Lethal Injection: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil:

Friday, March 30th, 2007
Understanding How Good People Turn Evil: Renowned Psychologist Philip Zimbardo On his Landmark Stanford Prison Experiment, Abu Ghraib and More

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In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo created the Stanford Prison Experiment in which 24 college students were randomly assigned the roles of prison guards and prisoners at a makeshift jail on campus. The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks. By Day Two, the guards were going far beyond just keeping the prisoners behind bars. In scenes eerily similar to Abu Ghraib, prisoners were stripped naked, bags put on their heads and sexually humiliated. The two-week experiment had to be canceled after just six days. Zimbardo tells the full story of the landmark study in his new book, "The Lucifer Effect." [rush transcript included]

As the United States enters the fifth year of its occupation of Iraq, some of the most enduring images of the war remain the vivid photographs of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

The pictures were leaked to the press and first revealed to the world in May 2004. Images showed Iraqis with bags over their heads, beaten, set upon by dogs and forced into sexually humiliating acts. The Bush administration tried to paint the scandal as an isolated incident committed by rogue soldiers. But who is really to blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib? The answer may lie in a landmark study conducted more than three decades ago.

In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo created an experiment at Stanford University in which 24 male college students were randomly assigned the roles of prison guards and prisoners at a makeshift jail on campus. The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks. By Day Two, the guards were going far beyond keeping the prisoners behind bars. In scenes eerily similar to Abu Ghraib, prisoners were stripped naked, bags put on their heads and sexually humiliated. The guards had become dangerously sadistic and the prisoners were breaking down emotionally. The two-week experiment had to be canceled after just six days.

Professor Philip Zimbardo has just written a new book that, for the first time, tells the full story of the famed Stanford Prison Experiment. It's called "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil." Professor Zimbardo joins me today from our firehouse studio in New York.

Philip Zimbardo, creator of the landmark Stanford Prison Experiment. He is professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University. Zimbardo is the author of the best-selling introductory psychology textbook, "Psychology and Life" as well as "Shyness." He recently served as the president of the American Psychological Association and is now director of the new Center for Interdisciplinary Policy Education and Research on Terrorism.

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AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zimbardo joins us today from the firehouse studio in New York. He is Professor Emeritus of psychology at Stanford University where he’s taught for the last half century. He delivered his final lecture there earlier this month. Professor Zimbardo also recently served as President of the American Psychological Association and is now Director of the new center for Interdisciplinary Policy Education and Research on Terrorism. We welcome you to Democracy Now! Professor Zimbardo.

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: Welcome Amy. I’m so happy to be here, thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, why don't you begin by just explaining, setting the stage for us, how did this experiment begin?

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: The experiment is really a study in how ordinary people, even good people, can be seduced or corrupted by powerful, social situations. What we did was, we began by selecting two dozen people, as you indicated, from among 75 people who had applied – had answered an ad I’d placed in the city newspaper. And the ad simply said “Wanted college students, for study of prison life. Expected to run for two weeks.”

We gave them a battery of psychological tests, interviews, because we wanted to start our prison filled only with good apples, if you will. That is, normal healthy young men, college students. Little more intelligent than the average public. But ordinary, healthy young men. And then what we did, what is critical to all research, we randomly assigned these young men to two roles. Either prisoner or guard, literally by a flip of the coin.

And so at the beginning of the study we had only normal, healthy kids playing the role of prisoners and guards. And, we had all the props. They had, the guards wore uniforms with symbols of power, billy clubs, silver reflecting sunglasses, an idea I got from the movie Cool Hand Luke. And that was to make them anonymous. And then the prisoners just had smocks on with numbers. And for the prisoners we took away --

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zimbardo, I wanted to step back for a minute. How the prisoners, the students who played the prisoners, how they even got to the psychology building, which was the setting for all of this?

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: What was critical in the study is, we wanted the boys who were going to be prisoners to have their freedom taken away, rather than have them come and say I’m here to be in the study. So I recruited the Palo Alto Police Department to make very realistic, serious arrests, of each student either in a dormitory or at home, and the police went there, knocked on the door, and said are is Billy Smith here? He’s wanted for a violation of penal code 459, armed robbery or breaking and entering. Handcuffed the kids, put him in a squad car, the sirens were wailing, neighbors are looking. Obviously they didn't know it was an experiment.

They bring them down to the police department of the -- in the City Hall, and they go through a formal booking. Meaning a fingerprinting, take their picture. And essentially, although the kids knew they had not been involved in armed robbery, never the less they felt guilty, guilty about being in a squad car, people looking in the window, guilty about being in a police station. And the policemen were as deadly serious as they could be. In part, because we had a local TV cameraman there filming it.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zimbardo, we're going to break, but when we come back, we'll go to the make-shift prison. I'll have you describe it to us. Then we'll talk about how the prisoners became increasingly afraid, passive, and how the prison guards became increasingly sadistic. We're talking to professor Philip Zimbardo.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: As we continue this discussion about this landmark experiment. It has been written about by the man who conducted it, Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Professor Zimbardo, is in the firehouse studio in New York. Professor Zimbardo, lay out the psychology building, and how you set up this prison to feel so much, for both the guards and the prisoners, the students who were playing them, as a jail?

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: Well, there are two things about a prison. One is the physical aspects of it. So we took a basement, which were offices that students usually used. We took off the doors, put new doors on with bars. Took a closet and converted it to solitary confinement, meaning a small, tight, dark space, which had a label on “The Hole”. We had quarters where the guards came and changed. I was the superintendent of the prison. We had a warden, David Jaffe, a student in his office. We had a place where visitors could come. We had a place where we would have parole board hearings.

So we created a very – simulated physical environment. And at one end of the hall we had a little window that we could look through watching what was happening with a TV camera. It was covered with theatrical scrims, so they never knew when they were being observed and when they were being filmed. The psychology -- psychological aspect of a prison is more subtle.

Before I began the experiment, I taught a summer course at Stanford called, The Psychology of Imprisonment with Carlo Prescott, he was both the consultant to my study and a young man who had just been released from prison after 17 years. So, he was our consultant, but also he was the head of the parole board. Ironically his parole had been denied for 17 previous years.

And what we wanted to do was create essential psychology of imprisonment, and that’s all about power. Every prison is about power. Guards have to assume more and more power and domination, and prisoners have to have their power stripped away. And so that is the ultimate evil of prison. It's all about power, dominance, and mastery. And that was the same thing we found in Abu Ghraib prison.

But also -- so the way that power evolves is, the prisoners have to be ultimately dehumanized. You have to think of them as not your kind, not your kin, as -- ultimately you end up thinking of them as animals. And the guards have to be impersonal, distant. Whatever humanity they have when they are home, when they are with their families, that has to be suspended, put on a hook. Because, what they have to do is treat other people in ways that they don't treat anyone else, those are the people being prisoners.

And so, we're talking about playing a role, anonymity, dehumanization, and then of course there's things like being a team member, the guards have to develop a sense of camaraderie. Most of the evil of the world comes about not out of evil motives, but somebody saying get with the program, be a team player, this is what we saw at Enron, this is what we saw in the Nixon administration with their scandal. And I think you are seeing it now, with the current administration.

So, it's that set of social psychological variables. Oh, the key one is of course diffusion of responsibility. When a person feels, I am not personally responsible, I am not accountable, it's the role I’m playing or these are the orders I’ve gotten, then you allow yourself to do things you would never do under ordinary circumstances.

So, it’s that mix of the physical environment, psychological environment, which came to be overwhelming. By overwhelming, I mean that, each day the guards would escalate their level of abuse, so that initially it was doing push ups, waking prisoners up in the middle of the night, long counts. Then it got to be personal humiliation. Cursing the guards, and having them curse each other, then finally it devolved into sexually degrading games.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zimbardo, I want to turn to a clip from your documentary Quiet Rage, that documents the six days of the Stanford Prison Experiment. In this clip, a prisoner, 8612, decides the only way to get out of prison is to show everyone that he's gone insane. He begins to play the role of the crazy person, but soon the role becomes too real, and he goes into an uncontrollable rage.

PRISONER 8612:

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zimbardo, explain what happened here and also where were you and how you dealt with this.

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: This young man is prisoner 8612, in real life, Doug Korpi. He was the first person to be arrested, and he was also the ring leader of a rebellion. He led the prisoners on a rebellion the second morning. He had been a student activist, an anti-war activist. And really, a powerful prisoner, with regard to opposing the authority. Remember, this is 1971. All of these kids are anti-war activists, civil rights activists, everybody’s got hair down to here, you could call them hippies. So these are kids who are against authority, whether they are prisoners or guards.

But the prisoners really rebelled against the limits on their freedom. And the guards just singled him out and harassed him, and hassled him. He had never been in a situation in which, when he did something that the authorities didn't like, they punished his cellmates. So that his cellmates started putting pressure on him, come on, straighten up, fly right, and he just gave in. That is, he gave in psychologically because his will to resist was being systematically crushed. He broke in 36 hours. The scene that you saw was at the end of only 36 hours into this study, and, but those 36 hours are every minute that is – prisoners, when they go to sleep, the guards woke them up every two hours to do counts, to do menial exercises. And he set the image of how you escape from prison. Because each day after that, another prisoner had a similar reaction. So at the end of five days we had five kids – kids we chose because they were normal and healthy, having emotional breakdowns.

AMY GOODMAN: Let's turn to another clip of the documentary Quiet Rage, which you narrated. Here all the prisoners, but one, Prisoner 819 are lined up for the 11:30 count. They together chant out against prisoner 819, who’d been resisting the guards and is I think in solitary confinement. He’s in another room.

PRISONERS:

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO:

PRISONERS:

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zimbardo, can you talk about what happened next?

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: Well, I’m trying to comfort this young man. And he says, I have to go back. I have to prove to them I’m not a bad prisoner. And at this point I say, no, you're not a bad prisoner. You're Stu, and I’m not the Super Intendent, I’m Phil Zimbardo, and the study is over. And he kept saying no, I have to go back, I’m not a bad prisoner. So, the reality of that prison was so deep, that even when I’m giving him the opportunity to leave, his reputation, his image as a bad prisoner has to be undone, has to be reconciled.

And so, it's so hard if you are outside of that situation to think how can that happen? These are kids playing cops and robbers. They volunteered for it. It’s an experiment. It's not a real prison. It's not real prison bars. But once you are in that setting, and you are living there day and night, the prisoners lived there around the clock. Obviously guards work eight-hour shifts. It becomes a total situation in which your identity as a good guard, or a bad guard, your identity as a tough guard, or a soft guard, becomes really important to you. That's who you are. You are the guard. You put on the uniform, you put on the glasses. You have a billy club, and that's who you are. Or you are --

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us about prisoner 416, the one who began a revolt by refusing to eat?

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: Well, when we released the first prisoner, 8612, we brought in a substitute. But, he came in half way through. And what's interesting is, day by day, as the situation degraded, we all adjusted to it. That is, each day’s level violence, of abuse was the platform for the next day. But, he comes in now, and he’s seeing these crazy things going on, and he says right up front, I’m not having any of this, and they told him, “you can’t leave”, they won't let you leave, which we never said.

In fact, 8612 is the one who told him they won’t let you out. And so he says I’m going to go on a hunger strike, I’m not going to eat anything, I’ll get sick and they’ll have to let me go. And he’s a skinny kid to begin with. And the guards go crazy, because he is now the symbol of resistance. All the other kids are broken. If they are not having emotional breakdowns, they’re like zombies, they’re doing whatever the guards says.

And for the next two days every guard on every shift, their mission is get this prisoner to eat those damned sausages. They put him in solitaire confinement, they make him hold the sausages, and to his credit, he resists. So, he should have been the hero. He should have been the hero for the other prisoners, but instead he becomes a trouble maker. The guards set the other prisoners against him. They say if he doesn't eat his sausages, you guys don't get your visiting hours. If he doesn’t eat his sausages, you guys don’t get your blankets. If he doesn't eat his sausages, we're going to put your blankets in nettles and spurs, and you’re going to spend hours digging them out. So they start jumping all over him. Eat the damn sausages, you’re ruining out life.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to turn to another clip of the documentary. Here the guards force this prisoner, 416, having to stand up and sing Amazing grace as the rest of the prisoners do push ups.

GUARD:

Amazing Grace

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

AMY GOODMAN: In another incident a guard uses, tries to use public humiliation and homophobia against Prisoner 416. He tells him to play Frankenstein and to tell another prisoner, 2093, playing the bride of Frankenstein, that he loves him.

GUARD:

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

AMY GOODMAN: At another point prisoner 416 is put in the hole for continuing his hunger strike. In an attempt to get him to submit, one of the guards sets the prisoners against him. He gives the prisoners a choice.

GUARD:

AMY GOODMAN: Excerpts from the documentary Quiet Rage. This is a filming actually of the experiment that was done in 1971. Philip Zimbardo, in a moment we're going to play the young men, the college students a few months later when you interviewed them about what happened. But talk now about what happened here with the prison guard.

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: I must say, 35 years later it's really upsetting when I see this. In fact, to prepare myself to write The Lucifer Effect, I went back and looked at – we have12 hours of video. It was so depressing, because as I’m watching the videos, I’m saying stop the experiment, stop the experiment. Why are you letting it go on? But what happened here is just a demonstration of power run amuck.

That here was this prisoner, who cares if he eats the lousy sausage, except what he represents symbolically. That he is resistance. He is the last bastion of resistance to the guards power. And they are doing everything they can to crush him. He is maintaining this heroic stance, that is, I will not give in. And finally what the guards do is they just use the might of the prisoners, getting other prisoners, against him, to break his will.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go now to the prisoners and the guards reflecting. Well this is when they're back as college students. The documentary Quiet Rage includes these post experiment interviews with the prisoners and the guards so we go back to this prisoner, 416, recalling the experience two months later.

PRISONER 416:

AMY GOODMAN: And here is one of the students, actually one who played the guards, recalling his role in the Stanford Prison Experiment two months later.

GUARD:

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zimbardo, can you respond to what he's saying today?

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: In a broader sense what the study really gets at, and what I try to capture in the The Lucifer Effect is that, it’s really a celebration of the human mind infinite capacity to be kind, or cruel, caring or selfish, creative or destructive. To make some of us be villains and some of us heroes. And it all depends on the situation. When we have total freedom, we choose situations that we know we can control. But when we're in situations where other people are in charge, in the military, in prisons, in some schools, in some families, we are – we can be transformed.

And so the question is what makes some people become perpetrators of evil? What makes some people passive in the face of evil? And what I end the book with, that I discovered as I was writing it, is what is the path to heroism. So, the same situation that can enflame a hostile imagination in some, for other people it inspires a heroic imagination. Now, I’m trying to move away from being imbedded in evil, which I’ve been studying for thirty or forty years, starting growing up in the south Bronx ghetto, where I was surrounded by evil, to focusing on how can we promote the heroic imagination and heroes in our society?

AMY GOODMAN: We're going to go to break. When we come back, we'll go to one of the most riveting parts of the documentary, when one of these prisoners and one of the guards confront each other. I also want to ask you about what you think about the American Psychological Association’s debate on the issue of torture, and participating in it. You were the President of the APA, and about testifying on behalf of the one of the guards at Abu Ghraib in his trial. We're talking to professor Philip Zimbardo. His book is called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, about a prison experiment he conducted 35 years ago at Stanford University, where he paid students $15 a day, a group of students, to be a part of this experiment, where he divided them into guards and prisoners. That's what we've been talking about for this show. In one of the most riveting parts of the documentary Professor Zimbardo you made called, Quiet Rage, prisoner 416 and one of the guards confront each other two months after the experiment is over this is the guard.

GUARD:

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

PRISONER 416:

GUARD:

And here they're supposed to have a little, they’re suppose to be together as a unit in jail, but here they are abusing each other because I requested them too. And no one questioned my authority at all. It really shocked me. Why didn't people -- when I started to get -- abuse people, I started to get so profane and still people didn't say anything.

AMY GOODMAN: Two of the students, one of the students played a guard, one of them played a prisoner. Professor Zimbardo, as we come to the end of this discussion of the experiment, and then I want to go to broader issues, talk about what happened after the six days. Also your response to what these two young men were saying two months after the experiment?

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: Well, I should say for your listeners that we ended the two week study only after six days because it was getting out of control, in the ways you saw and in other ways, even more extreme. But then what we did was, we had a whole day of what’s known as debriefing. I met with all the guards, with my staff, Craig Haney, Curt Banks, Carlo Prescott, David Jaffe, and we met with all the prisoners to get them to talk about their experiences. To talk to them about, try to diffuse some of the tension they felt and -- then we met with all the guards separately, and then we brought them altogether.

And what I able to say was, all of you did some bad things, and all of you saw each other doing some bad things. But it's not diagnostic of any pathology in you because we picked people who are the most normal and healthy on all psychological measures. It's really diagnostic of the power of the situation. So that even though kids had these emotional breakdowns if you will, there was no lasting effects.

We followed these kids up two weeks after, had them all come back two weeks later, a month later, I am still in contact, 35 years later, with many of the former prisoners and guards. And of course, once you take them out of that situation, and once you take them out of their costumes, just like soldiers, you take them out of their uniform and put them back in their street clothes, they bounce back to the healthy, base rate that they had earlier. So there were not, surprisingly, any lasting negative effects, which of course makes me feel good.

AMY GOODMAN: What made you stop the experiment? What ultimately made you do that six days instead of the full two weeks?

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: On the night of the fifth day, I had a-- I was going to bring in a number of psychologists, graduate students, and young faculty who had no relationship to the study to interview all of us, so we could get a fix on how we were doing. One of the people who came down was a young woman, Christina Maslach, who had been a student of mine, she is now a professor at Berkeley. And she and I had just started dating, we developed a romantic relationship. And, what she saw when she got down there was prisoners lined up, bags over their heads, legs chained, hands on each other shoulders, going through counts, guards yelling at them, cursing them.

And I looked up, and I said “hey Chris, look at that. And she starts tearing up and runs out. And I run after her and I say hey, what's wrong? This is the crucible of human nature, and I'm going through all this psychological stuff, and she said, one minute what you're doing to those boys is terrible. They're not prisoners, not subjects, they are boys, and you are responsible. And I'm still yelling that the whole psychology thing. And she goes I’m not sure I want to have a relationship with you. I thought you were a loving, caring person. What I see here is – I don’t know if she used the word monster, but it was equivalent.

And that was like a slap in the face. I said, oh my god she’s right. What has happened to me that I’ve been seduced into being this evil, well not evil, just indifferent authority. I had become a prison Superintendent. So, at that moment, I said the study was over, but this was now the middle of the night and so, we said we'll end it the next morning, because we had to call all the prisoners who had been released to come back, all the guards on all the guard shifts.

And the interesting thing, and the last thing is, what made the study so powerful is, half way through we had a former prison chaplain come down. He interviews all the kids, and he says, what are you doing if you get out? And they look at him and he says you have to get a lawyer. Well, he made it even more like a realistic – and one of the kids gave him the name of his mother who has a nephew who’s a lawyer, and the priest actually calls the lawyer, and the public defender comes down this last day. And so I waited to end the study until after the Public Defender went through his routine, and he got sucked into the reality of this -- reality illusion of this study. By going through his usual Public Defender role, but then we ended the study to the joy of, not only the prisoners, but to me and the my staff, Craig Haney, Curt Banks, Carlo Prescott.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to take this story to today. Professor Zimbardo, you testified in the court martial of the highest ranking officer implicated in the Abu Ghraib scandal, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick. Can you talk about what you said, why you testified -- did you testify on his behalf?

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: Yes I did. I was part of the defense team. I must say, when I saw those pictures on 20/20 -- on 60 minutes, I, excuse me, the pictures of the abuse. I was shocked the way most people are. Of course I saw the parallels immediately with the Stanford Prison Experiment, visual images. And immediately what happened was, what always happens when there is a scandal in police departments, or in the military, they blame the individual, it’s a few bad apples. The fact that the Head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or I guess General Myers said we know it's not systemic. Well, so I said maybe it's not bad apples, maybe these are really good American soldiers and they were put in a bad barrel, but how would I know?

When I was invited to be on Chip Frederick’s Defense council -- team, it meant I had access to him, I could find out everything there was to know about this young man, everything there was to know about the place and the psychological dynamics of the prison. I had access to all the investigative reports. And so in The Lucifer Effect, I have two whole chapters on what Abu Ghraib really was like and what the situation was like. What was the system? What was the military and Bush administration system that created those horrendous conditions? And so, I testified, essentially talking about how the situation he was in and the other seven soldiers were in, in the basement of that dungeon, how that corrupted him and made him lose his moral compass.

AMY GOODMAN: So, in the end, Staff Sergeant Ivan Frederick received a maximum eight year sentence.

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: Even worse. He was dishonorable discharged, he got eight years in prison, they send him to Kuwait in solitaire confinement. They took away 22 years of his retirement pay. This is an all American, super patriotic soldier; he had nine medals and awards, which he really prized. And they stripped him publicly to humiliate him. He's now in a prison in Leavenworth.

I still have personal contact with him and his family. The sad thing is, the day before he went down to that prison, from everything I know, he was normal, healthy, exactly like one of the good guards in our study. Within a few days, maybe a few weeks actually, he and the other military army reservists. Now, these are not real soldiers, these are military police, these are army reservists, who have no mission specific training, they are not trained to do this job.

He was a guard in a small prison in the states. He now is in charge of a thousand prisoners. Sixty Iraqi police men who are smuggling in weapons, the place is under constant bombardment. Soldiers are dying, prisoners are dying. He's working a 12-hour shift, seven days a week, 40 days without a day off. Incredible. How could anybody, how could any system allow American soldiers to be under that kind of stress? He and the other soldiers just gave in to the horrors of that situation.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zimbardo, who should be held responsible for what happened at Abu Ghraib?

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: Well, my analysis is, individuals are always ultimately personally responsible. He and most of the other military police said, I’m guilty -- well, they had to say it, because they're in the pictures, what I call the trophy photos. He is willing to accept punishment. The situational analysis says, we should limit the extent of the punishment, because these are extreme mitigating circumstances. And what I do in The Lucifer Effect, and I have a wonderful website, we just put up called www. lucifereffect.com, we put the system on trial. To say, if you're going to put these soldiers, these good American soldiers on trial for what they did, my argument has been, the people who create this corrupting situation, they have to be put on trial, too. So, I have a virtual voting booth in which I put George Tenant on trial, the former Head of the CIA, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and President Bush. Because, in various ways, they created that situation which corrupted these good American young men and women.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zimbardo we have held several debates on the American Psychological Association’s position on psychologists participating in military interrogations. Quite different from the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association. Can you comment on the organization you were formerly President of.

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: Well, I have to begin by saying that psychologists really want to make their research relevant to society, that we want to give back. Our research gets funded, our students education gets funded, and so we are eager to do things, certainly I, all my life, have tried to make our research relevant to the needs of society. So, many psychologists are military psychologists, many psychologists work for the government in various capacities, doing really important good things. Psychologists were critical in the Second World War. So some psychologists work to give advice to interrogators on how to be more effective, the same way some psychologists work to give advice to police detectives to be more effective. The problem comes when you're giving --

AMY GOODMAN: We have 10 seconds.

PROFESSOR ZIMBARDO: -- specific advice about a particular individual being interrogated, and at that point, you step across the line, that you cannot abuse your role as psychologist to help an interrogator break a prisoner, psychologically. And that I am strongly against.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Zimbardo, we're going to have to leave it there. I want to thank you very much for being with us. The book is called The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil.

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