Stanford Prison Experiment and the Holocaust

This past week, we started learning about social psychology and about how attitudes influences actions and actions influence attitudes. We briefly mentioned the Stanford Prison Experiment, saying that our buddy Philip Zimbardo conducted a week-long experiment at Stanford to test the influence of roleplaying on actions and attitudes. His findings were astounding: within one day, the "prisoners" actually started acting like prisoners and the "guards" actually starting acting as if they had all of the power and that they could abuse the prisoners. Remember that all of these people knew they were taking part in a psychological study and got so engrossed in the role play that they actually started behaving as if they were their roles. The prisoners exhibited a lot of learned helplessness in terms of escaping punishment and warding off the guards. Actually, the new behaviors got so out of control that Philip Zimbardo had to call off the experiment after only two days in order to prevent any major psychological damage.

The first time I heard about this experiment was at NCSY National Yarchei Kallah this past winter break. After Maariv one night, I attended an optional session led by one of the rabbis there. Although I have since forgotten the title of the session, I remember that it was all about whether or not a person could actually be as evil as the Nazis were towards other human beings. The rabbi there, also a psychologist, started the session by asking us if we thought it was possible for a regular person to suddenly act like a monster when put in a role play situation. The vast majority of the kids present, including myself, said that we thought it was possible but unlikely because role play is just that: pretend. We thought that people would be able to snap out of it when their behavior or attitudes got overly immoral. Then, the rabbi brought up the Stanford Prison Experiment. Everyone was flabbergasted and truly shocked. No one thought that this type of situation could bring out the "monster within" and none of us thought that the monsters would be that evil. In conclusion, it's incredibly interesting to see how role play played such a huge role in one of the biggest collective tragedies that the Jews have ever faced because the Nazi guards were put in a situation of power over the helpless Jews and were commanded to use their power. I don't feel pity for the Nazis, but I think this gives some insight into why they did what they did and why the atrocities tended towards the extreme.

Here's a video of the experiment. Viewer Discretion is Advised.