Big Brother, Survivor, and now Jailbreak. Viewers can鈥檛 get enough 鈥渞eality TV鈥�. And the programme makers have plenty of licence to film the participants in extreme social situations. Academics would love to do 鈥渞eality experiments鈥� because there鈥檚 no other way of learning about some human behaviours. But thirty years ago some of those experiments proved a little too real and ended up effectively banned by ethics committees. So you鈥檇 expect Philip Zimbardo, psychology professor at Stanford University and a pioneer of such experiments, to envy TV. No need. Zimbardo is now running his own reality experiments in a forthcoming TV series. Liz Else got a preview.
Do you like anything about the current reality TV?
I have mixed feelings. What I love is that it makes people aware how fascinating their behaviour is and motivates them to try to understand it. It turns them on to psychology, to social psychology in particular. So if reality TV then went the next step and used the public鈥檚 fascination to educate and explain what happens, and why it happens, then it would be a real value. It almost never does.
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Can you see their appeal?
Why do they sell? That is one big question. Here are programmes showing the ugly side of human nature. It鈥檚 not at all representative of how people normally act. In Survivor in the US, the person who won the $1 million won because he was what social psychologists call a 鈥渉igh Machiavellian鈥�, someone who is willing to alter their ordinary moral standards in order to achieve a goal. The star of the show, Richard Hatch, was clearly a high Mac and throughout he kept saying, 鈥淟ook it鈥檚 just a game, nothing personal.鈥� In the game you don鈥檛 want people to like you. Everybody there is simply instrumental to his ultimate success and that is how he is psychologically able to manipulate them, to exploit their weaknesses for his gain.
Does that mean that the next generation of reality TV programmes could get more extreme?
Yes. No question about that. What worked before is not going to work next time in terms of audience appeal. To attract big audiences the networks are going to have to set up situations that are more and more extreme, more and more unethical, more and more immoral. Already, people are thinking of running programmes where a woman is chained to a rock with four men and it is unclear what is going to happen. Do they rape her. Do they all get unchained and do a polka?
You don鈥檛 like reality TV, but what about Human Zoo?
Human Zoo is my idea of what an ideal reality TV programme is from the point of view of educating the public. Take a group of strangers from very different backgrounds in England, send them to a remote house in the Lake District-and watch what happens. On day one, people meet each other for the first time. What are their first impressions? How do people try to manage the impression they create? While it is happening, British social psychologists and I are analysing what is happening, making predictions about which people are going to be friends, and who is going to be less accepted. Then you find out whether we were right or wrong. The next day people are arbitrarily put into groups A and B. And you see the power of groups beginning to form. How friendships made on day one now break if they are not in the same group. Next, one group wins rigged competitions and gets put in a position of social dominance. How does this new power differential play out? Which people become authoritarian tyrants? Unlike Survivor or Big Brother, there are no prizes for the winner. It is more like ordinary life, where people have to learn how to live with others, to make sense of their behaviour.
When will the three programmes be broadcast?
They were supposed to be shown about now. I think this autumn in Britain and spring in the US. But maybe they鈥檒l never be shown. Everything we know suggests that viewers get jaded very quickly and want to see reality TV that degrades and demeans participants-for their entertainment, like a modern-day Roman circus.
What鈥檚 the difference between reality TV and reality experiments?
There are several big distinctions. But the biggest difference is that reality experiments set out to educate and change people, whereas the goal of these reality TV programmes is to entertain, not to explain or analyse. If they don鈥檛 entertain, people stop watching, ratings go down, and they don鈥檛 get the advertisers and are dumped.
Tell me about your own 1971 Stanford prison experiment? How did that work?
There were 24 young men-all white except for one Asian. About 70 students from the US and Canada came to be interviewed and for psychological tests. We picked the two dozen who were the most normal on all the dimensions that these tests measured, with no history of crime or drug addiction. It was an elaborate pre-selection because we wanted to put good people in an evil place and find out who or what wins. The setting was the basement of the psychology department at Stanford. Prisoners lived there day and night. Guards worked eight-hour shifts. We usually watched what was going on from the television monitors, taping them from concealed cameras. I came on the prison yard scene only at various points in the experiment. Usually it was only guards dealing with prisoners.
So who got to be guards or prisoners?
We randomly assigned half of the boys to be guards and half to be prisoners. I arranged with the city police to do mock arrests, and go through a formal arrest procedure exactly as they would arrest potential criminals. The only thing they did which was not an actual part of an arrest was to blindfold each student so that they would not be aware of where they were going when we took them from the police station down to our prison basement. Still blindfolded, the prisoners were stripped naked, allegedly to delouse them. This is part of what you usually get in some coercive institutions-the degradation ceremony. When the blindfold was taken off, the guards were all standing around laughing at and ridiculing each prisoner.
It all sounds a bit cruel. What was the outcome of this experiment?
We had to stop it halfway through, after seven days, because too many people were getting distressed. Too much behaviour was getting out of hand, with guards abusing inmates, dehumanising them, and our normal, healthy prisoners having extreme stress reactions. They had crossed the line between experiment and reality, between role and identity. Neither they nor we could have anticipated that such a benign group of students, knowing they were involved in what was a game of cops and robbers, would become so transformed so suddenly. That it would become a real prison run by psychologists, not the state.
You weren鈥檛 the only researcher making waves at that time. What was Stanley Milgram doing?
Coming from a Jewish background, he wanted to know whether people could easily be made to blindly obey authority. He set up a demonstration so that a large percentage of ordinary Americans, who were not influenced by Hitler or fascism, would electrocute a nice stranger just because an authority figure asked them to. In fact, no electricity was being administered, though the subjects didn鈥檛 know this. The victims were actors. Despite the screams from the victim in the adjacent room, Milgram showed that two-thirds or more participants were induced, seduced or initiated into that kind of evil-administering 450 volts of shock to an innocent victim. When 40 psychiatrists predicted the outcome, they said only 1 per cent would go the full range and administer 450 volts-which might 鈥渒ill鈥� or seriously harm the victim. They said that only sadists would go that far.
Is this percentage 鈥渘ormal鈥�?
In research done on the SS and concentration camps, the majority of men who did the most horrendous things were absolutely normal, pre and post their camp experience where they were given total power over the life and death of inmates. Hannah Arendt in her work on Adolf Eichmann reports that clinical psychologists and psychiatrists who interviewed him ended up by saying not only was he normal, but his behaviour and attitudes and values toward his family and friends were desirable. That is what is horrible. Here is a man who sent millions of people to their death with particular zeal. But when he is out of that situation, he is as normal as you and I.
A lot of researchers disagreed with your methods. Is this why subsequent reality experiments were turned down?
Right after I did my study, several psychologists came to me and said that guards trained by them would never have subjected the prisoners to the kind of degradation, dehumanisation and sadism in the experiment. So I proposed a new experiment to the university鈥檚 Human Subjects Committee that governed our experiments. I wanted to have several different groups of guards each trained by different trainers. The study was designed to explore the best way to train guards so they treat prisoners in a humane way. But it was turned down.
Why?
Because the committee wanted me to guarantee the outcome of the experiment. They couldn鈥檛 risk another bad experience. But if you can guarantee an outcome you will never do research.
So you believe that a certain amount of human suffering is legitimate in research?
Yes. There鈥檚 a whole movement in modern psychology in the United States called positive psychology. This focuses on people鈥檚 talents, strengths and the joy people experience as part of the human condition. That is the psychology of Mother Teresa. But Hitler exists in all of us. There is a psychology of evil which says that under certain social conditions the majority of people can be led to be perpetrators of evil.
Do we really need to know any more about evil people?
Yes. Evil continues to exist and it is all around us. But you can see how hard it is to study. To me it is the sign of an ultimate paradox: we need to study evil in order to reduce it. But to study evil you have to create conditions which seduce participants into behaving in evil ways. So, in order to reduce evil you are creating it. Researchers like me have been guilty of creating evil in order to understand its dynamics with the hope of contributing to reducing its impact.
Can鈥檛 thought experiments do the job?
No. My study didn鈥檛 show anything about prisons that poets, sociologists, criminologists hadn鈥檛 said more eloquently years before. But nobody had ever said: 鈥淪uppose we put good people in prison, people who didn鈥檛 break the law, people who are not psychopaths. Then what?鈥� No one had asked: 鈥淐an large numbers of ordinary citizens be seduced into evil by the nature of the situation?鈥�
You don鈥檛 think people know that?
No, people don鈥檛 know that at all. Most of us think we are good. Every time we hear about some atrocity, people say: 鈥淚 was amazed it could happen in my community. We are not like that.鈥� I find that amazing. These reality experiments were designed to get people to appreciate that anyone could be recruited into evil just by arranging some key elements of the social context-that you or I, your mother and your father, could be led to cross the line between the usual good side to that evil side by being exposed to a variety of social psychological conditions, many rather subtle and seemingly trivial.
But nothing seems to have happened as a result of your research. Isn鈥檛 that disappointing?
Yes it is. I presented the research to two Congressional committees and told them: 鈥淚 put your son, your middle-class, white son in my prison and he couldn鈥檛 last a week. What about all the young boys who are being put in real prisons much worse than mine?鈥� Most young boys who go to prison are sodomised or gang-raped. On the basis of my study, a federal law was changed not to allow juveniles in pre-trial detention to be housed with adult prisoners. That is one small contribution. Another is that the first prisoner to break down after only 36 hours was so affected that after getting his PhD, he did an internship at San Quentin prison, and has worked in a local prison for many years, helping to reduce the tensions between prisoners and guards. I count that as a really positive outcome of my study.
So situations shape guards and prisoners. But do they shape researchers?
Milgram and I went to high school in the Bronx. I was very poor and he was moderately poor. If you are poor, most people you see are failures. Your father is not working, you have friends who are going to jail. You don鈥檛 want to believe that it is genetic, that your family and friends are somehow inherently impaired. You look around and you say it is the situation, it is an accident of birth that made you poor rather than rich. So you begin to analyse things in terms of the situational conditions, and more importantly, you ask what could you change that would change the way the people behave. If you grow up well-off, then you want to take credit, you want it to be in the genes, in your inner core of goodness.
What would justify you redoing the Stanford prison study?
I鈥檇 want to find out about heroes. Who are the people who when put in these evil crucibles are able to maintain goodness and compassion, and don鈥檛 dehumanise others. We have been so fascinated with evil that we focus on the bad guys. For me the hero is not only someone throwing themselves in front of a hand grenade to save their children. It is somebody who can resist the majority in a powerful situation such as the Holocaust. It might be because of moral family training, spiritual or religious training that some people stand side by side with us and do not conform. Would you have been one of those heroes? The numbers are against you, since the majority conform, comply, blindly obey. And I want to know what it takes for ordinary people to behave heroically, to go beyond dissent to disobey, to rebel, to lead a revolution, to be a hero when others are being passive bystanders. Is that worth knowing? I think so.