If anyone finds copies elsehwere, let us know!

Haslam and Reicher use a different explanation – social identity theory. They argue that the degree to which we obey someone depends on the extent to which we identify with them. The more you identify, the more you obey. They use this to explain Zimbardo’s experiment and also the obedience of guards in the Second World War. They may have been ordinary people (as Hannah Arendt proposed) but the reason for obedience was less to do with an agentic shift and more because they identified with the Nazi movement and believed it to be right.

The importance of this interpretation is that it may lead us to understand obedience to unjust authority better, in terms of identification rather than lack of autonomy.

Professor Zimbardo was recently interviewed by The Independent outlining the parallels between his Stanford Prison study and incidents at Abu Ghraib. In the article (and his book The Lucifer Effect) Zimbardo provides interesting insights into the original study and the effect it has had on his life. “[Stanford] was a little week-long study,” he says, “but it has affected my whole life.” His thoughts are not all doom and gloom about human nature; where there are villains there are also heroes and his current interest lies in bringing out the good in all of us. Even Lucifer had the potential to be good as he was a fallen angel.