Despite the public outrage surrounding the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, new research by psychology professor Susan Fiske on prisoner abuse found that the incident was not an isolated event. According to her review of more than 25,000 studies and 8 million participants, anyone is capable of these atrocities.
Fiske, along with graduate students Lasana Harris and Amy Caddy, said most people believe these soldiers "must have been terrible people" to commit abuse.
However, the situation and soldiers' superiors are partially responsible for the soldiers' actions.
In a military atmosphere where loyalty to troops and obedience to superiors is stressed, "people are capable of doing really terrible things because their supervisors order them to do it," Fiske said.
"Abuse [in the military] is condoned even if it is not directly ordered," she added.
The research project examined five areas — conformity to peers, obedience to authority, social context of aggression, step-by-step social influence and prejudice.
When focusing on conformity to peers, the study observed a tendency for individuals to go along with group decisions. Fiske said even those who think they are immune to peer influence "do it at least once or twice in a series of trials."
Fiske's findings in the obedience to authority portion of her research support Stanley Milgram's studies in the 1970s.
In these studies, participants punish others with electric shocks when ordered by the administrators of the experiment, from small doses up to what they believe are lethal levels.
These experiments illustrate that "if people are ordered to . . . they will really do quite dangerous things," Fiske said.
In studying the social context of aggression, Fiske examined the effect of a war environment on the abuse at Abu Ghraib.
"People are more likely to be aggressive when provoked," Fiske said, especially in situations where they are "uncomfortable, hot, disgruntled . . . and in a bad state of mind."
Fiske's research on step-by-step social influence illustrated the manner in which soldiers become desensitized, allowing a situation to escalate.
When this happens in a military situation, "one things leads to another" and abuse can occur, she said.
An essential element to incidents of abuse, according to the study, is prejudice. Soldiers had a "handy target," Fiske said.
Fiske said she believes the United States must try to prevent abuses from happening in the future by showing that "we take human rights seriously."
President Tilghman's support of diversity issues is a way in which people in power can communicate the values of the organization, she said.
It is still uncertain whether Congress or the Bush administration will respond to these findings, just published on Friday, Fiske said, but people have to be alerted to the potential risks of creating an atmosphere in which human rights violations are condoned, she added.
The newly nominated U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales — who will replace John Ashcroft if confirmed by the Senate — sent a memo to government officials urging them to oppose applying the Geneva Convention's rules governing the treatment of prisoners of war to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison, according to a Nov. 11 CNN article.
Gonzales said the war on terror "renders obsolete Geneva's strict limitations on questioning of enemy prisoners and renders quaint some of its provisions."
If the officials agree that the Geneva conventions are applicable, they could be held accountable for war crimes, Gonzales said.
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