The Nature of Role-playing: Abu Ghraib
by The incident at Abu Ghraib was a horrible ordeal which can be easily compared to the 1971 Zimbardo Prison Study. In comparing them, it is easy to conclude that any person has the capacity to commit such acts when put in certain societal roles.
Any ordinary person is capable of immoral acts against humanity if they are put in a role or position to do so. This does not mean that everyone will become a robot to this fact, but it does mean that everyone is susceptible to the roles placed on them by society. This point is proven by analyzing the Stanford Prison Study from 1971 and comparing it with the Abu Ghraib Incident of 2003. Both of these cases show ordinary people put into positions of power over vulnerable prisoners. And in both, most of the guards became violent and power-driven, regardless of how they we were before hand.
The actions taken at the Abu Ghraib prison are very well known and viewed with horror by our society, and rightfully so. It is unclear how any person could be capable of such acts against humanity. In this paper, I hope to discover the cause of the incident and shed light on a small aspect of human nature and society.
I began writing this paper with very little knowledge of the events taken at Abu Ghraib in 2003. I was hoping to justify what little I knew by saying that the soldiers involved in the torture of the Iraqis were acting out of pure revenge. It was logical for me to assume that since Americans have been tortured by the Iraqis, the soldiers wanted justice for their comrades. Having a strong military background in my family, and beginning my own future in the military, this was a natural assumption. This assumption is, however, out of the question for me now.
After viewing photos and doing research, my opinion has changed completely. There was an element in the acts that was almost too sadistic, even for revenge. One could possibly argue that there is a mental disorder plaguing these soldiers. However, that is highly unlikely to be affecting such a large group of different backgrounds. More likely is the fact that this is probably a social aspect of human nature. When a person is put into a role or given a task, they quickly fall into it and become what they think a person in that role would be like.
To explain this further, I will include links between the incident at Abu Ghraib and the famous Stanford Prison Experiment by Zimbardo. Zimbardo himself compared his own experiment to that of the acts taken place in 2003 at Abu Ghraib.
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