Stanford Prison Experiment: the researchers provided cues and even scripts for the "guards".
Milgram: the subjects "controlling" the power knew it was faked.
Thanks, both.
I asked because recently I read
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning, which makes an interesting comparison with Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment.
Reserve Police Battalion 101 were a group of ordinary working-class Germans who'd joined the Police Reserve rather as one might join the US National Guard, in the hope of avoiding conscription into the regular army and also in the hope of not being posted away from home.
They found themselves participating in Hitler's Final Solution in Poland, sometimes actually murdering the Jews they rounded up, though more usually the actual murders were delegated to local SS police auxiliaries, while Battalion 101 was usually detailed for round-up, guard and escort duties.
After the war, they were the subject of a detailed criminal investigation by the West German authorities, which included lengthy and repeated interviews with all survivors of the battalion and the book is based on an analysis of the files from the investigation.
Perhaps surprisingly, it appears that the battalion's commander, Major Trapp, was not unsympathetic to men who were uncomfortable with actually participating in the firing parties (one of whom was his own driver) and apparently, while there was certainly pressure on all the soldiers to participate, NCOs would apparently generally select the actual shooters from men who actively sought out the role, leaving the others to perform guard and escort duties.
Discussing the archives in the light of both the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram's experiments, Browning writes,
Zimbardo’s spectrum of guard behavior bears an uncanny resemblance to the groupings that emerged within Reserve Police Battalion 101: a nucleus of increasingly enthusiastic killers who volunteered for the firing squads and “Jew hunts”; a larger group of policemen who performed as shooters and ghetto clearers when assigned but who did not seek opportunities to kill (and in some cases refrained from killing, contrary to standing orders, when no one was monitoring their actions); and a small group (less than 20 percent) of refusers and evaders.
That is, as with the Stanford Prison Experiment, some were enthusiastic killers, but, while most of the men could be persuaded to go along with it, they didn't want to, and left to themselves, they would rather have been at home getting on with regular police duties (had they wanted to brutalise and murder people, there were plenty of other careers open to them in the Third Reich, after all).
For what it's worth, that's in line with what a family friend (now dead) said about being a POW after the fall of Singapore -- contrary to popular mythology in the UK, apparently most of the Japanese guards weren't too bad, but the problem was that no one was interested in stopping the ones who were sadists and bullies from having their fun with the prisoners.
My takeaway is that, while people seem, by default, to want to behave decently, it doesn't take a lot to change that, which why I think human rights laws, and an independent legal system prepared to enforce them, are so important.