Stanley and Philip - Two Achieving Friends
Catherine
Philip G. Zimbardo Stanford University
Christina Maslach University of California, Berkeley
Craig Haney University of California, Santa Cruz
PROLOGUE
Philip G. Zimbardo
In a sense, this chapter does not fit well in the frame of this book on Milgram’s
paradigmatic research on obedience to authority. It is less about extreme forms of
interpersonal compliance to the demands of unjust authority than it is about emerging
conformity pressures in “total situations” in which the processes of deindividuation
and dehumanization are institutionalized. However, in another sense, it is the
natural complementary bookend to chapters tied to Milgram’s obedience paradigm, which
between them hold up the lessons of the power of social situations to overwhelm
individual dispositions and even to degrade the quality of human nature.
Whereas a central contribution of Milgram’s paradigm was to quantify aggression and
thus the extent of obedience using a simple but impressive technology, the value of
the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE) resides in demonstrating the evil that good
people can be readily induced into doing to other good people within the context of
socially approved roles, rules, and norms, a legitimizing ideology, and institutional
support that transcends individual agency. In addition, although the obedient
participants in Milgram’s many replications typically experienced distress for their
“shocking” behavior, their participation lasted for only about one half hour, after
which they learned that no one was really harmed. By contrast, participants in the
SPE endured 6 days and nights of intense, often hostile, interactions that escalated
daily in the level of interpersonal aggression of guards against prisoners. Take, as
but one example of the confrontations that occurred repeatedly during the prison
study, this statement found in a guard’s diary: “During the inspection... the
prisoner... grabbed my throat, and although I was really scared, I lashed out with my
stick and hit him in the chin.”
The authority that created the prison setting was typically not in sight of the
participants, but rather I, in the role of prison superintendent, became an agency or
remote agent overseeing the daily and nightly confrontations between these opposing
forces. It became my job to hold in check the growing violence and arbitrary
displays of power of the guards rather than to be the Milgramesque authority who, in
becoming transformed from just to unjust as the learner’s “suffering” intensified,
demanded ever more extreme reactions from the participants. Indeed, it was just the
opposite.
This chapter is the product of a 1996 APA symposium held in Toronto, Canada, honoring
the 25th anniversary of the SPE. Editor Tom Blass thought that its basic themes could
somehow mesh with the other contributions honoring and extending the classic work of
Stanley Milgram. That symposium began with my overview of the genesis of the study,
outlining some of the processes involved and the lessons learned from it. I
highlighted the drama of the study with slides and archival footage, now contained in
a video titled Quiet Rage: The Stanford Prison Experiment (Zimbardo, 1989).
Christina Maslach presented the perspective of an “outsider” who witnessed the
unimaginable transformations of character of the participants—and of herself—and
heroically challenged the authority to end the study. Craig Haney, who had assisted
in all phases of the study, along with William Curtis Banks, described how current
conditions in real prisons could benefit from application of the lessons of the SPE.
We follow that same sequential flow here, giving very personal accounts of our
experiences in this loosely connected, tripartite structure.
But before doing so, I want to exercise the prerogative of seniority to interject
some reflections on my personal association with Stanley Milgram that links us
intimately beyond the facts of our most salient research. So allow me to share a few
remembrances of the “good old days” before we turn to our analysis of the Stanford
Prison Experiment.
Stanley and I were high school classmates at James Monroe High School in the Bronx,
he being considered the smartest kid and I voted the most popular. We sometimes
talked about the reasons for seemingly strange or irrational behavior by teachers,
peers, or people in the real world that violated our expectations. Not coming from
well-to-do homes, we gravitated toward situational explanations and away from
dispositional ones to make sense of such anomalies. The rich and powerful want to
take personal credit for their success and to blame the faults of the poor on their
defects. But we knew better; it was usually the situation that mattered, by our
account.
After graduation in 1950, we went to separate colleges and graduate schools but were
reunited briefly a decade later at Yale University. Stanley had started as a new
assistant professor in 1960, whereas I left Yale to start my career at New York
University. I returned the next year to teach part time in the School of Education
and met with him on several occasions. Stanley began his landmark obedience studies
in 1961, and, when I asked about his research, Stanley chose not to share his ideas
or emerging data with me (or anyone else, I gather). He said that he preferred to
wait until his work was published, and then he would be pleased to discuss it. But I
still regret this lost opportunity to share ideas at their most exciting stage of
emergence.
We exchanged correspondence in 1965; I congratulated Stanley on winning the American
Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) prize, and he responded with the
hope of increasing our contact in the future. He called me a while later to say he
was using my book The Cognitive Control of Motivation (Zimbardo, 1969) as a text in
his methodology course because it represented the most rigorous and interesting
studies testing predictions from dissonance theory. Obviously flattered, I worked at
renewing our relationship, planning a jointly authored social psychology textbook
along with Bob Abelson (that unfortunately never materialized), calling him more
often, and meeting him at conventions. Several interesting conversations deserve
mention here.
I realized one day while teaching about the Milgram paradigm that we all focus on the
obedient participants and ignore the heroic ones who resisted the situational
pressures to obey the authority. I wondered what they did after they refused to
continue shocking the “learner.” Did they get out of their assigned seat and run to
aid the victim in apparent distress or insist that the experimenter do so? When I
posed this question to Stanley, he searched his memory and answered, “Not one, not
ever!” That means that he really demonstrated a more fundamental level of obedience
that was total—100% of the participants followed the programmed dictates from
elementary school authority to stay in your seat until granted permission to leave.
We both discussed but did not act on the need for psychologists to study the
dissidents, the rebels, the whistle-blowing heroes. Demonstrating the power of the
situation to make good people do evil deeds somehow held more appeal to us than the
more difficult reverse process of showing how ordinary people could be induced to do
heroic deeds within a Milgram-like paradigm.
At APA in 1971, I modified my planned invited address to include graphic procedural
slides and some hot new data I had just obtained from a study that had ended only
weeks before, the Stanford Prison Experiment. Stanley was in the audience and was
excited, in our conversation afterwards, about the conceptual similarity of our
research and really delighted that I would soon be diffusing some of the critical
heat off him regarding the ethics of such “dark side of human nature” research.
One of my greatest surprises from Stanley came at the height of his career when he
confided in me that he felt his research was underappreciated and not sufficiently
respected by his social psychology colleagues. I was at first stunned because his
obedience studies are the most cited in every introductory and social psychology text
I know. But perhaps what he meant was that, unlike Leon Festinger, his work did not
generate countless dissertations nor instigate more than a few dozen studies claiming
to prove or disprove his theory (see Blass, 1992). And in that sense, Stanley was
right. He was the master at demonstrating phenomena in captivating scenarios. His
research revealed vital aspects of human nature and social processes, and his
readers, his film observers, were, in a sense, the control condition. It was their
accounts of what ought to have happened, how they would have behaved, that served as
the base rate against which Stanley’s results could be evaluated.
Stanley Milgram, for all his genius, was not a theoretician who inspired many others
to support or challenge his derivations. He was a keen observer of human nature, a
brilliant empiricist, who could translate abstract conceptions and socially
intriguing questions into elegant experimentally valid plots for his actors to play
out and improvise—which leads to my final link in the connection between Stanley and
me.
Only after Stanley died did I become aware of our mutual admiration for Allen Funt,
creator of Candid Camera. I consider Funt to be one of the most creative, intuitive
social psychologists on the planet. For 50 years he has been contriving experimental
scenarios in which ordinary people face a challenge to their usual perceptions or
functioning. He manipulates situations to reveal truths about compliance, conformity,
the power of signs and symbols, and various forms of mindless obedience. I persuaded
Funt to allow me to work with him in preparing sets of his videos for distribution to
teachers of introductory psychology and others for social psychology. In preparing a
viewer/instructor’s manual to accompany the videos and laser disks (Zimbardo & Funt,
1992), I came across an article (Milgram & Sabini, 1979) that Stanley had written
earlier with John Sabini about the vital lessons of Candid Camera for psychologists
and his respect for its creator (see Zimbardo & Funt, 1992).
I end this prologue with one final surprise. When interviewing Funt for an invited
article in Psychology Today (Zimbardo, 1985)—as part of my long-term persuasive
effort to get him to share those videos with academicians—I was intrigued by Funt’s
assertion that he had absolutely no formal psychological background or training that
might have provided a scaffold for his Candid Camera paradigms. Just as my probing
was reaching a dead end in trying to discover some relevant historical contributions,
Funt recalled having worked his senior year at Cornell University as a research
assistant for some German professor in the School of Home Economics. His job was to
observe, from behind a one-way mirror, different feeding patterns of mothers and
nurses as they fed food to their babies or to foundlings. The year was 1934.
Funt strained his memory further on questioning and remembered that the professor was
“a Kurt, something or other.” It was indeed Kurt Lewin, the seminal figure in
experimental social psychology, intellectual grandfather to Stanley Milgram, Allen
Funt, me, and a whole generation of social psychologists. I think that Stanley would
have enjoyed hearing that story.
Catherine
THE SPE [Stanford Prison Experiment]: WHAT IT WAS, WHERE IT CAME FROM, AND WHAT CAME
OUT OF IT
Philip G. Zimbardo
The serenity of a summer Sunday morning in Palo Alto, California, was suddenly
shattered by the sirens of a police squad car sweeping through town in a surprise
mass arrest of college students for a variety of felony code violations. They were
handcuffed, searched, warned of their legal rights, and then taken to police
headquarters for a formal booking procedure. Let’s return to that scene on August
14, 1971, to recall what those arrests were all about.
Synopsis of the Research
The police had agreed to cooperate with our research team in order to increase the
“mundane realism” of having one’s freedom suddenly taken away by the police rather
than surrendering it voluntarily as a research participant who had volunteered for an
experiment. The city police chief was in a cooperative and conciliatory mood after
tensions had run high on Stanford’s campus following violent confrontations between
his police and student anti-Vietnam War protesters. I capitalized on these positive
emotions to help defuse these tensions between police and college students and
thereby to solicit the invaluable assistance of police officers in dramatizing our
study from the outset.
These college students had answered an ad in the local newspaper inviting volunteers
for a study of prison life that would run up to 2 weeks for the pay of $15 a day.
They were students from all over the United States, most of whom had just completed
summer school courses at Stanford or the University of California, Berkeley. Seventy
of those who had called our office were invited to take a battery of psychological
tests (the California Personality Inventory) and engage in interviews conducted by
Craig Haney and Curtis Banks, who were graduate students at that time. We were
assisted by David Jaffe, an undergraduate who played the role of prison warden. I
played the role of prison superintendent, in addition to being the principal
investigator, which would later prove to be a serious error in judgment.
Two dozen of those judged most normal, average, and healthy on all dimensions we
assessed were selected to be the participants in our experiment. They were randomly
assigned to the two treatments of mock prisoner and mock guard. Thus there were no
systematic differences between them initially nor systematic preferences for role
assignments. Virtually all had indicated a preference for being a prisoner because
they could not imagine going to college and ending up as a prison guard. On the
other hand, they could imagine being imprisoned for a driving violation or some act
of civil disobedience and thus felt they might learn something of value from this
experience should that ever happen.
The guards helped us to complete the final stages in the construction of the mock
prison in the basement of the Stanford University psychology department. The setting
was a barren hallway, without windows or natural light. Office doors were fitted
with iron bars, and closets were converted to dark, solitary confinement areas. The
“yard” was the 30-foot-long hallway in front of the three prison cells—converted from
small staff offices. Three offices were set up in an adjacent hallway for the staff:
one for the guards to change into and out of their uniforms, one for the warden, and
the third for the superintendent. Provision was made for space in the hallway to
accommodate visitors on visitors’ nights. There was only a single door for access
and exit, the other end of the corridor having been closed off by a wall we erected.
A small opening in that wall was provided for a video camera and for inconspicuous
observation. The cells were bugged with microphones so that prisoner conversations
could be secretly monitored.
The guards were invited also to select their own military-style uniforms at a local
army surplus store and met as a group for a general orientation and to formulate
rules for proper prisoner behavior on the Saturday before the next day’s arrests. We
wanted the guards to feel as if it were “their prison” and that soon they would be
hosting a group of prisoner-guests.
The would-be prisoners were told to wait at home or at the address they provided us,
and we would contact them on Sunday. After the surprise arrest by the police, they
were brought to our simulated prison environment, where they underwent a degradation
ceremony as part of the initiation into their new role. This is standard operating
procedure in many prisons and military institutions, according to our prison
consultant, a recently paroled ex-convict, Carlo Prescott. Nine prisoners filled
three cells, and three guards staffed each of the 8-hour shifts, supplemented by
backups on standby call. Additional participants were also on standby as
replacements if need be, one of whom was called on midweek to take the place of a
released prisoner. The prisoners wore uniforms that consisted of smocks with numbers
sewn on front and back, ankle chains, nylon stocking caps (to simulate the uniform
appearance from having one’s hair cut off), and rubber thongs on their feet, but no
underwear. Among the coercive rules formulated by the guards were those requiring
the prisoners to refer to themselves and each other only by their prison number and
to the guards as “Mr. Correctional Officer.”
Much of the daily chronology of behavioral actions was videotaped for later analysis,
along with a variety of other observations, interviews, tests, diaries, daily
reports, and follow-up surveys that together constituted the empirical data of the
study. Of course, we were studying both guard and prisoner behavior, so neither
groups was given any instructions on how to behave. The guards were merely told to
maintain law and order, to use their billy clubs as only symbolic weapons and not
actual ones, and to realize that if the prisoners escaped the study would be
terminated.
It is important to realize that both groups had completed informed-consent forms
indicating that some of their basic civil rights would have to be violated if they
were selected for the prisoner role and that only minimally adequate diet and health
care would be provided. The university Human Subjects Review Board approved of the
study with only minor limitations that we followed, such as alerting Student Health
Services of our research and also providing fire extinguishers because there was
minimal access to this space. Ironically, the guards later used these extinguishers
as weapons to subdue the prisoners with their forceful blasts.
It took a full day for most of the guards to adapt to their new, unfamiliar roles as
dominating, powerful, and coercive. Initial encounters were marked by awkwardness
between both groups of participants. However, the situation was radically changed on
the second day, when several prisoners led all the others in a rebellion against the
coercive rules and restraints of the situation. They tried to individuate
themselves, ripped off their sewn-on prisoner numbers, locked themselves into their
cells, and taunted the guards. I told the guards that they had to handle this
surprising turn of events on their own. They called in all the standby guards, and
the night shift stayed overtime. Together, they crushed the prisoner rebellion and
developed a greater sense of guard camaraderie, along with a personal dislike of some
of the prisoners who had insulted them to their face. The prisoners were punished in
a variety of ways. They were stripped naked, put in solitary confinement for hours
on end, deprived of meals and blankets or pillows, and forced to do push-ups, jumping
jacks, and meaningless activities. The guards also generated a psychological tactic
of dividing and conquering their enemy by creating a “privilege cell” in which the
least rebellious prisoners were put to enjoy the privilege of a good meal or a bed to
sleep on. This tactic did have the immediate effect of creating suspicion and
distrust among the prisoners.
We observed and documented on videotape that the guards steadily increased their
coercive and aggressive tactics, humiliation, and dehumanization of the prisoners day
by day. The staff had to remind the guards frequently to refrain from such abuses.
However, the guards’ hostile treatment of the prisoners, together with arbitrary and
capricious displays of their dominating power and authority, soon began to have
adverse effects on the prisoners. Within 36 hours after being arrested, the first
prisoner had to be released because of extreme stress reactions of crying, screaming,
cursing, and irrational actions that seemed to be pathological. The guards were most
sadistic in waking prisoners from their sleep several times a night for “counts,”
supposedly designed for prisoners to learn their identification numbers but actually
to use the occasion to taunt them, punish them, and play games with them, or rather
on them. Deprivation of sleep, particularly REM sleep, also gradually took a toll on
the prisoners. Interestingly, the worst abuses by the guards came on the late-night
shift, when they thought the staff was asleep and they were not being monitored.
That first prisoner to be released, Prisoner 8612, had been one of the ringleaders of
the earlier rebellion, and he jolted his fellow prisoners by announcing that they
would not be allowed to quit the experiment even if they requested it. The shock
waves from this false assertion reverberated through all of the prisoners and
converted the simulated experiment into “a real prison run by psychologists instead
of run by the state,” according to one of the prisoners. After that, some prisoners
decided to become “good prisoners,” obeying every rule and following all prison
procedures faithfully in zombie-like fashion. Powerful conformity pressures
eliminated individual differences among the prisoners. But another generalized
reaction was to imitate the behavior of Prisoner 8612 and passively escape by acting
“crazy” and forcing the staff to release them prematurely. On each of the next three
days a prisoner took that path out of the SPE. A fifth prisoner was released after
he broke out in a full body rash following the rejection of his appeal for parole by
our mock parole board. The parole board heard prisoner requests for early parole and
refutations by the guards. The board consisted of secretaries, graduate students,
and others, headed by our prison consultant, who was familiar with such hearings
because his own parole requests had been turned down at least 16 times.
Although most of the time during the day and night the only interactions that took
place were between prisoners and guards, it should be noted that probably as many as
100 other people came down to our basement prison to play some role in this drama.
On Visitors’ Night, about two dozen parents and friends came to see their prisoners.
A former prison chaplain visited, interviewed all but one of the inmates, and
reported that their reactions were very much like those of first-time offenders he
had observed in real prisons. Our two parole boards consisted of another 10
outsiders. Perhaps as many as 20 psychology graduate students and faculty looked in
from the observation window or at the video monitor during the experiment or played
more direct roles inadvertently. Others helped with interviews and various chores
during the study. Finally, a public defender came to interview the remaining inmates
on the last day. He came at the request of the mother of one of the prisoners, who
had been informed by the Catholic priest (who had visited our prison earlier) that
her son wanted legal counsel to help him get out of the detention facility in which
he was being held. He too likened their mental and behavioral state to those of real
prisoners and jailed citizens awaiting trial.
We had to call off the experiment and close down our prison after only 6 days of what
might have been a 2-week long study of the psychological dynamics of prison life. We
had to do so because too many normal young men were behaving pathologically as
powerless prisoners or as sadistic, all-powerful guards. Recall that we had spent
much time and effort in a selection process that chose only the most normal, healthy,
well-adjusted college students as our sample of research participants. At the
beginning of the study there were no differences between those assigned randomly to
guard and prisoner roles. In less than a week, there were no similarities among
them; they had become totally different creatures. Guard behavior varied from being
fully sadistic to occasionally acting so to being a tough guard who “went by the
book” and, for a few, to being “good guards” by default. That is, they did not
degrade or harass the prisoners, and even did small favors for them from time to
time, but never, not once, did any of the so-called good guards ever contest an order
by a sadistic guard, intervene to stop or prevent despicable behavior by another
guard, or come to work late or leave early. In a real sense, it was the good guards
who most kept the prisoners in line because the prisoners wanted their approval and
feared things would get worse if those good guards quit or ever took a dislike to
them.
Building on this brief synopsis of an intensely profound and complex experience, I
next want to outline why this study was conducted as it was and what we learned from
it. Before doing so, I should preview the next section of this chapter by noting
that the immediate impetus for terminating the study came from an unexpected source,
a young woman, recently graduated with a PhD from our department, who had agreed to
assist us with some interviews on Friday. She came in from the cold and saw the raw,
full-blown madness of this place that we all had gradually accommodated to day by
day. She got emotionally upset, angry, and confused. But in the end, she challenged
us to examine the madness she observed—that we had created. If we allowed it to
continue further, she reminded us of our ethical responsibility for the consequences
and well-being of the young men entrusted to our care as research participants.
Genesis of the Experiment: Why Did We Do This Study?
There were three reasons for conducting this study, two conceptual and one
pedagogical. I had been conducting research for some years earlier on
deindividuation, vandalism, and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which
ordinary people could be led to engage in antisocial acts by putting them into
situations in which they felt anonymous or in which they could perceive others in
ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects. This research is
summarized in Zimbardo (1970). I wondered, along with my research associates, Craig
Haney and Curt Banks, what would happen if we aggregated all of these processes,
making some participants feel deindividuated and others dehumanized within an
anonymous environment, that constituted a “total environment” (see Lifton, 1969) in a
controlled experimental setting. That was the primary reason for conducting this
study.
A related second conceptual reason was to generate another test of the power of
social situations over individual dispositions without relying on the kind of
face-to-face imposition of authority surveillance that was central in Stanley Milgram
’s obedience studies (see Milgram, 1992). In many real-life situations, people are
seduced to behave in evil ways without the coercive control of an authority figure
demanding their compliance or obedience. In the SPE, we focused on the power of
roles, rules, symbols, group identity, and situational validation of ordinarily
ego-alien behaviors and behavioral styles. We were influenced here by earlier reports
of “brainwashing” and “milieu control” coming out of accounts of the Korean War and
Chinese Communist indoctrination methods (Schein, 1956).
Pedagogically, the study had its roots in a social psychology course I had taught the
previous spring, after the student strikes against the university as part of
anti-Vietnam War activities. I invited students to reverse roles and instruct me on
10 topics that interested me but that I had not had the time to investigate. They
were primarily topics and issues that were at the interface of sociology and
psychology or of institutions and individuals, such as the effects of being put into
an old-age home, media distortion of information, and the psychology of imprisonment.
The group of students, headed by David Jaffe, who chose the prison topic conducted a
mock prison experiential learning session over a weekend just before they were to
make their class presentation. The dramatically powerful impact this brief
experience had on many of them surprised me and forced us to consider whether such a
situation could really generate so much distress and role identification or whether
the students who chose to study prisons, among the many other options available to
the class, were in some way more “pathological” than the rest of the ordinary
students. The only way to resolve that ambiguity was to conduct a controlled
experiment that eliminated self-selection factors, and so we did.
Catherine
1. Some situations can exert powerful influences over individuals, causing them to
behave in ways they would not, could not, predict in advance (see Ross & Nisbett,
1991). In trying to understand the causes of complex, puzzling behavior, it is best
to start with a situational analysis and yield to the dispositional only when the
situational fails to do a satisfactory causal job.
2. Situational power is most salient in novel settings in which the participants
cannot call on previous guidelines for their new behavior and have no historical
references to rely on and in which their habitual ways of behaving and coping are not
reinforced. Under such circumstances, personality variables have little predictive
utility because they depend on estimations of future actions based on characteristic
past reactions in certain situations—but rarely in the kind of situation currently
being encountered. Personality tests simply do not assess such behaviors but rely on
asking about typical reactions to known situations—namely, a historical account of
the self.
3. Situational power involves ambiguity of role boundaries, authoritative or
institutionalized permission to behave in prescribed ways or to disinhibit
traditionally disapproved ways of responding. It requires situational validation of
playing new roles, following new rules, and taking actions that ordinarily would be
constrained by laws, norms, morals, and ethics. Such validation usually comes
cloaked in the mantle of ideology; value systems considered to be sacred and based on
apparently good, virtuous, valued moral imperatives (for social psychologists,
ideology equals their experimental “cover story”).
4. Role playing—even when acknowledged to be artificial, temporary, and
situationally bound—can still come to exert a profoundly realistic impact on the
actors. Private attitudes, values, and beliefs are likely to be modified to bring
them in line with the role enactment, as shown by many experiments in dissonance
theory (Festinger, 1957; see Zimbardo & Leippe, 1991). This dissonance effect
becomes greater as the justification for such role enactment decreases—for example,
when it is carried out for less money, under less threat, or with only minimally
sufficient justification or adequate rationale provided. That is one of the
motivational mechanisms for the changes we observed in our guards. They had to work
long, hard shifts for a small wage of less than $2 an hour and were given minimal
direction on how to play the role of guard, but they had to sustain the role
consistently over days whenever they were in uniform, on the yard, or in the presence
of others, whether prisoners, parents, or other visitors. Such dissonance forces are
likely to have been major causes for the internalization of the public role behaviors
into private supporting cognitive and affective response styles. We also have to add
that the group pressures from other guards had a significant impact on being a “team
player,” on conforming to or at least not challenging what seemed to be the emergent
norm of dehumanizing the prisoners in various ways. Finally, let us take into
account that the initial script for guard or prisoner role playing came from the
participants’ own experiences with power and powerlessness, of seeing parental
interactions, of dealing with authority, and of seeing movies and reading accounts of
prison life. As in Milgram’s research, we did not have to teach the actors how to
play their roles. Society had done that for us. We had only to record the extent of
their improvisation within these roles—as our data.
5. Good people can be induced, seduced, initiated into behaving in evil (irrational,
stupid, self-destructive, antisocial) ways by immersion in “total situations” that
can transform human nature in ways that challenge our sense of the stability and
consistency of individual personality, character, and morality (Lifton, 1969). It is
a lesson seen in the Nazi concentration camp guards; among destructive cults, such as
Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple or more recently the Japanese Aum cult; and in the
atrocities committed in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and Burundi, among others. Thus any
deed that any human being has ever done, however horrible, is possible for any of us
to do—under the right or wrong situational pressures. That knowledge does not excuse
evil; rather, it democratizes it, shares its blame among ordinary participants,
rather than demonizes it. Recently a program at the U.S. Air Force Academy
(code-named SERE) that was designed to train cadets for survival and escape from
enemy capture had to be terminated early because it got out of control. As part of a
“sexual exploitation scenario,” women cadets were beaten repeatedly, degraded,
humiliated, put in solitary confinement, deprived of sleep, and made to wear hoods
over their heads—all much like the SPE. But in addition, the women cadets in this
course were subjected to simulated rapes by interrogators that were realistic enough
to cause posttraumatic stress disorder. These “rapes” were videotaped and also
watched by other cadets, none of whom ever intervened. The grandfather of one abused
female cadet, himself a World War II hero, said, “I can’t believe that all these men,
these elite boys, could stand around and watch a young woman get degraded and not one
had enough guts to stop it” (Palmer, 1995, p. 24). After watching our “good guards”
be similarly immobilized when witnessing SPE abuses, I can now understand how that
could happen.
6. Human nature can be transformed within certain powerful social settings in ways
as dramatic as the chemical transformation in the captivating fable of Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde. I think it is that transformation of character that accounts for the
enduring interest in this experiment for more than a quarter of a century. A recent
analysis of the SPE by an Australian psychologist (Carr, 1995) reports that
undergraduate students in that country who learn about the study are left surprised,
disturbed, and mystified by it. He notes:
"Judging by the reactions of our own students, it has even more impact than either
Asch’s “line-length” study (Asch, 1951) or Milgram’s (1963) obedience study. What
seems to strike home is that Zimbardo’s situation impacted much more deeply on his
subjects, reportedly corrupting their own innermost beliefs and feelings—and all this
without involving the direct pressure to change which runs through the classic
conformity and obedience studies." (Carr, 1995, p. 31)
7. Despite the artificiality of controlled experimental research such as the SPE or
any of Milgram’s many variations on the obedience paradigm, when such research is
conducted in a way that captures essential features of “mundane realism,” the results
do have considerable generalizability power. In recent years, it has become
customary to deride such research as limited by context-specific considerations, as
not really credible to the research participants, or as not tapping the vital
dimensions of the naturalistic equivalent. If this were so, there would be no reason
to ever go through the enormous efforts involved in doing such research well. We
believe that much of that criticism is misguided and comes from colleagues who don’t
know how to do such research or how to make it work or who misunderstand the value of
a psychologically functional equivalent of a real-world process or phenomenon.
Several previous chapters in this volume document eloquently the generalizability of
Milgram’s experiments.
I would like to call attention to two parallels to the SPE: one recent, the other
from an earlier era. On July 22, 1995, news headlines chronicled, “Guards abused
inmates in immigration center” (Dunn, 1995, p. A6). The article, reprinted in the
San Francisco Chronicle from the New York Times, reported on an investigation of a
New Jersey detention center holding immigrants awaiting deportation. It outlined “a
culture of abuse that had quickly developed at the detention center,” in which
“underpaid and poorly trained guards had beaten detainees, singling out the midnight
shift as particularly abusive.” Investigators found that “guards routinely
participated in acts meant to degrade and harass, such as locking detainees in
isolation and repeatedly waking them in the middle of the night.” This was all
possible in part because “the detention center had become a closed and private
world.”
Such an account mirrors exactly what transpired in the SPE. the worst abuses were by
guards on our midnight shift, who thought they were not being monitored by the
research team; they degraded, harassed, and woke the prisoners repeatedly every
night, and at times hit them and locked them in isolation—and they were also
underpaid and poorly trained to be guards.
Historian Christopher Browning (1992) provides a chilling account of a little-known
series of mass murders during the Holocaust. A group of older reserve policemen from
Hamburg, Germany, was sent to Poland to round up and execute all the Jews living in
rural areas because it was too costly and inconvenient to ship them to the
concentration camps for extermination. In his book, appropriately titled Ordinary
Men, Browning documents how these men were induced to commit the atrocities of
shooting Jewish men, women, and children, doing the killing up close and personal,
without the technology of the gas chambers to distance the crimes against humanity.
The author goes on to note, “Zimbardo’s spectrum of guard behavior bears an uncanny
resemblance to the groupings that emerged within Reserve Police Battalion 101” (p.
168). He shows how some became sadistically “cruel and tough,” enjoying the
killings, whereas others were “tough, but fair” in “playing the rules,” and a
minority qualified as “good guards” who refused to kill and did small favors for the
Jews.
So we side with Kurt Lewin, who argued decades ago for the science of experimental
social psychology. Lewin asserted that it is possible to take conceptually and
practically significant issues from the real world into the experimental laboratory,
where it is possible to establish certain causal relationships in a way not possible
in field studies and then to use that information to understand or make changes in
the real world (Lewin, 1951; Lewin, Lippitt, & White, 1939). In fact, in his
presidential speech to the American Psychological Association, psycholinguist George
Miller (1969) startled his audience by advocating a radical idea for that time, that
we should “give psychology away to the public.” The exemplars he later used, in a
Psychology Today (1980) interview, as being ideal for public consumption of
psychological research were the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram’s obedience
studies.
From another perspective, the SPE does not tell us anything new about prisons that
sociologists and narratives of prisoners have not already revealed about the evils of
prison life. What is different is that by virtue of the experimental protocol, we
put selected good people, randomly assigned to be either guard or prisoner, and
observed the ways in which they were changed for the worse by their daily experiences
in the evil place.
8. Selection procedures for special tasks, such as being prison guards—especially
those that are relatively new to the applicants—might benefit from engaging the
participants in simulated role playing rather than, or in addition to, screening on
the basis of personality testing. As far as I know, current training for the very
difficult job of prison guard, or correctional officer, involves minimal training in
the psychological dimensions of this position.
9. It is necessary for psychological researchers who are concerned about the utility
of their findings and the practical application of their methods or conclusions to go
beyond the role constraints of academic researcher to become advocates for social
change. We must acknowledge the value-laden nature of some kinds of research that
force investigators out of their stance of objective neutrality into the realm of
activism as partisans for spreading the word of their research to the public and to
those who might be able to implement its recommendations through policy actions.
Craig Haney and I have tried to do so collectively and individually in many ways with
our writings, public testimonies, and development of special media to communicate to
a wider audience than the academic readers of psychology journals.
For starters, we published the SPE first to U.S. audience in articles in the New York
Times Magazine (Zimbardo, Haney, Banks, & Jaffe, 1973) and in Society (Zimbardo,
1972), as well as to international audiences (Haney, Banks, & Zimbardo, 1973;
Zimbardo & Haney, 1978); we extended the implications to education in a Psychology
Today magazine piece (Haney & Zimbardo, 1975) and in an educational journal (Haney &
Zimbardo, 1973); and we related psychology to legal change (Haney, 1993b). I have
also specified how the SPE gives rise to considering new role requirements for social
advocacy by psychologists (Zimbardo, 1975). Most recently, we have just published an
article in American Psychologist on how the lessons learned from the SPE could
improve the ill health of America’s out-of-control correctional system (Haney &
Zimbardo, 1998). Appearances on national television and radio shows, such as The
Phil Donahue Show and That’s Incredible, in which I discussed the SPE, have also
extended the audience for this research. In each case, some of the participants from
our prison study were involved. We have carried the message to college and high
school students and also to civic groups through colloquia and distribution of a
dramatic slide-tape show (Zimbardo & White, 1972; available on the INTERNET,
http://www.ZIMBARDO.COM/PRISONEXP) and the provocative video Quiet Rage (1992), as
well as in the PBS video series Discovering Psychology (1989; Program #19, “The Power
of the Situation”). Finally, I have given invited testimony relating the SPE to
various prison conditions before Congressional Subcommittees on the Judiciary (The
Power and Pathology, 1970; The Detention and Jailing, 1973).
10. Prisons are places that demean humanity, destroy the nobility of human nature,
and bring out the worst in social relations among people. They are as bad for the
guards as the prisoners in terms of their destructive impact on self-esteem, sense of
justice, and human compassion. They are designed to isolate people from all others
and even from the self. Nothing is worse for the health of an individual or a society
than to have millions of people who are without social support, social worth, or
social connections to their kin. Prisons are failed social-political experiments
that continue to be places of evil and even to multiply, like the bad deeds of the
sorcerer’s apprentice, because the public is indifferent to what takes place in
secret there and because politicians use them and fill them up as much as they can to
demonstrate only that they are “tougher on crime” than their political opponents. At
present, such misguided thinking has led to the “three strikes” laws in California
and a few other states. Meant to curtail violent crime, the statute was so broadly
written as to include drug offenses as “serious felonies,” thus filling prisons with
a disproportionate number of nonviolent, young minority drug offenders—for a minimum
of 25 years to a maximum life term. The cost to taxpayers figures to be about one
million dollars per inmate for 25 years of warehousing and medical care and to be
even greater for older inmates (see Zimbardo, 1994). The costs of extensive prison
construction and of hiring many guards to oversee the many prisoners starting to fill
these new prisons is already diminishing the limited state and county funds available
for health, education, and welfare. A “mean-spirited” value system pervades many
correctional operations, reducing programs for job training, rehabilitation, and
physical exercise, and even limiting any individuality in appearance. Projections
are dire at best for the future of corrections in the United States.
I was able to terminate my failed prison experiment, but every citizen is paying for,
and will continue to pay an enormous price in taxes for, the failed experiments
taking place in every state of this union—the failed U.S. prison system. This system
has failed by any criteria: of recidivism, of prison violence, of illegal activities
practiced in prisons, of second offenders often committing more serious
second-time-around crimes than initially, of low morale of corrections staff, and of
deadly prison riots. Among the most outrageous examples of the evil that prison
settings can generate come from the recent reports of guards “staging fights among
inmates and then shooting the combatants,” 50 of whom have been shot and 7 killed in
the past 8 years (Holding, 1996). Federal investigators have been checking out such
reports (Los Angeles Times, 1998). Obviously, sometimes it is the guards we must be
protected from, as we saw in the SPE.
From Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm, 2000, pp.
198-211.
JJAYBOYD
you should look into getting some kind of job... you have WAY too much time to
sit and rethink your 'everyone and everything is conspiring to get me' dilema..
Youre a sad little worm in the apple of society..
Are you going to be brave enough to go to DCA....? I might just do it just to
see you face to face to confront you about you and your 'thoughts'... and I
think I am going to coordinate a get together of any and everyone you slander
or misrepresent...
Lets see if you have the guts and the honor to show up....
doubtful.. youll be pissing yourself all the way back to the land of cheese.
Jason
Catherine
block of the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad. By John Moore, AP
Abuse less shocking in light of history
By Rick Hampson, USA TODAY
One of the most surprising things about the abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. soldiers
is that so many Americans are surprised.
Decades of research and eons of history point to one conclusion: Under certain
circumstances, most normal people will treat their fellow man with abnormal cruelty.
The schoolboys' descent into barbarism in William Golding's classic The Lord of the
Flies is fiction that contains a deeper truth.
And from Andersonville to the "Hanoi Hilton," no combination of circumstances turns
us against our better nature faster than the combination of war and prison, whether
we are acting on orders or on our own.
Charles Figley, a Florida State University psychologist who studied the experiences
of 1,000 U.S. soldiers in the Vietnam War, describes himself as "shocked about people
being shocked" by the reports from Iraq.
"About 25% of the vets I've talked to either participated in, witnessed, or were
aware of violations of the Geneva Conventions" in Vietnam, he says.
Geneva is a long way from Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad, where U.S. military
police photographed each other tormenting hooded, naked Iraqis in their custody.
Three face courts-martial, and four others could soon learn whether they will be
tried, too.
President Bush has called the alleged offenders a relative few whose actions "do not
reflect the nature of the men and women who serve our country." Still, many
Americans wonder how people described as kind and decent by the folks back home could
lapse into such extraordinary behavior.
Philip Zimbardo, a Stanford University psychologist who presided over the single most
famous experiment in the field, blames the system, not the soldiers, who "were put in
a situation where the outcome was totally predictable."
"It's not a few bad apples," he says. "It's the barrel that's bad. The barrel is
war. That's what can corrupt, whether it's in My Lai or in Baghdad." (Related
photos: Abuse at Abu Ghraib)
That might explain the actions of soldiers such as Lynndie England, so gentle back
home in West Virginia that she wouldn't even shoot a deer on family hunting trips, or
Sabrina Harman, whose mother says that when she found a bug in the house she'd
release it outside.
It also raises the question: Were the American guards following orders or defying
them?
The evidence is conflicting. Many families and other experts say they doubt the
relatively unsophisticated reservists would come up with tactics that seemed
specifically designed to humiliate Muslim men, such as stripping them naked and
forcing them into homosexual poses.
England said Tuesday that she was ordered to pose for to pose for photos showing her
holding a leash around the neck of an Iraqi prisoner. In an interview with KCNC-TV in
Denver, she said her superiors praised the techniques she and other military police
were using on prisoners. They "just told us, 'Hey, you're doing great, keep it up,' "
England said.
Whether the American guards were following orders or not, the prison seems to have
been a virtual petri dish for the sorts of abuses that experts have long warned
against and that threaten to undermine the U.S. war effort in Iraq.
School for scandal
Soldiers are not lab rats. But experts say that in retrospect, conditions at Abu
Ghraib virtually assured a scandal. They point to the presence of some conditions —
and the absence of others. The following appear to have been insufficient or
deficient:
• Training. The guards were reservists, most of whom had not been trained to work in
a prison or internment camp, much less interrogate terrorists or prisoners of war.
The 372nd Military Police Battalion was practiced mostly in traffic enforcement.
• Staffing. By most accounts, there were too many prisoners and too few guards.
Experts say this tends to encourage brutality as a crude means of inmate control.
• Direction. The soldiers' basic charge was to guard prisoners, but that became
muddied when military intelligence officers came forward with vague requests to
"soften up" prisoners and "set conditions" for interrogation.
• Supervision. The unit's commander, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, rarely visited the
prison within a prison (the so-called hard site) where prisoners were abused. Her
authority may have been usurped by military intelligence officers, but even at a
congressional hearing Tuesday, a Pentagon official and a major general couldn't agree
on who was in charge. That prompted Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., to ask, "How do you
expect the MPs to get it straight if we have a difference between the two of you?"
• Accountability. In the absence of a clear line of command, the guards were on
their own — operating at night, behind prison walls, in a foreign country far from
home, without lawyers, journalists or relatives to observe them.
In addition to what was lacking, Abu Ghraib also had ingredients to encourage abuse:
• Stress. The young and inexperienced soldiers were in a war zone that had witnessed
many deadly sneak attacks on soldiers and civilians. The prison itself was the target
of almost daily mortar attacks. One such incident Sept. 20 killed two Army
intelligence soldiers.
• 9/11. The government has argued that the war on terrorism sometimes requires
suspensions of civil liberties. Critics ask whether this message trickled down to
guards, who concluded that in this war, anything goes.
• Revenge. Soldiers may have been influenced by a range of events, from the 9/11
attacks to an escalating series of incidents in Iraq.
• Instability. Prisons are stabilized by long-standing, informal understandings
between guards and inmates. But at Abu Ghraib, everyone — guards and prisoners
alike — was new and had neither a common language nor culture.
These factors combined to produce a classic case of abuse. But Zimbardo, the Stanford
psychologist, sees something else in the jeering faces of the guards in the prison
photos — a sort of timeless euphoria.
"The trophy photos make no sense," he says. "At some level, even as you're doing this
stuff, you should realize this isn't something you're going to want documented in the
future. I think these people got lost in what I call 'expanded present time.' The
past seemed distant. The future was vague. All they knew was they were in charge of
these animals. It was their circus."
He sounds surprised. And, after what he went through in 1971, it takes a lot to
surprise Zimbardo.
Studying abusive behavior
The two most famous experiments that bear directly on Abu Ghraib were separately
designed and executed by two members of the class of 1950 at James Monroe High School
in the Bronx — Zimbardo and Stanley Milgram.
In the early 1960s, Milgram was teaching at Yale and studying the impact of authority
on human behavior. He wanted to see whether ordinary people would follow orders to
keep administering what they thought were ever more painful and powerful electric
shocks to test subjects.
He hired local residents to participate in what he told them was an experiment in
"teaching through punishment." They were the "teachers," and they would, on
instructions, apply electrical shocks to the "learners." The director would take
responsibility for any harm to the "learners."
What Milgram found surprised him: based purely on the instructions of a researcher in
a white lab coat, two-thirds of the subjects kept raising the voltage levels, despite
the howls (and eventually the ominous silence) of the learners in the next room. The
teachers didn't know the electricity wasn't on, and that the learners were actors
pretending to be hurt.
Milgram later identified some key conditions for suspending human morality, many
relevant to Abu Ghraib: an acceptable justification for the behavior; an important
role for participants; use of euphemisms such as "learners" (instead of victims); and
a gradual escalation of violence.
A decade later, Milgram's old honors program classmate undertook an experiment of his
own in a basement of the psychology building at Stanford.
In 1971, Zimbardo recruited 24 college students from around the San Francisco Bay
Area to pose as guards or inmates in a mock prison for two weeks.
But, in contrast to Milgram, he gave them few further orders and supervised them only
loosely.
Quickly, the guards became more and more abusive, the inmates more and more cowed. At
night, when Zimbardo was gone, guards put bags over inmates' heads, stripped them of
clothing and told them to simulate sex acts. Finally, after several inmates suffered
emotional breakdowns, a shaken Zimbardo stopped the experiment after six days.
He concluded later that he himself had gotten swept up in the situation and didn't
see what was happening until it was too late. "You could never even try that today,"
he says. "You'd be sued."
While Milgram's study stands for the proposition that most good people will sometimes
follow bad orders, Zimbardo's suggests that sometimes good people don't even need bad
orders — none or vague ones will do.
Milgram had strictly supervised his subjects, and they did the wrong thing — he
called it "surrendering your agency," your self-control. Zimbardo had mostly left his
subjects on their own, and they did the wrong thing. He called it "the power of the
situation."
Over the years, the experiments have become famous. They are taught in psychology
classes and have formed the basis for novels and movies.
At the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., the experiments are often mentioned
in courses in the Department of Behavior Sciences and Leadership.
Not everyone fails the test. The cadets at West Point periodically get a visit from
someone who did not surrender his agency — Hugh Thompson, the Vietnam War Army
helicopter pilot who put his craft between marauding GIs and Vietnamese civilians
during the My Lai massacre in 1968.
Who among us?
To some, the fallout from the Abu Ghraib scandal is a sign of progress.
David Finkelhor, a sociologist at the University of New Hampshire and director of the
school's Crimes Against Children Research Center, says the government's willingness
to deal immediately with the problem contrasts with World War II and Vietnam.
"In other wars, these things stayed under wraps — it was not talked about," he says.
"Now I think that there are a lot (of people) around who are not willing to tolerate
this, colleagues and their superiors who are truly committed to keeping this from
happening, even if it allows some compromise of our mission."
Frank Farley of Temple University, past president of the American Psychological
Association, says the photos offer an education, albeit a painful one. "We have
learned a little bit," he says. "We may become a little bit more enlightened, also,
about ourselves. It is going to be hard for those dark concerns to be hidden."
What's really different about Abu Ghraib are the photos, which have granted the
public a rare view of what can go on behind prison walls — even when Americans are
the jailers.
In his psychology classes at Stanford, Zimbardo used to talk about Milgram's
experiment. Who among you, he'd ask, would have been in the minority that refused to
keep applying the shocks? Without fail, he says, each hand in the room shot toward
the ceiling. The fact is that few people in situations like this actually do resist.
Time and again, studies of torturers also have returned the same verdict:
"terrifyingly normal," in the words of Hannah Arendt, chronicler of the trial of Nazi
Holocaust functionary Adolf Eichmann.
This has been true in Northern Ireland, Greece and Brazil, in Josef Stalin's Russia
and Pol Pot's Cambodia. It was true in ancient Mexico; blocks from the Iraqi prison
hearings in Washington, the National Gallery of Art displays a mural of Mayans
parading tortured captives before their victorious leader.
Who could do such a thing? The answer could be as far away as the nearest mirror.
Contributing: Karen Peterson, Cathy Lynn Grossman, the Associated Press
Lou Labetti
"JJAYBOYD" <jjay...@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20040815171834...@mb-m04.aol.com...
> Hey catherine...
>
>
> Are you going to be brave enough to go to DCA....? I might just do it
just to
> see you face to face to confront you about you and your 'thoughts'.
Great I just can not wait to meet my rookie. I feel the "Love" :) Remember
the beer of choice is Budwiser....
BigLou
http://www.drumcorps.net
george maloney
But it's OK when you do it to Crown and Boston everyday for two months?
PKB. You're no better.
George;}
george maloney
But it's OK when you do it to Crown and Boston everyday for two months?
george maloney
I got $20, that says she'd kick your ass.
George;]
JJAYBOYD
>PKB. You're no better.
>George;}
hey there little troll !! Since I have spoken PERSONALLY to one of the staff
not once but MANY times about it... at least I have the balls to discuss it
with someone responsible.. Would have done it face to face, but this person
lives in the midwest... maybe when I get there touring Ill set something up...
I was in the stands not 20 feet from these people at Allentown and cheered
wildly when the amps went dead... they could have come up to me too.. but
didnt.. but you fail to see that cause it fucks up your flimsy little attempt
at an argument...
OH and yet again.. starting in where I wasnt directly talking to YOU.. aint it
funny when a nothing 'never has been' little failure in life tries to show how
important he is by picking fights all the time? LOLOLOL
You little bitch.. keep at it..
jason
JJAYBOYD
>George;]
LOL you have 20 bucks.. LOLOLOLOLOLOL
im guessing you found a lot of change in peoples couch cushions?
I got 5 says when we finally do meet you'll end up on the ground calling the
police spewing lies that I 'attacked' you...
pussy boy
Jason
Wage Peace
at flu...@msn.com wrote on 8/15/04 11:09 PM:
Jason used the words "guts and honor" and "show up" ...
...
...
...
LOL
Man, that's funny.
Wage
TerriGolden1957
internet warrior. If Blansett shows up, he'll be in disguise. A
rather LARGE disguise complete with groucho glasses.
-Terri
flu...@msn.com (george maloney) wrote in message news:<b9faa458.0408...@posting.google.com>...
george maloney
> >But it's OK when you do it to Crown and Boston everyday for two months?
> >PKB. You're no better.
> >George;}
>
> hey there little troll !! Since I have spoken PERSONALLY to one of the staff
> not once but MANY times about it... at least I have the balls to discuss it
> with someone responsible.. Would have done it face to face, but this person
> lives in the midwest... maybe when I get there touring Ill set something up...
>
> I was in the stands not 20 feet from these people at Allentown and cheered
> wildly when the amps went dead... they could have come up to me too.. but
> didnt.. but you fail to see that cause it fucks up your flimsy little attempt
> at an argument...
So you think they care about you? You're just some nut in the crowd,
why would they 'come up to you'?????? do you think they are afraid of
you? Do you think anyone is afraid of you? Your a punk. What argument
are you talking about?
>
> OH and yet again.. starting in where I wasnt directly talking to YOU.. aint it
> funny when a nothing 'never has been' little failure in life tries to show how
> important he is by picking fights all the time? LOLOLOL
Aren't you the one who wanted to meet me at Giant's stadium? Didn't I
give you my seat number? I even told you what I was wearing. PUNK.
george maloney
Remeber sec 110 row 24 seat 23, giant's stadium? PUNK.
george maloney
He's a walking talking oximoron;]
george maloney
> I got 5 says when we finally do meet you'll end up on the ground calling the
> police spewing lies that I 'attacked' you...
>
> pussy boy
>
> Jason
P.S. Any time, any where!
Lou Labetti
buy beer. Sooner or LATER he will meet BigLou. If he tries to pull something
silly, the Scraton police have absolutoy NO sence of humor. I plan on
sticking my hand out to Jason and welcome him..... ;)
Biglou
http://www.drumcorps.net
"george maloney" <flu...@msn.com> wrote in message
news:b9faa458.04081...@posting.google.com...
JJAYBOYD
>Remeber sec 110 row 24 seat 23, giant's stadium? PUNK.
dude.. I showed up .. you must have gone to get something or what have you .. I
wasnt going to say anything.. but hell.. you want to bring it up? You werent
there pussy boy... I JUST threw out your description of yourself the other
day.. I had printed it and brought it with me...
YOU are the one who ran away like a little bitch...
again.. once we meet just remember: I predict you are going to run away and
cry to a police officer that I attacked you... I can see it now... You pussy
nothing little nobody! :)
Jason
Catherine
"Lou Labetti" <llab...@tampabay.rr.com> wrote in message
news:_3dUc.41258$wM.3...@twister.tampabay.rr.com...
> Hey George, I want Jason to go to DCA. I am hopeing to meet him, have Jason
> buy beer. Sooner or LATER he will meet BigLou.
I've met BigLou. Find the beer line...
Lou Labetti
having a beer. What the heck hey Jason I'll evan buy ya a beer. ;)
BigLou
http://www.drumcorps.net
"Catherine" <Catherine@yahoo!!!.com> wrote in message
news:McdUc.2091$yj3.3...@newssvr28.news.prodigy.com...
----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeed.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! >100,000 Newsgroups
---= 19 East/West-Coast Specialized Servers - Total Privacy via Encryption =---
JJAYBOYD
>give you my seat number? I even told you what I was wearing. PUNK.
>>
wasnt my fault you went to the ladies room to hide like the little bitch you
are pussy boy!!!!!!
Jason
Jeff Ream
you two make us look tame
>Subject: Re: Stanley and Philip - Two Achieving Friends
>From: flu...@msn.com (george maloney)
>Date: 8/16/2004 8:41 PM Eastern Standard Time
>Message-id: <b9faa458.04081...@posting.google.com>
Jeff Ream
I am the drummer your color guard captain warned you about
marilyn
(TerriGolden1957) wrote:
>I'll put my $20 on her avoiding everyone and EVERYONE. She's an
>internet warrior. If Blansett shows up, he'll be in disguise. A
>rather LARGE disguise complete with groucho glasses.
>
>-Terri
What? Your $20? Did you finally get all the quarters you've been
earning rolled up?
TerriGolden1957
you fall off your rascal and hit your head or something and then it
made you make stupid comments like that?
-Terri
marilyn <marily...@yahoo.comma> wrote in message news:<u304i0d1tb31omghu...@4ax.com>...
JJAYBOYD
>you fall off your rascal and hit your head or something and then it
>made you make stupid comments like that?
>
>-Terri
Im beginning to LOVE this lady!
Jason
george maloney
> >I'll take that bet.
> >Remeber sec 110 row 24 seat 23, giant's stadium? PUNK.
>
> dude.. I showed up .. you must have gone to get something or what have you .. I
> wasnt going to say anything.. but hell.. you want to bring it up? You werent
> there pussy boy... I JUST threw out your description of yourself the other
> day.. I had printed it and brought it with me...
>
> YOU are the one who ran away like a little bitch...
I was in my seat for all 8 corps and then some. Sure you where trying
hard enough to find me? 'ran away' what ever lets you sleep at night,
punk.
>
> again.. once we meet just remember: I predict you are going to run away and
> cry to a police officer that I attacked you... I can see it now... You pussy
> nothing little nobody! :) Let me know when you're in Hartford and we'll chat it in private, punk.
> Jason
george maloney
Do you think anyone believes this jj? Me hiding and you couldn't find
me? After I gave you my seat number and what I was wearing. All night.
You should try to be more honest with yourself. Punk.
George;]
george maloney
> wow and people complained about me and Catherine in the day.
>
>
> you two make us look tame
Thank you:}
george maloney
>
>
> you two make us look tame
Thank you:}
george maloney
> buy beer. Sooner or LATER he will meet BigLou. If he tries to pull something
> silly, the Scraton police have absolutoy NO sence of humor. I plan on
> sticking my hand out to Jason and welcome him..... ;)
Don't hold your breath Lou. He's all mouth. But let me know if he does
have the nerve to show his face after all the friends he's made over
the last few years. Now that might be funny:}
George