Analysis Of The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources Of Sadism

Put in the right circumstances, every human being has the potential to be a sadist. In "The Stanford Prison Experiment", Phillip G. Zimbardo examines how easily people can slip into roles and become sadistic to the people around them, even going so far as to develop a sense of supremacy. He does this by explaining the results of his experiment that he created to understand more about the effects that imprisonment has on prisoners, and how a prison environment affects the guards who work there. In her article "The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism", Marianne Szegedy-Maszak looks at the Abu Ghraib atrocities and the possible reasons why "normal" people turned into sadists who committed unfathomable acts of torture. Although Szegedy-Maszak
Dehumanization is a key element in this change from a caring person to a sadist. According to Robert Okin, a professor of psychiatry, dehumanization allows people to "sever any empathetic human connection" (Szegedy-Maszak 304) they may have felt towards a person. Through interviews and studies, Zimbardo discovered that prisoners often report feeling dehumanized; his goal was to incorporate this feeling into his prison if possible. While conducting his experiment, he saw a degree of dehumanization occur that was astounding for the short period of time that the study was carried out. Szegedy-Maszak says that authorization leads to routinization, which ultimately leads to dehumanization. She claims that these three traits were present at Abu
Zimbardo 's experiment is an example of a situation where external attitudes came into play. Everyone came into the experiment under the same circumstances and initially no one had any problems with one another. One subject stated, "I don 't feel like I am the type of person that would be a guard, just constantly giving out [orders] and forcing people to do things" (Zimbardo 351). The attitudes, and more importantly, the actions, of the guards soon changed. Just days later a guard said, "I was surprised at myself...I made them call each other names and clean the toilets out with their bare hands (Zimbardo 348). This radical transformation had to come from somewhere. In a matter of days the subjects went from being cordial to one another, to inflicting or enduring acts of torture. The guards did not go into the experiment hating the prisoners; it was the atmosphere and the tension-filled environment that was the catalyst. However, imagine if both internal and external attitudes are at play. The situation changes dramatically, for the