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The Stanford Prison Experiment's Torture Hermeneutics: Difference and Morality in the US University, 1968 to 9/11
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2017
Abstract
Beginning with Talal Asad's (2007) claim that torture is a hermeneutic, this article investigates the ongoing relationship between torture and the US university's primary ways of making meaning about racialized difference. The Stanford prison experiment is routinely referenced as a seminal study revealing why people engage in torture. Through a close reading of Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, the major account of the SPE, I raise concerns about how torture is used to enable moral development and to promote an understanding of difference as a “problem” to be managed by institutionalized diversity projects.
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References
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27 McCoy, A Question of Torture.
28 Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual; Luban, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb.”
29 As Luban, 1440–52, carefully details, this scenario is a fantastical one, its function to align torture with morality rather than to prepare for an actual possible event.
30 Ibid., 1444.
31 Dayan, 53, 91.
32 Ibid., 13, 39.
33 I will speak more directly in the following sections to the particular role of sexual violence in the torture scenarios covered by The Lucifer Effect. For now, I raise this issue in part to acknowledge an important point made by one of the anonymous reviewers of this article: that rampant sexual assault on US university campuses, and the failure of universities to take significant action against it, needs to be understood as related to academic support for state-sponsored torture.
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39 Ibid., 32.
40 Ibid., 206.
41 Ibid., 5, emphasis added.
42 Ibid., 55.
43 Ibid., 33.
44 Ibid., 23–27.
45 Ibid., 26.
46 Ibid., 23–24.
47 Ibid., 152–53.
48 Ibid., 224.
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52 Ibid., 90.
53 Ibid., 63.
54 Ibid., 68.
55 Ibid., 145.
56 Ibid., 141, emphasis in original.
57 Genter, “Understanding the POW Experience”; McCoy, A Question of Torture, 25; Summers, “Making Sense of the APA.”
58 McCoy, 26–28; Zimbardo, 91.
59 Heiner, Brady Thomas, “The American Archipelago: The Global Circuit of Carcerality and Torture,” in Backhaus, Gary and Murungi, John, eds., Colonial and Global Interfacing: Imperial Hegemonies and Democratizing Resistances (Oxford and New York: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 84–117Google Scholar; McCoy; Soldz, “Healers or Interrogators”; Summers.
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64 Ibid., 8. The use of such behavioral research and techniques by the CIA across the so-called Third World, including the training of local police and military forces in such techniques, is relevant here. Ibid, 50.
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67 Ibid., 242–43.
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73 Ibid., 324, emphasis added.
74 Ibid., 324, emphasis added.
75 Ibid., 195, emphasis added.
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79 Ibid., 305.
80 Ibid., 344.
81 Ibid., 338.
82 Ibid., 338.
83 Ibid., 351, emphasis added.
84 Ibid., 344, emphasis in original.
85 Ibid., 237, emphasis added.
86 Ibid., 310.
87 Ibid., 378.
88 John Eligon, “Advisers on Interrogation Face Legal Action by Critics,” New York Times, 28 April 2011, A21; Soldz, “Healers or Interrogators,” 598–99.
89 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 252–54.
90 Ibid., 238.
91 Ibid., 239.
92 Ibid., 239–52.
93 Ibid., 252.
94 McCoy, A Question of Torture, 32–33.
95 Ibid., 50–59.
96 Soldz, 604.
97 See Summers, “Making Sense of the APA,” 622, for an account of government agencies “channeling the money through private foundations … and academic organizations” to fund research into torture.
98 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 328.
99 Ibid., 20.
100 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 13.
101 Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual, 39.
102 McClintock, Anne, “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 28 (March 2009), 50–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 59.
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104 Reddy, Freedom with Violence, 39.
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107 Asad, 4.
108 Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” The Atlantic, Sept. 2015, available at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356, accessed 28 July 2016.
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110 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 452.
111 Tamsin Shaw, “The Psychologists Take Power,” New York Review of Books, 25 Feb. 2016, available at www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/the-psychologists-take-power, accessed 2 Sept. 2016. In her brave review of several books on moral and social psychology, Shaw draws these crucial connections. Describing the work of Martin Seligman, a key figure in positive psychology, Shaw notes the following: “In the 1960s, Seligman devised a theory of ‘learned helplessness.’ … Seligman and other researchers applied the theory to depression, but also to social problems such as ‘demoralized women on welfare,’ ‘helpless cognitions’ on the part of Asian-Americans, and ‘defeatism’ among black Americans. In developing Positive Psychology one of Seligman's core goals has been ‘to end victimology,’ which, he claims, pervades the social sciences and requires us to ‘view people as the victims of their environment.’ After September 11, 2001, he came to see the cultivation of positive strengths and virtues as an urgent task for America, shoring up its people and institutions by increasing their resilience.”
112 Danner, Mark and Eakin, Hugh, “The CIA: The Devastating Indictment,” New York Review of Books, 62, 2 (2015), 31–32Google Scholar, 32.
113 Ibid., 32.
114 Davis, Abolition Democracy, 78.
115 Reddy, Freedom with Violence, 47.
116 Ibid., 47.