 |  |  | Posted by helmut
May 7, 2004, 12:06 pm |  |
Dear Mr. Zimbardo,
Because of the US-American behaviour in Iraq attention was drawn to your experiment. I found the German language descriptions with images and it confirmed what I had suspected after I first read about the experiment during my studies in psychology.
Your 1971 prison experiment is flawed in its scientific set-up as well as in its conclusions, for a number of methodological and scientific reasons.
Presently only the conclusions interest me: that anybody given the circumstances can turn into a torturer. For that conclusion, however, one needs not an experiment that would never pass the university research ethics committees in Europe.
As a long-time observer of attitudes and motivations I fear that both the behaviour and set-up of your experiment AND the US-American behaviour in Iraq reflect one thing clearly: the inherent violence of US-American societal structures. And it also reflects your US superiority feelings.
I also conclude that referring to the Zimbardo experiment in relation to the US behaviour in Iraq (and elsewhere in the past) serves as a means to avoid the question of personal responsibility of all people involved. According to the experiment and its conclusions it's the circumstances. But who created those in the first place?
Yours sincerely ... Helmut
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