Lessons Ignored

The world was stunned with the pictures released from Abu Ghraib, a prison in Iraq, revealing images of American soldiers harassing and torturing the detainees. It is said that 90% of the detainees there are innocent and that what the world has seen was only the minority of the army. However, the question was “how did this happen?”. How could the American soldiers, a group of valiant men and women who carried the promises of freedom to Iraq behaved in such ways?
Psychologists have conducted experiments that proved the causes of these scandals. They conclude that it is social context and surrounding people that brought about these behaviors. In an experiment by Phillip Zimbardo, a group of students were assigned into two groups, one act as the prisoners and another act as the guards. The experiment was intended to last two weeks, yet it was called off after six days when the subjects went too deep into their roles began to behave violently.
Another experiment by Milgrim also contributed to the fact that we all have the capability of doing evil deeds. Milgrim asked a subject to be the teacher for his experiment on memory, and for each time the subject received a wrong answer from the students, the subject will have to switch on electric current the runs from mild to severe to the student. This experiment was a fake, actually the student worked with Milgrim and did not receive any current; Milgrim was trying to find out how many people would switch on fatal current into a stranger. It turned out that two-thirds of the subjects went over 350 volts. From this he concluded that a subject is blindly obeying the order of the experimenter, showing no empathy for others.
What we have ignored is the fact that we all are capable of doing wrong things, and that our society is an important factor that influence our behavior.