Ethics, Psychology and Abu Ghraib - Bad People or Bad Systems?

Ethics training in the CF currently focuses on helping personnel to make good choices, using individual "gut checks" to ask if a course of action is right, or asking themselves, "what would mom think if my actions were on the news". In this approach, abuses can be attributed to bad judgement or character flaws on the part of the abuser. But what happens when abuse is perpretrated by a system or culture, which is the thesis of Philip Zimbardo's book, The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil (Rider and Co, 2007), 9781844135776. Zimbardo is famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971, a study which attempted to understand the psychology of imprisonment.

Zimbardo's book comments on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq, which the US attempted to attribute to the actions of several low-ranking "bad actors". Here is part of Martha Nussbaum's review of this section of the book:

"Zimbardo concludes that situational features, far more than underlying dispositional features of people’s characters, explain why people behave cruelly and abusively to others. He then connects these insights to a detailed account of the abuses by United States soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, where, he argues, the humiliations and torments suffered by the prisoners were produced not by evil character traits but by an evil system that, like the prison system established in the SPE, virtually ensures that people will behave badly. Situations are held in place by systems, he argues, and it is ultimately the system that we must challenge, not the frequently average actors. He then sets himself to analyse the features that make systems and situations bad, and to suggest ways in which they might be remedied."

Nussbam's critique of Zimbardo is that he tends to speak as if systems determine human psychology, "and the insides of people explain nothing at all". She argues that emotional development is just as important in explaining individual responses.

"Philip Zimbardo does not focus on emotional development, but it is surely a key part of the future of any society that is going to refuse to go down the road of the SPE and Abu Ghraib. What the guards in the experiment crucially lacked, when they lacked the ability to see the other as human, was empathy and its close relative, compassion. Compassion, as Daniel Batson’s wonderful research has shown, is closely linked to the ability to follow the story of another’s plight with vivid imagination. Situations can certainly encourage this ability, as Batson’s experimental situation did. Nonetheless, the imagination is a muscle that gets weak from routinized thinking and strong from vigorous challenges, and this suggests a vital role for the arts and humanities in any curriculum for good citizenship.

Let us hope that The Lucifer Effect, which confronts us with the worst in ourselves, stimulates a critical conversation that will lead to more sensible and less arrogant strategies for coping with our shared human weaknesses."

Words Unspoken Are Rendered on War’s Faces

I cam across this by chance while visiting Baltimore crime writer Laura Lippman's blog. Say what you want to about the NY Times' political slant, the pictures are unnerving. Nina Berman's exhibit reminds us of our obligation to care for those who come home so badly damaged.

One of the more shocking photographs to emerge from the current Iraq war was taken last year in a rural farm town in the American Midwest. It’s a studio portrait by the New York photographer Nina Berman of a young Illinois couple on their wedding day.

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War Stress Pushing Army Suicides Higher

August 16, 2007 - 7:27pm
By PAULINE JELINEK
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Repeated and ever-longer war-zone tours are putting increasing pressure on military families, the Army said Thursday, helping push soldier suicides to a record rate.

There were 99 Army suicides last year _ nearly half of them soldiers who hadn't reached their 25th birthdays, about a third of them serving in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Col. Elspeth Ritchie, psychiatry consultant to the Army surgeon general, told a Pentagon press conference that the primary reason for suicide is "failed intimate relationships, failed marriages."

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When a US soldier in Iraq won't soldier

By Mary Wiltenburg | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the August 13, 2007 edition

WÜRZBURG, GERMANY - No one looked comfortable at the sentencing hearing. Not family and friends who packed the US military courtroom's straight-backed benches. Not the rookie Army prosecutor in stiff dress greens who flushed with every "Your Honor." Not Judge R. Peter Masterton, whose usually animated face was now grave.

And not the convicted deserter – Army medic Agustín Aguayo – on the stand in a US military court in central Germany last March, pleading for understanding.

"I'm sorry for the trouble my conscience has caused my unit," Private 1st Class Aguayo said, his voice thick with emotion. "I tried to obey the rules, but in the end [the problem] was at the very core of my being."

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US Army struggles with soldier who won't pull the trigger

By Mary Wiltenburg | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

Schweinfurt, Germany
The US Army sergeants waited on the couch, studying the floor. Family dogs skirted the sofa, growling. From time to time, one of the soldiers extended a conciliatory hand to them.

On the floor, sixth-grader Rebecca Aguayo played a video game; her twin rollerbladed outside. Just one voice fed the tension in the living room: Their mother, Helga, sat in an armchair, bawling. "It was the ugly crying, with the snot and everything," Mrs. Aguayo recalls, "I wanted them to see how much they were hurting us."

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