ample, football matches can turn otherwise decent individuals into ranting idiots chanting mindless obscenities, or worse. Then again, if there was, say, a panic in the crowd and people were being crushed, some of those mindless idiots would perform heroically to rescue others, including fans of the opposing teams. Others, including no doubt some of those horrified at the obscene chants, wouldn’t. It’s a complicated old business, this human behaviour.
But now, because a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University got together some undergraduates, called some of them prisoners and some of them guards, and made them do some role playing which got out of hand, there’s no more room for doubt or nuance. It’s been proved that there’s no such thing as evil. This is science: just like medicine, just like, say, Ronald Ross and his discovery that malaria is transmitted by mosquitos. Right there in that mock-up jail in Stanford, Zimbardo, the Ronald Ross of psychology, discovered that the causes of human behaviour lie not in some intrinsic character but in the situations in which people find themselves. What a breakthrough! So all that complicated stuff about the interaction between character and environment that’s so engrossed historians, novelists and philosophers for so long turns out to have been a complete waste of time. Science has, finally, given us the answer.
It is, unsurprisingly, on Abu Ghraib that the reviewer, Michael Bywater, concentrates. Not, that is, the Abu Ghraib of Saddam, with its blood-drenched walls, where people were invited to see their children tortured, or their pregnant wives have their babies ripped from their bellies, but the Abu Ghraib where US soldiers humiliated prisoners. Which is fair enough, I suppose. After all, these scientific findings, as we know, only apply to decent middle-class Westerners.
What of the rest of the world? Yes, there are a few brave souls out there willing to push back the barriers of psychological research. Take, for instance, the director of Jamia Hafsa Madrassah (below). To get those women all dressed up like that, in a state of righteous indignation that only serves to consolidate their subjugation, well, that’s some powerful little experiment he’s got going there. And this cleric, persuading people to kill themselves, and others, to preserve his own power – persuading them that it doesn’t get much peachier than blowing other people into little bits – with the notion that, after death, they’ll be given 70 (or is it 72?) beautiful virgins to have their way with – well, you’d think a reasonably intelligent four-year-old would be able to see through that, but there are thousands, maybe even millions, who believe it. Oh yes, the West has no monopoly on exciting psychological experiments.
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