Tuesday, May 11, 2004

The Bad Barrels That Corrupt Any Good Apples They Touch
Addendum 2:30pm PDT for photo:


As I had posted last week, Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971 really reached out and grabbed me since the disclosure (shocked, simply shocked) of torture by US people of prisoners in Iraq. I did my magic search engine queen incantation ... waved the potion around, and voila!

Bad Barrels ...

Excerpt: "In 1971 researchers created a simulated prison in a basement on Stanford University campus. They randomly assigned 24 students to be either prison guards or prisoners for two weeks.

Within days, the "guards" had become swaggering and sadistic, to the point of placing bags over the prisoners' heads, forcing them to strip naked and encouraging them to perform sexual acts."


There's more including Hannah Arendt's quote on the banality of evil. But read it for yourself, and then look up in ASZ's archives for the link to the Stanford Prison Experiment.

I report. You decide. Or not.