Phil Zimbardo writes an interesting article for the Chronicle of Higher Education on situational influences on behavior. He talks about the Stanford Prison experiment’s lessons for understanding abuse of power. If you’re a PCC student, you have free access to the Chronicle articles. Contact a PCC librarian for details.
If the goals of the criminal system are simply to blame and punish individual perpetrators — to get our pound of flesh — then focusing almost exclusively on the individual defendant makes sense. If, however, the goal is actually to reduce the behavior that we now call “criminal” (and its resultant suffering), and to assign punishments that correspond with culpability, then the criminal-justice system is obligated, much as I was in the Stanford prison experiment, to confront the situation and our role in creating and perpetuating it. It is clear to most reasonable observers that the social experiment of imprisoning society’s criminals for long terms is a failure on virtually all levels. By recognizing the situational determinants of behavior, we can move to a more productive public-health model of prevention and intervention, and away from the individualistic medical and religious “sin” model that has never worked since its inception during the Inquisition.
Technorati Tags: aggression, psychology, social psychology
