Reviewing Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect, Martha Nussbaum gives a good brief account of the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which volunteers playing the roles of guards and prisoners started to behave in ways that were sufficiently alarming that Zimbardo himself called the experiment off after a few days. Nussbaum notes some of the flaws in the way the experiment was conceived and run, but accepts that its conclusion – ‘that situational features, far more than underlying dispositional features of people’s characters, explain why people behave cruelly and abusively to others’ – is ‘somewhat true’ in any case. Along the way she dispatches in a very few words (though this may not have been her main intention) over-sociologizing views of humankind which make no room for the idea that human beings having a nature. She writes:
Situations… don’t elicit bad behaviour from a stone, or even an elephant. So what is it about many humans that makes them vulnerable?
There is another interesting point in her review that is worth noticing. Nussbaum says that…
We should understand that we are all vulnerable, and we should judge individuals, accordingly, in a merciful way, knowing that we don’t really know what we would have done, had we faced similar pressures.
I agree that everyone should understand that they, too, may be vulnerable when confronted by situational pressures encouraging cruel or abusive behaviour. Yet, there is a difference between knowing what might be true about you under certain pressures and actually succumbing to such pressures and behaving cruelly and abusively. Nussbaum emphasizes that there are people who don’t just go along with others in pressurizing circumstances: whistle-blowers who ‘have the strength to challenge the system’; ‘good actors in bad situations’. And she endorses Zimbardo’s view that it is important to foster a culture of personal accountability. We have to educate people, she says, in the fact of their own individual responsibility. This shows that being merciful is not exculpatory; it doesn’t acquit those who behave cruelly of blame for the wrongness of what they do.