found a way to work together. When pDM was taken out of the prison, anarchy returned.

Reicher & Haslam show that the "slide into tyranny" isn't inevitable. Prisons don't have to be hellholes. It seems that people choose tyranny when they've run out of options: better a tyrant in charge than total chaos.

I guess President Obama isn't planning on letting all the terror suspects in Guantanamo run free. They'll be rehoused in another prison, probably somewhere on the US mainland. Reicher & Haslam's findings could be very useful for setting up a prison regime that manages to stay humane and fair. There's a danger that the Americans might become very paranoid about using power to hold and interrogate the prisoners. But being squeamish about using power was exactly the problem Reicher & Haslam's guards felt... and as you know, that led to chaos and tyranny in the end too.