Trump’s “Stanford” experiment
The MAGA faithful, at long last, have not seen the light. That Road to Talledega moment, that flash of insight when the scales fall from their eyes and their political savior is revealed a bronzer-caked madman bent on the destruction of the red, white and blue nation they hold so dear? Never happened.
What has happened since Donald Trump’s Veterans Day “vermin” speech is that the mainstream press and others have finally stopped giving him the benefit of the doubt.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Donald Trump is a fascist,” late-night host Stephen Colbert told his audience. Former Republican Tom Nichols declared Trump had “crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism.” Even the New York Times this week broached the subject.
But the answer to why the faithful have not wavered might be found in Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment and its aftermath. Zimbardo famously set up a mock prison in Stanford University’s psychology department. He recruited students to play the roles of prisoners and prison guards for a study in human dynamics.
The New Yorker recently summarized:
According to the lore that’s grown up around the experiment, the guards, with little to no instruction, began humiliating and psychologically abusing the prisoners within twenty-four hours of the study’s start. The prisoners, in turn, became submissive and depersonalized, taking the abuse and saying little in protest. The behavior of all involved was so extreme that the experiment, which was meant to last two weeks, was terminated after six days.
Less than a decade earlier, the Milgram obedience study had shown that ordinary people, if encouraged by an authority figure, were willing to shock their fellow-citizens with what they believed to be painful and potentially lethal levels of electricity. To many, the Stanford experiment underscored those findings, revealing the ease with which regular people, if given too much power, could transform into ruthless oppressors. Today, more than forty-five years later, many look to the study to make sense of events like the behavior of the guards at Abu Ghraib and America’s epidemic of police brutality. The Stanford Prison Experiment is cited as evidence of the atavistic impulses that lurk within us all; it’s said to show that, with a little nudge, we could all become tyrants.
But not so fast. The study was controversial and drew critics. Among them, Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland. They speculated that perhaps Zimbardo’s recuitment ad influenced who volunteered to participate in “a psychological study of prison life.”
In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.
There was more nuance, of course, but subsequent studies and papers never quite dispelled the urban legends.
One of the few, true talents Trump possesses is for self-promotion. The faux-business genius/reality TV star’s rise to power in this country has been one long advertisement for “aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance.” We see in those who have volunteered to join him a group that seems self-selected for lower scores on empathy and altruism.
What Trump promises to create in his second term is a nationwide experiment in which “regular people” will be invited to play guards at expanded detention camps for undesirables. His plans to centralize more power in the presidency, to bring more federal agencies under direct presidential control, and to prosecute his enemies and rivals is an intentional, months-long advertisement for the type of people Zimbardo’s experiment attracted by accident of wording.
Trump is recruiting Americans predisposed to stare long into the abyss.