Newspaper Article

DOCUMENTARY CASTS A CHILLING LIGHT ON SOCIAL BEHAVIOR

Weiss, Joanna

2006

Overview

In 2004, workers at a string of fast food restaurants strip- searched and abused their employees at the orders of a crank caller who claimed to be a detective. Nearly 40 years earlier, Stanley Milgram's \"obedience\" experiment at Yale meant to explore the psychological underpinnings of the Holocaust showed that men were so inclined to follow orders that they would deliver high-voltage electric shocks to other men. The Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, subject of so much recent hand-wringing, had a laboratory precursor in the famed 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. Dr. Philip Zimbardo set up a mock jail and divided test subjects into prisoners and guards. Within days, the \"guards\" were perpetrating shocking abuse. Indeed, many former researchers and subjects seem disturbingly cool when they describe what they did long ago in the consequence- free confines of a lab. Dave Eshleman, the most sadistic \"guard\" in Zimbardo's mock prison, describes his own behavior as a sort of game- within-an-experiment: \"I was trying to see how far I could take it before somebody would say, `OK, that's enough, stop.' \"

• Publisher: Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC
• Subject: Documentary films / Human Behavior Experiments, The / Television programs