by Alex Boese
More curious than the man in the bag, though, was the reaction of people to him. Initially the other students tried to ignore him. However, that proved impossible. Although he did nothing to impose himself on others—he barely even spoke—his mere presence dominated the room and seemed to antagonize people. One student threw punches at him. Another tried to pin a KICK ME sign to his back. When the Black Bag responded by sitting next to that student and staring at him, the student poked the Black Bag with his umbrella and screamed, “Get away from me!”
The media picked up on the story of the Black Bag, and reporters soon were descending on the classroom in droves, at one point outnumbering the students. The reaction of the American public resembled that of the students. It was a mixture of curiosity and anger. People wrote letters demanding Goetzinger be fired for allowing such a charade. One alumnus declared that OSU had degenerated to the level of UC Berkeley.
Why did the Black Bag inspire such anger? Professor Goetzinger had one theory: “We always have a frame of reference for events. Then in walks a black bag with a human inside it. Nowhere in our frame of reference has there been such a thing. So we resent.”
An experiment conducted a year later on the other side of the country offers another clue.
Philip Zimbardo, a professor at New York University, was researching the concept of deindividuation. According to this theory, our sense of social responsibility is strongly tied to our feelings of individuality. In situations where we lose our sense of being a unique, identifiable person—for instance, if we blend into a crowd or make ourselves anonymous by putting a bag over our head—we suddenly feel freer to engage in behavior considered antisocial or taboo. Members of the Ku Klux Klan, for instance, both rampage around in mobs and conceal their identities with hoods.
Zimbardo demonstrated the phenomenon by asking two groups of college coeds to electroshock an innocent victim after they had listened to a tape-recorded interview with her. He made the first group feel anonymous by placing large bags (flower-patterned pillowcases) over the participants’ heads—making them look, oddly enough, like Klan members. He addressed them by number (never by name), sat them in darkened cubicles, and told them he would not know which one of them was pressing the shock button because all their buttons led to a common terminal (which was a lie). With the second group, he emphasized the subjects’ identities. He addressed each one by name and gave them large name tags to wear instead of bags.
The bag-wearing coeds held down the shock button far longer than the non-bag-wearing group. In fact, they often jammed down the button for as long as they could, despite the screams and cries of the victim—who was acting and never got shocked. “These sweet, normally mild-mannered college girls,” Zimbardo observed, “shocked another girl on almost every one of the twenty trials on which they had an opportunity to do so, sometimes for as long as they were allowed, and it did not matter whether or not that fellow student was a nice girl who didn’t deserve to be hurt.” Wearing a bag—even a flower-patterned one—had unleashed their most violent, antisocial impulses.
But while the bag-wearing subjects of Zimbardo’s experiment were the ones being aggressive toward another person, at OSU it was the guy in the bag who was suffering abuse. How do we account for this difference?
Zimbardo suggests that the phenomenon of deindividuation works in both ways. Anonymity loosens the restraints on aggressive behavior in situations that permit such behavior, but when victims are anonymous, and therefore dehumanized, it similarly grows easier to commit violence against them. Zimbardo notes numerous reports of children at Disneyland striking hapless costumed characters for no apparent reason.
The idea that we are aggressive toward those with whom we share no comparable identity might also explain what happened as the academic quarter at OSU neared its end. The students warmed up to the Black Bag. They went from bullying him to becoming his strongest supporters, vigorously defending his right to wear a bag. Evidently, in their eyes, he had acquired a recognizable, albeit eccentric, identity. And though he may have been a bag, he was their bag. One of them even declared, “If my mother tried to take that bag off him, I’d beat the hell out of her.”
When the quarter ended, the Black Bag slipped back into the shadows without revealing his identity. To this day who he was is unknown. So why did he wear the bag? One theory is that it was a stunt inspired by a cryptic remark once made by Anthony Cox, the second husband of Yoko Ono. He had said, “The world would be better off if everyone wore a large, black, cloth bag.” Another theory is that Goetzinger put the Black Bag up to it as an informal experiment in persuasion—which was, after all, the theme of the class. One OSU faculty member, convinced this was the case, openly criticized Goetzinger for not including proper sociological controls in his study. However, if this was an experiment in persuasion, it’s not clear what the Black Bag was trying to persuade anyone of. That, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, remains, like the Black Bag himself, a riddle inside an enigma wrapped in a mystery covered by a black cotton sack.
Zimbardo, P. G. (1969). “The Human Choice: Individuation, Reason, and Order Versus Deindividuation, Impulse, and Chaos.” In Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (vol. 17), eds. W. D. Arnold & D. Levine. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Behind the Wheel
The light turns green. Your foot hovers over the accelerator, but the car in front of you hasn’t moved. A few seconds pass and you think, “What is this idiot doing? Why do they let people like this on the road?” A few more seconds go by, and your hand reaches for the horn. “Come on, buddy! I haven’t got all day.” You start shouting, even though no one can hear you. “Move it!” The anger flows through you, out of your hand, and into the horn. The blaring honk becomes your scream of rage, the sonic weapon with which you assault the driver blocking your path. You allow it to blast on and on. Inside the other car, the driver looks at his watch and chuckles.
If you’ve ever been stuck behind an unmoving car at a green light, you know the feeling. You can’t help but suspect the driver of the stationary car is sitting there on purpose, just to annoy you. As it turns out, you might be right.
Sitting at green lights until people start honking is a favorite experimental technique of anger researchers. When anger experiments are performed in a lab, it’s difficult to guarantee subjects will act naturally. They know they’re being observed, so they’re on their best behavior. But in the naturalistic setting of a traffic intersection, people don’t expect a scientist to be watching them. Researchers can study their unguarded reactions, investigating exactly which variables promote an anger response and which inhibit it. This setting also allows researchers a speedy getaway, in case subjects become a little too mad.
Anthony Doob and Alan Gross conducted the first such traffic-intersection experiment in 1968. Drivers in Palo Alto and Menlo Park were their unlucky, unwitting subjects. Doob and Gross wanted to know whether signs of wealth and high status would inhibit displays of aggression. So they drove around, pausing for an obnoxious length of time at green lights, in two separate cars—a black 1966 Chrysler Crown Imperial hardtop, recently washed and polished, and a decrepit gray 1961 Rambler sedan. They recorded which car got honked at more often.
The Rambler won the honk contest, hands down. Eighty-four percent of drivers stuck behind it honked within twelve seconds. This compared to a honk rate of only 50 percent from cars behind the Chrysler. In fact, two impatient drivers never even bothered to honk at the Rambler—they nudged it with their bumpers instead. On the occasions this occurred, the researchers decided waiting around for a honk wasn’t wise. They immediately implemented the speedy getaway option.
Since Doob and Gross’s study, numerous researchers have performed variations of the honking study. For instance, a 1971 study by Kay Deaux revealed that both genders honk at women drivers more often, apparently because “common stereotypes regarding ‘damn women drivers’ suggest that honking at a female driver is more acceptable than honking
at a male driver.” A 1975 University of Utah study discovered that displaying a hostile symbol such as a rifle in a gun rack or a vengeance bumper sticker increases the likelihood people will honk at you.
In one particularly memorable study, conducted in 1976, researcher Robert Baron arranged for a male accomplice to stop at a red light. When a car pulled up behind him, and with the light still red, a female accomplice walked across the street in between the two cars. She did so either dressed conservatively in blue jeans and a blouse, limping on crutches, wearing a clown mask, or attired in a sexy, revealing outfit. After she crossed the street, the light turned green, and the accomplice in the car waited fifteen seconds before moving. Baron found that when the female accomplice had just walked by on crutches, wearing a clown mask, or dressed provocatively, people in the second car honked significantly less often than when she had passed by in conservative clothes or when she didn’t cross the street at all. These results, he suggested, indicate that empathy, humor, and mild sexual arousal may inhibit aggression.
While contributing to this field of research may be tempting—especially given the simplicity of the procedural design—this is one experiment that should definitely be left to the professionals. The last thing our roads need are scores of amateur researchers blocking intersections in the name of science. There are enough bad drivers as it is.
Doob, A. N., & A. E. Gross (1968). “Status of Frustrator as an Inhibitor of Horn-Honking Responses.” Journal of Social Psychology 76: 213–18.
The Stanford Prison Experiment
“Prisoner 8612, against the wall!” The prisoner ignores the guard. His mind is reeling. It feels like everything is pressing in on him, as though he is going mad.
“Against the wall!” the guard shouts again. “Come on, somebody get him back in line.”
Suddenly 8612 wheels to face the guard. “Listen, if I have to be in here, I’m not going to put up with this shit. I mean, really!” The prisoner turns and grips one of his fellow prisoners by the arm. “I couldn’t even get out,” he hisses. There’s a desperate edge to his voice. “They wouldn’t let me out. You can’t get out of here.”
The other prisoners laugh nervously, but you can see it in their eyes—the sudden flash of panic. He couldn’t get out? That means that this is real, that this is an actual prison. And they’re stuck inside.
It had started out like a game. They had volunteered to spend two weeks in a fake jail in the basement of the Stanford psychology department, dressed up as prisoners and guards. It would be fun. Or, at least, something different to do during the summer. The idea seemed harmless. How bad could it be?
The mock prison was the idea of Philip Zimbardo—the same Zimbardo we just met who dressed New York University coeds in flower-patterned bags. By now it was 1971, and he was teaching at Stanford, but he was still interested in situations that make good people turn bad, and his thoughts had turned to prisons. What makes prisons such violent places? he wondered. Was the character of the prisoners and guards to blame? Or was it the power structure of the prison itself that brought out the worst in people? Was it a case of bad apples, or a bad barrel?
To find out, he decided to create a fake prison. He would recruit twenty-four healthy young men—who were good, honest citizens with no criminal records, and who, based on their personality test scores, fell into the normal range on every trait—and randomly assign half of them to be guards in his mock prison and the other half to be prisoners. He would then step back for two weeks and see what happened.
If bad people are the cause of bad prisons, then his prison filled with good people should experience two uneventful weeks. But if the structure of prison life is responsible for making the inhabitants of prisons go bad, then things would go very differently.
The experiment began on Saturday, August 14, 1971. With sirens wailing, squad cars swept through Palo Alto picking up the prisoners. “Come quietly, son,” the officers said, as they led the bewildered young men to the squad cars in full view of concerned neighbors. Am I being arrested? the volunteers wondered. They had been told nothing about real police picking them up. Only when they were deposited at the Stanford psychology department did they know, Yes, this was part of the experiment. Zimbardo dreamed up the police pickup as a way to thrust the prisoners right into their new roles. The police had gone along as a conciliatory gesture toward Stanford’s administration, with whom tensions had recently run high following violent anti–Vietnam War demonstrations.
The prison was a bunch of offices with bars fitted onto the doors. A broom closet served as solitary confinement. The guards, wearing khaki uniforms and reflective sunglasses, met the prisoners. “From now on you are a number,” they told them. “You will address each of us as ‘Mr. Correctional Officer.’ Do you understand?”
The prisoners stripped and were sprayed with deodorant, as if being deloused. Then they were given smocks, stocking caps, and ankle chains to wear. The smocks (worn without underwear) humiliated them by forcing them to walk awkwardly to keep themselves covered. The caps simulated having their heads shaved, and the ankle chains were to remind them of their loss of freedom.
The first day was a lot like being at camp. The guards were unsure how to behave. They had received only minimal instructions—no physical violence, and don’t let the prisoners escape. The prisoners seemed more at ease, swapping jokes with one another as they lined up for roll call.
But before long the guards warmed up to their roles. At two a.m. they forced the prisoners out of bed for a count in “the yard” (which was really the hallway outside the offices). “Get out of bed! On the double!” they screamed. “Up against the wall!” Bleary-eyed, the prisoners complied.
The next morning the prisoners retaliated. They staged a rebellion, shoving their beds up against their cell doors and screaming taunts at the guards: “This isn’t a prison. This is a fucking simulation!”
Embarrassed by the sudden loss of control, the guards cracked down hard. They blasted the prisoners with fire extinguishers, called in the off-duty guards as reinforcements, and forced their way into the cells. From that moment on, summer camp was over. The guards stripped the prisoners naked, herded them into the yard, and made them do jumping jacks, sit-ups, and push-ups. They threw the ringleader of the rebellion, prisoner 8612, into solitary to let him dwell on his misbehavior.
To prevent future rebellions, the guards sharply curtailed the few liberties the prisoners had. They implemented random strip searches and revoked bathroom privileges, making the prisoners pee in a bucket. Soon the stench of urine crept through the cells. The guards also introduced psychological tactics meant to create divisions among the prisoners. They branded those who resisted their authority as troublemakers and blamed them for making conditions worse for the others; meanwhile, they created a ‘privilege cell’ for good prisoners.
It all proved too much for prisoner 8612. He began complaining of stomach pains and headaches. He approached the researchers, pleading to be let out. But they were unsympathetic. Zimbardo tried to cut him a deal—no more abuse from the guards in return for sharing information about the other prisoners. Dazed and confused, prisoner 8612 stumbled back to his cell, and it was then he told the other prisoners that he couldn’t get out, that this was a real prison.
Later that night, 8612 became unmanageable. He started screaming, “I feel so fucked-up. Jesus Christ, I’m burning up inside. Don’t you know? I want out!” Grudgingly, Zimbardo agreed to release him. After a mere thirty-six hours, the experiment had lost its first prisoner.
Fast-forward to Friday afternoon, the sixth day of the experiment. Christina Maslach stopped by the prison at the request of Zimbardo. She had recently completed her doctorate at Stanford and was romantically involved with Zimbardo. The two would later marry. Maslach had agreed to interview some of the participants and record their thoughts and feelings at this stage of the experiment.
When she arrived, the prison was quiet. The guards were relaxing and the pri
soners were in their cells. She met up with Zimbardo, who excitedly related the events of the previous week. “The psychology of it is fascinating,” he enthused.
Since the release of 8612, the guards, intoxicated by the sense of power, had steadily escalated their harassment of the prisoners. While refraining from physical violence, they had freely used verbal abuse, humiliation, sleep deprivation, and withholding of basic necessities such as food and blankets. As though aware that what they were doing was wrong, the guards had attempted to conceal their behavior. They made the prisoners write letters home saying, “No need to visit. It’s seventh heaven.” They also saved their worst abuses for the night shift, when they thought the researchers weren’t observing.
The prisoners, meanwhile, had grown more passive, as though broken by the system. Four more of them had followed 8612’s lead and started acting crazy, forcing the researchers to release them. One had even broken out in a full-body stress-related rash.
Zimbardo encouraged Maslach to observe “the count,” which was just then beginning in the yard. She watched in horror as the meanest of the guards, a blond eighteen-year-old nicknamed John Wayne, strode back and forth, pounding his billy stick into his hand, screaming abuse at the prisoners. Later she witnessed a bathroom run. Hooded and chained, the prisoners were led in single file to the lavatory like animals.
“What you are doing to these boys is a terrible thing!” Maslach burst out. Enraged, she accused Zimbardo of creating a madhouse. How could he allow this to go on? He defended himself. Couldn’t she see what important psychological research was being done here? They went back and forth. As they argued, Zimbardo eventually looked out at the prison and stopped in his tracks. He realized Maslach was right. He had created a madhouse. He had allowed himself to get caught up in the same negative psychology of the situation that had, within six days, transformed average college kids into passive prisoners and sadistic guards. It had to end.