The Stanford Prison Experiment
Philip G. Zimbardo ran an experiment in 1971 in Stanford University which predicts the behaviour found in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
Originally intended to be run over two weeks, with two groups of randomly selected, healthy, normal students playing the roles of prisoners and guards, the experiment had to be stopped after six days because the prisoners were being maltreated and sexually abused by the guards:
I ended the study prematurely for two reasons. First, we had learned through videotapes that the guards were escalating their abuse of prisoners in the middle of the night when they thought no researchers were watching and the experiment was “off.” Their boredom had driven them to ever more pornographic and degrading abuse of the prisoners.Second, Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw our prisoners being marched on a toilet run, bags over their heads, legs chained together, hands on each other’s shoulders. Filled with outrage, she said, “It’s terrible what you are doing to these boys!”