Throughout this essay, Szegedy-Maszak attempts to answer the question: Are there particular conditions in Iraq that might shed light on why these soldiers committed these unconscionable acts? (Szegedy-Maszak p. 173). She begins by presenting two famous psychological experiments that explore the capacity for evil residing in normal people, (Szegedy-Maszak p. 174). The first experiment, conducted by Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo, attempted to mimic a real life prison scenario with students impersonating actual guards and prisoners. Surprisingly, the results were analogous to the actual events that took place at Abu Ghraib prison. The second experiment, created by Stanley Milgram, studied some peoples willingness to follow orders. The experiment began with an actor sitting in a chair supposedly wired with electricity. For every wrong answer this actor would give, volunteers were asked to deliver increasingly dangerous electric shocks to the actor in the chair. The results showed that two out of the three volunteers delivered potentially lethal electric shocks.
Judging by the outcomes of these two experiments, Szegedy-Maszak concludes that some evil may be present within human nature. To help tie the results of these experiments in with the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, Szegedy-Maszak references Robert Okin, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco, who said that the abuse [in Abu
Cited: zegedy-Maszak, Marianne. The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism. US News & World Report. 30 August 2008: 173-174.