Extreme Psychology

For a small band of shrinks, intervening in catastrophic situations is an everyday event. But their experience at the edge has deep consequences for us all: It is altering our understanding of the true nature of human nature.

By Joann Ellison Rodgers, published on July 01, 2006 - last reviewed on January 08, 2009

The Evil Within—and Without

In charge of the night shift in a part of Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison known as the "hard site," Ivan "Chip" Frederick could have stopped the abuse that famous night in 2003, he later admitted. But the 38-year-old former staff sergeant, whose 12-year sentence is on appeal, took part instead, forcing prisoners to masturbate and punching one man so hard he needed medical help. He also hooked wires to the hands of a detainee, who was told he would be electrocuted if he fell off a box.

Philip Zimbardo was called to consult on Frederick's defense. "Most of us have a self-serving illusion," says the Stanford University psychologist, whose 1971 landmark study of prison society famously demonstrated the power of circumstance to hijack morality. "We say we'd be good guards or heroic prisoners, that we can't imagine how guards at Abu Ghraib did this." But he can.

Zimbardo grew up in the South Bronx—"a skinny, sickly kid with a funny, big nose, picked on by other kids." Survival meant using his brains to learn the "psychology of street smarts," becoming an "intuitive personality theorist who sized up other kids very fast to figure out who was a friend and who was dangerous." That led to "understanding the dynamics of power, which kid had it and how to make it work for me and not against me."

With a Ph.D. in psychology from Yale, and his mean-streets training, Zimbardo found himself exploring how ordinarily decent people could do evil. "This was not a philosophical question for me," he says of the experiment in which he put college students into a prisonlike setting, some as guards, some as inmates. He watched as shifts in power and circumstances messed with personal identities, distorting and overwhelming deeply held values and moral codes.

"The lesson was that the human mind is a template for virtually anything, capable of heroic or evil acts," he says. Within "deindividuation," a temporary state of suspended personal identity, lie the ordinariness of evil and the banality of heroics. "Most people who do evil—or a heroic act—do it unpredictably, only once and in a particular time or place," he says. This suggests that many are looking for evil in the wrong places, including in "bad seed" personalities.

Frederick, for example, supervised 12-hour night shifts for 40 nights with no day off amid stress, prison filth, lack of sunlight, missed meals, absence of socialization, fear of bombings, escape attempts, zero mission-specific training and vague commands. "There is not a single trait about him that is other than normal," says Zimbardo. "No sadism. Nine medals. An all-American poster boy of patriotism who became a monster. This was not a case of a bad apple, but of bad bough makers."

Zimbardo stresses that Frederick is responsible for his acts. But, he says, "Abu Ghraib was a crucible for evil and those who try to predict evil by linking personality traits rooted in everyday normal situations to samples of evil behavior at a particular time are on a fool's errand."

In his forthcoming book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Zimbardo points out that Lucifer was once God's favorite angel. "Everywhere I've looked, I've found transformations of ordinary people into evil ones," he says. "The gold ring won't be found in predicting the unpredictable, but in figuring out triggers and altering them. Not in trying to change the nature of human capabilities, but in understanding what drives it."

Open Minds, Targeted for Closing

Steven Alan Hassan was 19 and depressed, a college dropout who had just broken up with his girlfriend. He was lonely and working at a nearby Holiday Inn when a trio of attractive young women approached him on his college campus. Dressed like students and carrying books, they talked about classes, flirted and got him to talk about himself.

Over several days, they described the good life living with people from all over in a group house. They reassured him he would love it there, that there were big ideas afoot that could include him and that their only agenda was to help each other save the world. "I had no idea that what was happening to me was a systematic, well-planned manipulation and seduction and that I had been targeted," he says.

So, in 1973, Hassan became a member of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. For more than two years, the Moonie was subjected to "overwhelming psychological, physical and emotional torture." He rose quickly in the cult's ranks and was brought into discussions about "what country I wanted to run when we took over the U.S. and, ultimately, the world."

But his "boringly normal" Jewish family never stopped worrying about him and seized a moment of opportunity. Working almost nonstop to raise money for the cult, he had fallen asleep at the wheel, crashed and was hospitalized with a broken leg and chest injuries. Dazed and unsure about what would happen to him, he called his sister Thea. "I made her promise not to tell my parents. Fortunately she broke her word."

Hassan became an expert witness in the U.S. government's investigation of the 1978 Jonestown massacre in Guyana. He turned over Moon's speeches, believing the parallels to Jim Jones' cult would help expose the Unification Church's methods.