Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 November 2017
Beginning with Talal Asad's (2007) claim that torture is a hermeneutic, this article investigates the ongoing relationship between torture and the US university's primary ways of making meaning about racialized difference. The Stanford prison experiment is routinely referenced as a seminal study revealing why people engage in torture. Through a close reading of Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, the major account of the SPE, I raise concerns about how torture is used to enable moral development and to promote an understanding of difference as a “problem” to be managed by institutionalized diversity projects.
1 James Risen and Matt Apuzzo, “C.I.A., on Path to Torture, Chose Haste over Analysis,” New York Times, 15 Dec. 2014, available at www.nytimes.com/2014/12/16/us/politics/cia-on-path-to-torture-chose-haste-over-analysis-.html, accessed 1 Aug. 2016; James Risen, “American Psychological Association Bolstered C.I.A. Torture Program, Report Says,” New York Times, 30 April 2015, available at www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/report-says-american-psychological-association-collaborated-on-torture-justification.html, accessed 1 Aug. 2016; Stephen Soldz, Nathaniel Raymond, Steven Reisner, Scott A. Allen, Isaac L. Baker, and Allen S. Keller, “All the President's Psychologists: The American Psychological Association's Secret Complicity with the White House and US Intelligence Community in Support of the CIA's ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program,” New York Times, 30 April 2015, available at www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/01/us/document-report.html, accessed 28 July 2016.
2 David H. Hoffman, Danielle J. Carter, Cara R. Viglucci Lopez, Heather L. Benzmiller, Ava X. Guo, S. Yasir Latifi, and Daniel C. Craig, “Report to the Special Committee of the Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association: Independent Review Relating to APA Ethics Guidelines, National Security Interrogations, and Torture,” 2 July 2015, available at www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/09/us/document-report.html, accessed 1 Aug. 2016; James Risen, “Outside Psychologists Shielded U.S. Torture Program, Report Finds,” New York Times, 10 July 2015, available at www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us/psychologists-shielded-us-torture-program-report-finds.html, accessed 22 Jan. 2016.
3 For accounts of this longer history see Genter, Robert, “Understanding the POW Experience: Stress Research and the Implementation of the 1955 U.S. Armed Forces Code of Conduct,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 51, 2 (2015), 141–63CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; McCoy, Alfred W., A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2006)Google Scholar; Soldz, Stephen, “Healers or Interrogators: Psychology and the United States Torture Regime,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 18 (2008), 592–613CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Summers, Frank, “Making Sense of the APA: A History of the Relationship between Psychology and the Military,” Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 18 (2008), 614–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For responses to the Hoffman report and reporting on its implications for the APA see L. Morgan Banks, Debra L. Dunivin, Larry C. James, and Russ Newman, “Hoffman's Key Conclusion Demonstrably False: The Omission of Key Documents and Facts Distorts the Truth,” Oct. 2015, available at www.hoffmanreportapa.com/resources/RESPONSETODAVIDHOFFMAN1026.pdf, accessed 28 July 2016; James Risen, “Critic of Psychologists’ Role in Interrogation is Asked to Reconsider,” New York Times, 15 April 2016, available at www.nytimes.com/2016/04/16/us/psychologists-torture-hoffman-report-rebuttals.html, accessed 28 July 2016; Society for Military Psychology (APA Division 19) Presidential Task Force, “Response to the Hoffman Independent Review,” Nov. 2015, available at www.hoffmanreportapa.com/resources/TF19%20Response%20to%20the%20Hoffman%20Report.pdf, accessed 28 July 2016; Stephen Soldz and Steven Reisner, “Attacks on Hoffman Report from Military Psychologists Obfuscate Detainee Abuse: A Rebuttal to Banks et al. and APA's Division 19 Task Force,” Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, Jan. 2016, available at www.ethicalpsychology.org/materials/Rebuttal-to-Hoffman-Report-Critics.pdf, accessed 28 July 2016.
4 “APA's Council Bans Psychologist Participation in National Security Interrogations,” American Psychological Association, 9 June 2016, available at www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2015/08/psychologist-interrogations.aspx, accessed 28 July 2016.
5 “APA Moving Forward after the Independent Review,” American Psychological Association, available at www.apa.org/independent-review/moving-forward.aspx, accessed 26 Aug. 2016.
6 Pallitto, Robert M., “Torture and Historical Memory,” New Politics, 13, 3 (2011), 66–71Google Scholar, 66.
7 For discussions of how psychology's disciplinary organization and intellectual commitments are fundamentally intertwined with war efforts, beginning with World War II, see Genter; Summers.
8 For examples and commentary see Banks et al.; Risen, “Critic of Psychologists’ Role”; Society for Military Psychology (APA Division 19) Presidential Task Force; Soldz and Reisner.
9 Dayan, Colin, The Story of Cruel and Unusual (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Luban, David, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,” Virginia Law Review, 91, 6 (2005), 1425–61Google Scholar. Dayan examines Supreme Court cases to establish the longer history of how people designated slaves and criminals have been divested of legal protection from violence, while Luban looks more closely at post-9/11 efforts by the executive branch of the government to devise legal justifications for torture.
10 Dayan, 67–71.
11 Pallitto, Robert M., Torture and State Violence in the United States: A Short Documentary History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 255Google Scholar.
12 Asad, Talal, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 31Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., 30.
14 Ibid., 22–26, 31–38.
15 Ibid., 36.
16 Ibid., 31–32.
17 Ibid., 32.
18 Ibid., 32.
19 For important analyses of torture using the frameworks of biopolitics and necropolitics see Ahuja, Neel, “Abu Zubaydah and the Caterpillar,” Social Text, 29, 1 (2011), 127–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jackson, Jessi Lee, “Sexual Necropolitics and Prison Rape Elimination,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 39, 1 (2013), 197–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics,” trans. Meintjes, Libby, Public Culture, 15, 1 (2003), 11–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Puar, Jasbir, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
20 Ferguson, Roderick A., The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
21 Melamed, Jodi, Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
22 Reddy, Chandan, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 Zimbardo, Philip, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York: Random House, 2007), xii–xiiiGoogle Scholar, 6–7, 210–11.
24 Ibid., 91. Zimbardo notes here that the Office of Naval Research, under the Department of Defense, funded the SPE.
25 Stephen Bottoms notes that the results of the SPE were never published in a peer-reviewed outlet, and yet “the experiment's findings have been treated, not least by Zimbardo himself, as demonstrating ‘timeless’ scientific truths.” See Bottoms, Stephen, “Timeless Cruelty: Performing the Stanford Prison Experiment,” Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 19, 3 (2014), 162–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 163. The positivity with which The Lucifer Effect has been received, and Zimbardo's importance to the fields of social and political psychology even in the face of critical reviews of the SPE, are evidenced in several reviews of the book. See Krueger, Joachim I., “Lucifer's Last Laugh: The Devil Is in the Details,” American Journal of Psychology, 121, 2 (2008), 335–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose McDermott, review of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Zimbardo, Philip, Political Psychology, 28, 5 (2007), 644–46Google Scholar; Smith, M. Brewster, “The Sociogenesis of Evil,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 13, 4 (2007), 463–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 There was significant controversy over the findings of the APA's task force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) in 2005, which supported psychologists’ involvement as consultants at interrogations; later, in 2007, the APA passed a resolution banning participation in some types of interrogation, but not all. Soldz, “Healers or Interrogators,” 600–5.
27 McCoy, A Question of Torture.
28 Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual; Luban, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb.”
29 As Luban, 1440–52, carefully details, this scenario is a fantastical one, its function to align torture with morality rather than to prepare for an actual possible event.
30 Ibid., 1444.
31 Dayan, 53, 91.
32 Ibid., 13, 39.
33 I will speak more directly in the following sections to the particular role of sexual violence in the torture scenarios covered by The Lucifer Effect. For now, I raise this issue in part to acknowledge an important point made by one of the anonymous reviewers of this article: that rampant sexual assault on US university campuses, and the failure of universities to take significant action against it, needs to be understood as related to academic support for state-sponsored torture.
34 Davis, Angela Y., Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005), 60Google Scholar.
35 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 5, emphasis in original.
36 Ibid., 18.
37 Ibid., 211.
38 Ibid., 229.
39 Ibid., 32.
40 Ibid., 206.
41 Ibid., 5, emphasis added.
42 Ibid., 55.
43 Ibid., 33.
44 Ibid., 23–27.
45 Ibid., 26.
46 Ibid., 23–24.
47 Ibid., 152–53.
48 Ibid., 224.
49 Heiner, Brady Thomas, “Foucault and the Black Panthers,” City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 11, 3 (2007), 313–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 319, 331–32.
50 Zimbardo, 224. Zimbardo does not elaborate on the horrific treatment of the imprisoned in these or other instances, much less connect that treatment to a longer history of racialized torture as a main feature of US carcerality. For such accounts see Davis, Abolition Democracy; Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual; Pinar, William F., “Cultures of Torture,” in James, Joy, ed., Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 290–304CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dylan Rodríguez, “Forced Passages,” in ibid., 35–57.
51 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 59.
52 Ibid., 90.
53 Ibid., 63.
54 Ibid., 68.
55 Ibid., 145.
56 Ibid., 141, emphasis in original.
57 Genter, “Understanding the POW Experience”; McCoy, A Question of Torture, 25; Summers, “Making Sense of the APA.”
58 McCoy, 26–28; Zimbardo, 91.
59 Heiner, Brady Thomas, “The American Archipelago: The Global Circuit of Carcerality and Torture,” in Backhaus, Gary and Murungi, John, eds., Colonial and Global Interfacing: Imperial Hegemonies and Democratizing Resistances (Oxford and New York: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 84–117Google Scholar; McCoy; Soldz, “Healers or Interrogators”; Summers.
60 Soldz, 596; Summers, 630.
61 Danner, Mark, Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror (New York: New York Review Books, 2004), 17Google Scholar.
62 Cited in McCoy, 51.
63 Ibid., 134–35.
64 Ibid., 8. The use of such behavioral research and techniques by the CIA across the so-called Third World, including the training of local police and military forces in such techniques, is relevant here. Ibid, 50.
65 Haslam, S. Alexander and Reicher, Stephen D., “Contesting the ‘Nature’ of Conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo's Studies Really Show,” PLOS Biology, 10, 11 (2012), 1–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1; Soldz, 594; Summers, 623.
66 Zimbardo, 21.
67 Ibid., 242–43.
68 Philip Zimbardo, “Philip G. Zimbardo on his Career and the Stanford Prison Experiment's 40th Anniversary,” interview with Drury, Scott, Hutchens, Scott A., Shuttlesworth, Duane E., and White, Carol L., History of Psychology, 15, 1 (2012), 161–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 168.
69 Zimbardo credits the SPE with the origin of his interest in shyness as a treatable condition, and indeed he is also known for his work in shyness, including his co-directorship of the Shyness Institute. See Philip Zimbardo, “Philip G. Zimbardo,” Social Psychology Network, 2013, available at zimbardo.socialpsychology.org, accessed 11 July 2016. For a critical account of the classification of shyness as a disorder see Lane, Christopher, Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
70 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 21.
71 Pinar, “Cultures of Torture,” 290–300.
72 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 172, emphasis added.
73 Ibid., 324, emphasis added.
74 Ibid., 324, emphasis added.
75 Ibid., 195, emphasis added.
76 Davis, Angela Y., “From the Convict Lease System to the Super-Max Prison,” in James, Joy, ed., States of Confinement: Policing, Detention, and Prisons (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), 60–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 63.
77 Jackson, “Sexual Necropolitics,” 203.
78 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 334.
79 Ibid., 305.
80 Ibid., 344.
81 Ibid., 338.
82 Ibid., 338.
83 Ibid., 351, emphasis added.
84 Ibid., 344, emphasis in original.
85 Ibid., 237, emphasis added.
86 Ibid., 310.
87 Ibid., 378.
88 John Eligon, “Advisers on Interrogation Face Legal Action by Critics,” New York Times, 28 April 2011, A21; Soldz, “Healers or Interrogators,” 598–99.
89 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 252–54.
90 Ibid., 238.
91 Ibid., 239.
92 Ibid., 239–52.
93 Ibid., 252.
94 McCoy, A Question of Torture, 32–33.
95 Ibid., 50–59.
96 Soldz, 604.
97 See Summers, “Making Sense of the APA,” 622, for an account of government agencies “channeling the money through private foundations … and academic organizations” to fund research into torture.
98 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 328.
99 Ibid., 20.
100 Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 13.
101 Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual, 39.
102 McClintock, Anne, “Paranoid Empire: Specters from Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 28 (March 2009), 50–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 59.
103 James Risen, “Pentagon Wants Psychologists to End Ban on Interrogation Role,” New York Times, 24 Jan. 2016, available at www.nytimes.com/2016/01/25/us/politics/pentagon-wants-psychologists-to-end-ban-on-interrogation-role.html, accessed 1 Aug. 2016.
104 Reddy, Freedom with Violence, 39.
105 Asad, On Suicide Bombing, 19–22.
106 Reddy, 12.
107 Asad, 4.
108 Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” The Atlantic, Sept. 2015, available at www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356, accessed 28 July 2016.
109 Evan Osnos, “Making a Killing: The Business and Politics of Selling Guns,” New Yorker, 27 June 2016, 36–45.
110 Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, 452.
111 Tamsin Shaw, “The Psychologists Take Power,” New York Review of Books, 25 Feb. 2016, available at www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/02/25/the-psychologists-take-power, accessed 2 Sept. 2016. In her brave review of several books on moral and social psychology, Shaw draws these crucial connections. Describing the work of Martin Seligman, a key figure in positive psychology, Shaw notes the following: “In the 1960s, Seligman devised a theory of ‘learned helplessness.’ … Seligman and other researchers applied the theory to depression, but also to social problems such as ‘demoralized women on welfare,’ ‘helpless cognitions’ on the part of Asian-Americans, and ‘defeatism’ among black Americans. In developing Positive Psychology one of Seligman's core goals has been ‘to end victimology,’ which, he claims, pervades the social sciences and requires us to ‘view people as the victims of their environment.’ After September 11, 2001, he came to see the cultivation of positive strengths and virtues as an urgent task for America, shoring up its people and institutions by increasing their resilience.”
112 Danner, Mark and Eakin, Hugh, “The CIA: The Devastating Indictment,” New York Review of Books, 62, 2 (2015), 31–32Google Scholar, 32.
113 Ibid., 32.
114 Davis, Abolition Democracy, 78.
115 Reddy, Freedom with Violence, 47.
116 Ibid., 47.
