The
Lucifer Effect by Zimbardo, 2007, Excerpts
One of the worst
things that we can do to our fellow human beings is deprive them of their
humanity, render them worthless by exercising the psychological process of
dehumanization. This occurs when the “others” are thought not to possess the
same feelings, thoughts, values, and purposes in life that we do. The most
extreme instance of this hostile imagination at work is of course when it leads
to genocide, the plan of one people to eliminate from existence all those who
are conceptualized as their enemy. War engenders cruelty and barbaric behavior
against anyone considered the Enemy, as the dehumanized, demonic Other.
Dehumanization is the
central construct in our understanding of “man’s inhumanity to man.”
Dehumanization occurs when whenever some human beings consider other human
beings to be excluded from the moral order of being a human person. The objects
of this psychological process lose their human status in the eyes of their
dehumanizers. Dehumanization is a central process in prejudice, racism, and
discrimination. Dehumanization stigmatizes others, attributing them a “spoiled
identity.”
The Stanford Prison Experiment
created an environment of dehumanization just as real prisons do. It started
with the loss of freedom and extended to the loss of privacy and finally to the
loss of personal identity. It separated inmates for their past, their
community, and their families and substituted for their moral reality a current
reality that forced them to live with other prisoners in an anonymous cell with
virtually no personal space. Tender, caring emotions were absent among both
guards and prisoners after only a few days. External, coercive rules and
arbitrary decisions by guards dictated their behavior. In our prison, as in all
prisons, emotions were suppressed, inhibited, and distorted.
The Nazi genocide of
the Jews began by first creating through propaganda films and posters a
national perception of these fellow human beings as inferior forms of animal
life, as vermin, as voracious rats. The many lynchings of black people by mobs
of white in cities throughout the United States were likewise not considered
crimes against humanity because of the stigmatization of them as only
“niggers.” Behind the My Lai massacre of hundreds of innocent Vietnamese civilians
by American soldiers was the dehumanizing “gooks” label the GIs had for all of
those different-looking Asian people. Yesterday’s “gooks” have become today’s
“hajjis” and “towel heads” in the Iraq War as a new corps of soldiers derogates
these different-looking citizens and soldiers.
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