Interview With Philip Zimbardo

With all this discussion about the influence of circumstances on our behavior, I thought I'd draw your attention to my interview with Philip Zimbardo (of Stanford Prison Experiment fame), which is in the latest issue of the The Believer.  By special permission from the good people over at McSweeney's, you can read the interview here.   Zimbardo talks at length about the prison experiment, its bearing on the abuses of Abu Ghraib, and the implications of situationism for moral responsibilty in general. 

A longer version (where we also delve into free will and control) is included in the collection of my interviews, entitled A Very Bad Wizard: Morality Behind the Curtain, due out later in the Fall.  The book includes interviews with Galen Strawson, Michael Ruse, Jon Haidt, Frans de Waal, Steve Stich, Josh Greene and Liane Young, Joe Henrich, William Ian Miller, and Zimbardo--all on stuff we love to talk about here at the Garden.   More shameless self-promotion to come when the book comes out!

Comments

[Tom Clark]

Tamler,

Congrats on your first book, love the title! May it sell millions.

I remember Zimbardo not agreeing with a point I raised at a talk he gave: that Cheney, Bush and the higher ups were bad apples for situational reasons too. Seems like he wanted to reserve some dispositional blame for the guys in charge, not surprising. The buck has to stop somewhere, right? No, it doesn't, and to think it does halts the investigation of causes. I look forward to reading the full interview on an actual printed page!

[Eddy Nahmias]

Hi Tom,
I like the analogy. Sure, ultimately, the buck doesn't stop anywhere (until maybe God or the Big Bang), but if we think that there's an important since of "buck" that is not so meaningless it cannot stop anywhere else, then it seems like the buck *slows down* in some places more than others ("buck" of course comes in degrees; it's not all-or-nothing). And it seems like it slows down much less than we might have thought in the Abu Ghraib guards, because of the situational influences on them and the limitations those influences placed on their cognitive capacities to act in accord with the moral demands on them. It's hard to know how much the buck should slow down through the higher ups, since we'd have to know how much they understood about the situation they were creating and should have known about the possible adverse effects.

[Tom Clark]

I like it: "The buck slows here." That is, I'm expected to take responsibility, and be held responsible for the project I'm heading up, including adverse effects that I should have been aware of. But, being a product of my situation, I'm not self-created, and there are factors I'm probably unaware of that feed into my performance. So if I screw up it would be wise to look at the total situation I'm in and am a product of, not just my own values and actions, that is, if you're interested in not having it happen again and not just placing blame. Note that this doesn't let me off the hook, but it does distribute causal responsibility to factors outside me.

When people ask rhetorically, "How could Cheney get away with that sh*t?" the answer lies in his situation, through which the buck also passes, usually invisibly.

Btw, thanks for your chapter on Autonomous Agency and Social Psychology, which seems to raise serious questions about the scope of autonomy if the experimental data bear any relation to real life.

[Tamler Sommers]

Tom, thanks for the kind words. I'm glad you like the title--you're in the minority with that one. (My wife hates it.)

Re: Zimbardo on Bush and Cheney's responsibility, I found that puzzling too. Especially since, as you'll see in the longer version, he explicitly calls free will an illusion. And the basis of his exoneration of the guards is that they lacked free will. I pressed him on this but he wouldn't budge. One possibility is that his anger at Bush et al gets the better of him--and he's definitely angry. The other is that (as we allude to briefly), he's seeing responsibility and punishment in something like expressivist terms. We punish and hold responsible in order to express to the world our condemnation of this behavior or the system that produces it. By not punishing and holding the higher-ups responsible, we send the message that it's OK to set up a system that results in these kinds of abuses.

Eddy, this seems like a classic case where desert is tied to our knowledge of the causal factors that led to the immoral behavior. We let the guards off the hook because we have a rough idea what led them to commit their actions. But we continue to think Bush et al deserve blame because we have no idea what factors cause presidents and vice presidents to construct their policies after an event like 9/11. That's what seems unfair about the compatibilist account for the differences in responsibility attribution. (Of course, in real life it's the guards who were the ones treated unfairly...)

[Kip]

Great interview, Tamler. I like how you get all Galen Strawson on Zimbardo, when you say that Bush and Cheney were products of the situation too. Great book title, too (although I don't catch the reference?).

[Tamler Sommers]

Thanks Kip. It's from the Wizard of Oz, right after Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal the machinery behind the wizard act. Dorothy says "You're a very bad man!" And Oz says: "No my dear. I'm a very good man. I'm just a very bad wizard."

[Kip]

Ha. I love it!

[Josh Shepherd]

Tamler,
Congrats on making it to aldaily.com (for those who don't know, a great site)! This was an interesting read.

[Tamler Sommers]

Thanks Josh! I'm a big fan of the site--I've always wanted to have something posted there.