by Jon Ronson
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind was, on publication, a runaway success. It was translated into twenty-six languages and gave Le Bon what he’d always wanted - a place at the heart of Parisian society, a place he immediately abused in a weird way. He hosted a series of lunches - Les Dejeuners de Gustave Le Bon - for politicians and prominent society people. He’d sit at the head of the table with a bell by his side. If one of his guests said something he disagreed with he’d pick up the bell and ring it relentlessly until the person stopped talking.
All over the world famous people began declaring themselves Le Bon fans. Like Mussolini: ‘I have read all the work of Gustave Le Bon and I don’t know how many times I have reread The Crowd. It is a capital work to which, to this day, I frequently refer.’ And Goebbels: ‘Goebbels thinks that no one since the Frenchman Le Bon has understood the mind of the masses as well as he,’ wrote Goebbels’ aide Rudolf Semmler in his wartime diary.
Given all of this, you’d think Le Bon’s work might have at some point stopped being influential. But it never did. I suppose one reason for his enduring success is that we tend to love nothing more than to declare other people insane. And there’s another explanation. One psychology experiment more than any other has kept his idea alive. It’s the one created in a basement at Stanford University in 1971 by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo.
*
Zimbardo was a working-class New York City boy, the son of Sicilian immigrants. After graduating from Brooklyn College in 1954 he taught psychology at Yale and NYU and Columbia before ending up at Stanford in 1971. Crowd theory - or ‘deindividuation’ as it was by then known - preoccupied Zimbardo so deeply that in 1969 he wrote a kind of prose poem to it: ‘The ageless life force, the cycle of nature, the blood ties, the tribe, the female principle, the irrational, the impulsive, the anonymous chorus, the vengeful furies.’
Now, at Stanford, with funding from the US Office of Naval Research, he set about trying to dramatically prove its existence.
He began by placing a small ad in the local paper: ‘Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks beginning August 14.’
After selecting twenty-four applicants, he turned the windowless basement of the psychology department into a mock prison, with ‘cells’ and a ‘solitary confinement room’ (a janitor’s closet). He split the students into two groups. Nine would be ‘prisoners’, nine ‘guards’, and the remaining six would be on call. He gave the guards batons and mirrored sunglasses so nobody could see their eyes. He designated himself the role of ‘superintendent’. The prisoners were stripped and put into smocks. Chains were placed on their feet. They were sent to their ‘cells’. And it began.
The experiment was abandoned six days later. It had - Zimbardo later explained to a US congressional hearing - spiralled violently out of control. Zimbardo’s fiancee Christina Maslach had visited the basement and was horrified by what she saw. The guards were strutting sadistically around, screaming at the prisoners to ‘fuck the floor’ and so on. The prisoners were lying in their cells yelling, ‘I’m burning up inside, dontcha know? I’m all fucked up inside!’
Maslach furiously confronted her fiance: ‘What are you doing to these boys? You’re a stranger to me. The power of the situation has transformed you from the person I thought I knew to this person I don’t know.’
At this, Zimbardo felt like he’d been slapped awake. She was right. The experiment had turned evil. ‘I have to end this,’ he said to her.
‘What we saw was frightening,’ Zimbardo told the congressional hearing two months later. ‘In less than a week human values were suspended and the ugliest, most base, pathological side of human nature surfaced. We were horrified because we saw boys treat other boys as if they were despicable animals, taking pleasure in cruelty.’
Zimbardo released a selection of clips from the footage he’d covertly filmed throughout the experiment. In them the guards were seen screaming at the prisoners: ‘What if I told you to get down on the floor and fuck the floor?’ and, ‘You’re smiling, [prisoner] 2093, you get down there and do ten push-ups’ and, ‘You’re Frankenstein. You’re Mrs Frankenstein. Walk like Frankenstein. Hug her. Tell her you love her.’ And so on. As a result, and to this day, Zimbardo’s basement has become for students of social psychology the incarnation of Le Bon’s crowd - a place of contagion where good people turned evil. As Zimbardo told the BBC in 2002, ‘We put good people in an evil place and we saw who won.’
But I couldn’t help thinking that the evil actions captured in Zimbardo’s covertly filmed footage looked a bit hammy. Plus whilst I knew only too well how a psyche can be mangled by sleep deprivation (I have raised a teething and colicky baby) and by being forced into a windowless room (I once spent an ill-advised week in an inside cabin on the Mediterranean cruise ship The Westerdam and I’m sure I too would too have repeatedly screamed ‘I’m all fucked up inside, dontcha know?’ were it not for my freedom to visit the Explorations Cafe and Vista Lounge whenever I liked), at no point, even on the worst nights, did I turn into someone from the Stanford Prison Experiment. What had really gone on in that basement?
*
Nowadays John Mark works as a medical coder for the health insurance company Kaiser Permanente. But for six days back in 1971 he was one of Zimbardo’s ‘guards’. Tracking down the participants hadn’t been an easy task - Zimbardo has never released all of their names - but John Mark has published letters about his memories of the experiment in the Stanford alumni magazine, which was how I discovered him.
‘What happens when you tell people you were a guard in the Stanford Prison Experiment?’ I asked him over the telephone.
‘Everyone assumes I was brutal,’ he replied. He sighed. ‘I hear it all the time. You turn on the TV and they’ll be talking about anything to do with brutality and they’ll drop in, “as was shown in the Stanford Prison Experiment …” They were studying it in my daughter’s high school. It really upsets me.’
‘Why?’ I asked.
‘It’s not true,’ he said. ‘My days as a guard were pretty boring. I just sat around. I was on the day shift. I woke the prisoners up, brought them their meals. The vast majority of the time was just hanging out.’ He paused. ‘If Zimbardo’s conclusion was the true conclusion, wouldn’t it have applied to all the guards?’
Then he said that if I looked closely at Zimbardo’s clips - he wished Zimbardo would release the full footage one day - I’d see that ‘the only guard who really seemed to lose his mind was Dave Eshelman’.
‘Dave Eshelman?’ I said.
He was right: when you picture the evil guards in Zimbardo’s basement you’re really picturing one man - Dave Eshelman. He was the man who yelled, ‘Fuck the floor!’ and ‘You’re Frankenstein!’ and so on. Social scientists have written papers analysing Eshelman’s every move in there, including the strange detail that the more brutally he behaved the more American South his accent sounded. I saw at least one analysis of the experiment where the author seemed to find it perfectly plausible that if a person was overcome by a violent madness he’d involuntarily start to sound like someone from Louisiana.
Nowadays Dave Eshelman runs a home loan company in Saratoga, California. I telephoned him to ask how it felt to personify the evil that lies within all of us.
‘I think I did a pretty damn good acting job,’ he replied.
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘This was not a simple case of taking an otherwise normal well-balanced rational human being, putting him in a bad situation, and suddenly he turns bad,’ he said. ‘I faked it.’
He explained. The first night was boring. Everyone was just sitting around. ‘I thought, “Someone is spending a lot of money to put this thing on and they’re not getting any results.” So I thought I’d get some action going.’
He had just seen the Paul Newman prison movie Cool Hand Luke, in which a sadistic Southern prison warden played by Strother Martin persecutes the
inmates. So Dave decided to channel him. His sudden Southern accent wasn’t some uncontrollable physical transformation like when Natalie Portman sprouts feathers in Black Swan. He was consciously channelling Strother Martin.
‘So you faked it to give Zimbardo a better study?’ I asked.
‘It was completely deliberate on my part,’ he replied. ‘I planned it. I mapped it out. I carried it through. It was all done for a purpose. I thought I was doing something good at the time.’
After I put the phone down I wondered if Dave had just told me a remarkable thing - something that might change the way the psychology of evil was taught. He might have just debunked the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. And so I sent a transcript of the interview to the crowd psychologists Steve Reicher and Alex Haslam. They’re professors of Social Psychology - Reicher at St Andrews University and Haslam at the University of Queensland. They’ve spent their careers studying Zimbardo’s work.
Both of them emailed me back sounding totally unimpressed at the part I’d thought potentially sensational. ‘The “only acting” line is a red herring,’ Haslam wrote, ‘because if you are on the receiving end of brutality it doesn’t matter if the person was acting or not.’
‘Acting is not “unserious”,’ Reicher added. ‘Even if we are performing, the question remains, “why did we act in a particular way?”’
But, they both wrote, the conversation with Dave Eshelman was indeed ‘fascinating and important’, as Reicher put it, but for a different reason to the one I’d thought. There was a smoking gun, but it was something I hadn’t noticed.
‘The really interesting line,’ Haslam wrote, ‘is I thought I was doing something good at the time. The phrase doing something good is quite critical.’
Doing something good. This was the opposite of Le Bon and Zimbardo’s conclusions. An evil environment hadn’t turned Dave evil. Those 100,000 people who piled in on Justine Sacco hadn’t been infected with evil. ‘The irony of those people who use contagion as an explanation,’ Steve Reicher emailed, ‘is that they saw the TV pictures of the London riots but they didn’t go out and riot themselves. It is never true that everyone helplessly joins in with others in a crowd. The riot police don’t join in with a rioting crowd. Contagion, it appears, is a problem for others.’
Then Reicher told me a story about the only time he ever went to a tennis match. ‘It was a “people’s day” at Wimbledon, and the hoi polloi were allowed into the show courts. So we were on No. 1 Court. Three sides were ordinary folk; on the fourth were the members. The game we were watching was fairly boring. So people in the crowd started a Mexican wave. It went round the three “popular” sides of the court and then the posh folk refused to rise. No contagion there! But the rest of the crowd waited just the time it would have taken for the wave to ripple through the fourth side. Time and again this happened, each time the mass - half-jocular - urging the members to rise. And eventually they did, in a rather embarrassed way. The ensuing cheer could be heard a long way away. Now on the surface, perhaps, one might talk of contagion. But actually there is a far more interesting story about the limits of influence coinciding with the boundaries between groups, about class and power … Something contagion hides rather than elucidates. Even the most violent crowds are never simply an inchoate explosion. There are always patterns, and those patterns always reflect wider belief systems. So the question we have to ask - which “contagion” can’t answer - is how come people can come together, often spontaneously, often without leadership, and act together in ideologically intelligible ways. If you can answer that, you get a long way towards understanding human sociality. That is why, instead of being an aberration, crowds are so important and so fascinating.’
*
Philip Zimbardo’s assistant emailed. ‘Unfortunately he is declining all further interview obligations until mid fall due to a full schedule.’ It was February. I asked her if maybe she could let me know if he was going to be involved in any deindividuation projects. She said she wouldn’t. ‘I receive many many many requests of this sort daily and simply cannot keep up with the requests to remember to be in touch with individuals.’ I told her I’d spoken to Dave Eshelman and asked if I could at least do a fact check with Dr Zimbardo. ‘He may be able to answer a few short questions in mid-May via email,’ she replied. And so in May I sent her Dave Eshelman’s quotes. ‘Doesn’t the phrase “doing something good” point to the opposite of Dr Zimbardo’s conclusions?’ I wrote. ‘Dave Eshelman hadn’t been infected by an evil environment. He was trying to be helpful.’
She forwarded my message on to Dr Zimbardo, writing: ‘Just send back to me! Or I fear he will continue corresponding with you directly!!’ (I was accidentally copied in on the exchange.) Zimbardo emailed me back later that evening. ‘Please suspend your naivete briefly,’ he wrote. ‘Eshelman has publicly said he decided to be “the most cruel, abusive guard imaginable” in videotaped interviews, that the prisoners were his “puppets”, that he decided to push them as far as he could until they rebelled. They never did and he never let up. In fact, his degrading abuses escalated every night … Trying to be helpful? He created the evil environment that crushed innocent students and prisoners!’
Was Zimbardo right - and I was being naive? Was Dave soft-soaping his brutality all these years later? I did more research and discovered that I wasn’t the first person to have found the Zimbardo experiment a bit contrived. The Boston College psychologist Peter Gray - author of the widely used teaching aid Psychology - published an essay in Psychology Today titled ‘Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in My Textbook’:
Twenty-one boys (OK, young men) [there were actually twenty-four] are asked to play a game of prisoners and guards. It’s 1971. There have recently been many news reports about prison riots and the brutality of guards. So, in this game, what are these young men supposed to do? Are they supposed to sit around talking pleasantly with one another about girlfriends, movies, and such? No, of course not. This is a study of prisoners and guards, so their job clearly is to act like prisoners and guards - or, more accurately, to act out their stereotyped views of what prisoners and guards do. Surely, Professor Zimbardo, who is right there watching them (as the Prison Superintendent) would be disappointed if, instead, they had just sat around chatting pleasantly and having tea. Much research has shown that participants in psychological experiments are highly motivated to do what they believe the researchers want them to do.
- Peter Gray, ‘Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in My Textbook’, Psychology Today, 19 October 2013
Gray felt Zimbardo’s critical error was awarding himself the role of superintendent, instead of being some remote observer. And he was no aloof superintendent. Before the experiment began he gave his guards a pep talk, as he later recounted in his own book The Lucifer Effect:
‘We cannot physically abuse or torture them,’ I said. ‘We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration. We can create fear in them, to some degree. We can create a notion of the arbitrariness that governs their lives, which are totally controlled by us, by the system, by you, me, [Warden] Jaffe. They’ll have no privacy at all, there will be constant surveillance - nothing they do will go unobserved. They will have no freedom of action. They will be able to do nothing and say nothing that we don’t permit. We’re going to take away their individuality in various ways. They’re going to be wearing uniforms, and at no time will anybody call them by name; they will have numbers and be called only by their numbers. In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none.’
- Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect, Random House 2008
For Gustave Le Bon a crowd was just a great ideology-free explosion of madness - a single blob of violent colour without variation. But that wasn’t Twitter. Twitter did not speak with one voice. Within Justine Sacco’s pile-on there had been misogynists: ‘Somebody (HIV+) must rape this bitch and we’ll see if her
skin colour protects her from AIDS‘. There had been humanitarians: ‘If @JustineSacco’s unfortunate words about AIDS bother you, join me in supporting @CARE’s work in Africa‘. There had been corporations promoting products, like the aeroplane Wi-Fi providers Gogo: ‘Next time you plan to tweet something stupid before you take off, make sure you are getting on a @Gogo flight! CC: @JustineSacco‘.
All these people had, just as Steve Reicher said, come together spontaneously, without leadership. I wasn’t one of them. But I’d piled in on plenty of people like Justine. I’d been beguiled by the new technology - a toddler crawling towards a gun. Just as with Dave Eshelman, it was the desire to do something good that had propelled me on. Which was definitely a better thing to be propelled on by than group madness. But my desire had taken a lot of scalps - I’d torn apart a LOT of people I couldn’t now remember - which made me suspect that it was coming from some very weird dark well, some place I really didn’t want to think about. Which was why I had to think about it.
6
DOING SOMETHING GOOD
‘I am a nobody,’ said Hank, ‘just a guy with a family and a job, a middle-America type guy.’
Hank wasn’t his real name. He’d managed to keep that aspect of himself a secret. He was talking to me via a Google Hangout from his kitchen in a suburban house in a West Coast American town I promised him I wouldn’t name. He looked frail, fidgety, the sort of man more comfortable working alone at a computer than talking to a human stranger via one.