There are stunning parallels between the Stanford Prison Experiment and what happened at Abu Ghraib, where some of the visual scenes that we have seen include guards stripping prisoners naked, putting bags over heads, putting them in chains, and having them engage in sexually degrading acts. And in both prisons the worst abuses came on the night shift. Our guards committed very little physical abuse. There was a prisoner riot on the second day, and the guards used physical abuse, and I, as both the superintendent of the prison as well as the principal investigator (my big mistake—you can't play both of those roles), I continually told them that they could not use physical abuse. But then they resorted entirely to psychological controls and psychological domination. There is an interesting comparison between police detectives who after being forced to give up brutal third degree abuses in getting confessions, switched to psychological tactics, and they were equally effective in obtaining confessions after interrogation, as my research in the Sixties documented.

Our guards would say things to the prisoners like, "You're Frankenstein. You're Mrs. Frankenstein. Walk like Frankenstein. Hug her. Tell her you love her." And then they would push them together.

We learned that in real prisons one of the things guards try to do is weaken the masculinity in dominance, because prisons are a threat to the guards' security. And so at Stanford the prisoners wore smocks with no underpants, like dresses. We did that purposely to feminize them. The guards would tell the prisoners that they should line up to play leapfrog. It's just a simple game, except when you leap over each prisoner your genitals smack each guy's head. Then they'd say, "You, bend over. You're female camels." And when they did their behinds were showing. And then they would tell others, "You're male camels. Line up behind them. Okay, hump them." This is a funny play on words, of course, but they had the prisoners simulating sodomy.

These are exact parallels between what happened in this basement at Stanford 30 years ago and at Abu Ghraib, where you see images of prisoners stripped naked, wearing hoods or masks as guards get them to simulate sodomy. The question is whether what we learned about the psychological mechanisms that transformed our good volunteers into these creatively evil guards can be used to understand the transformation of good American Army reservists into the people we see in these trophy photos in Abu Ghraib. And my answer is yes, there are very direct parallels.

One of the distressing things I have to think about is whether or not the results of my research, which I've written about extensively, have been incorporated by the Pentagon in its various programs. I hate to think that my research actually contributed to creating this evil, rather than simply helping to explain it. But the situation we have now is that the Army, the Pentagon, and the Administration are trying to disown any influence on the specific guards seen in those "trophy pictures." One of the many investigations (the Schlessinger Report) into these abuses explicitly states that the Stanford Prison Experiment should have served as a forewarning to those running Abu Ghraib Prison of the potential dangers of excesses by guards in such settings.

It is hard to comprehend what the soldiers were thinking when they took photos of themselves engaged in those abuses—"trophy photos." I call them "trophy photos" because the analog is to big game hunters displaying their victory over the beasts of the earth and sea. But a more potent parallel are the trophy photos from lynchings of Black men and women over decades. There's a remarkable book called No Sanctuary which shows that for a hundred years not only did Americans lynch blacks in the South and the Midwest, but they often took photos of their illegal lynchings, including photos of all those people who were involved. These were not only lynching photos, but brutal whippings, and they also burned blacks alive. In some of the pictures young children are photographed watching the spectacle. To make the horror worse, these images were put on postcards, and people would send them to one another, or would frame them and hang them in their living rooms. Talk about dehumanization! The concept of lynching or burning somebody alive is horrible enough, but then to take a picture, put yourself in it, and then send it to your mother to say, "I'm the third one on the left," is just evil.

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