Abu Ghraib and the Stanford Prison Experiment Parallels

Upon watching Standard Operating Procedure it seemed to me as if Abu Ghraib was a real life example of both the Stanford Prison experiment and the Milgram experiment. Both experiments ultimately studied the effects of authority their results closely matched the events that occurred in Abu Ghraib. Both Abu Ghraib and the Stanford experiment took place in a prison setting where there were prisoners and officers with little to no presence of higher ups regulation. In both cases the officers succumbed to the power they had and in the simplest way of putting it, abused it. Similar to the officers in the Stanford Experiment the personalities of the officers at Abu Ghraib were most likely affected by situational attribution. In this case the situation the offers were in had a major impact on the way they acted and not necessarily their true inner selves. A lot of the actions of the Abu Ghraib officers could be explained by cognitive dissonance, which was another point brought up by the Stanford experiment. The uncomfortable situations that many of the officers might have faced caused them to shift their thinking process and accept that what they were doing was acceptable. This plays in line with the idea of the power of authority as lower ranking officers might have originally been uncomfortable with the tortures but after time they might have created a tolerance and forced them to believe that what they were doing was okay.

This website draws further parallelism between the Abu Ghraib events and the Stanford and Milgram experiments:

http://maletomalefeeling.com/abughraib.html