A recent movie, The Stanford Prison Experiment, tells the story of a notorious experiment done at Stanford University in 1971 by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo. In the actual experiment, twenty-four male students were randomly chosen to be either prisoners or prison guards in a mock prison erected in the basement of Stanford Psychology Department. The movie accurately portrays what happened in the experiment, and sheds light (along with another earlier experiment by Stanley Milgram) on why people are cruel to other people.

The Stanford Prison Experiment was to last from 7 to 14 days, but it was abruptly stopped after six days. The participants, particularly the guards, played their roles well beyond Zimbardo’s expectations, as they developed authoritarian attitudes and at times subjected prisoners to psychological torture. Many prisoners accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who were trying to fight the abuse. The experiment started out as a simulated event but promptly became real.

Zimbardo later admitted the experiment even affected him. In his role as the superintendent, he permitted the guards’ abuse of prisoners to continue and even encouraged it. Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early, and the entire experiment was suddenly stopped, to an extent because of the objections of Zimbardo’s assistant, Christina Maslach, whom Zimbardo later married.

The movie has brought to light how situations can make people act cruel. Another experiment done in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram studied basically the same topic. It measured the willingness of study participants to follow the instructions of an authority figure who insisted that they administer electric shocks to learners when they make mistakes in remembering word pairs. (The subjects did not actually receive electric shocks but were actors who screamed as though they were in agony.) About 65% of the subjects were willing to go all the way to 450 volts (an amount of electricity that would kill anybody several times over) simply because the experimenter told them it would do no lasting harm.

Both of these studies concluded that people are cruel if an authority figure gives them permission to be cruel. If one looks at history there are numerous episodes that back up this contention, such as Germany’s cruelty to Jews during World War II at the behest of their maniacal leader, Adolf Hitler, or the burning of hundreds of thousands of women accused of being witches during Medieval times when the Pope (and the Bible) was the authority.

Yet in both experiments not everybody did what the authority figures asked. In the Stanford Prison Experiments, some “guards” became more sadistic than others, and some tried to oppose the cruelty. In the Milgram experiment, while 65 of participants went all the way to administering 450 volts, others stopped earlier and some refused completely. In Germany, not all Germans went along with the persecution of Jews: some resisted and tried to help Jews.

What this tells us is that there is another factor that determines whether a person will be cruel or not. This factor is the potential of each person to be sadistic to others, and this factor is not linked with the authority, but with the particular upbringing and subsequent character of the individual. Individuals who have unconscious anger inside them, who try to be nice but are in fact waiting for an opportunity in which they can vent their anger, would be more prone to follow a ruthless authority figure. Today, many angry young people are joining Muslim terrorist groups, which offer them a “glorious” way to vent their anger.

Some families, unfortunately, are breeding grounds of cruelty. Parents are the authority figures of these families, and in some instances, either intentionally or unintentionally, they raise their children to be cruel. Sometimes this happens when parents are overly permissive and sometimes when parents are overly punitive. In the former case, children grow up spoiled and feel entitled to be cruel. In the latter case, children grow up resentful and angry and look for people to take out their anger on.

Children become bullies because they are pushed in that direction often by parents or older siblings. I learned of one eight-year-old girl who was called into the principal’s office because of her hazing of a younger girl in her school. The parents of the younger girl complained, and this led to a confrontation in the principal’s office. The mother of the bullying girl defended her actions, saying that her daughter was simply being assertive because the younger girl was “snubbing my daughter.” The younger girl said she was not snubbing the older girl, but trying to stay away from her out of fear. Defense mechanisms such as projection (attributing one’s own hatred to someone else) often play a role in bullying.

Another aspect of cruelty is that it is sometimes seen as “clever” by bystanders, while the victim of cruelty is viewed as a “loser.” This is called, “Identification with the Aggressor” in psychoanalysis. Because cruel people are sometimes seen as powerful and are looked up to by those who feel powerless, their cruelty is reinforced.

It is difficult for cruel people to change. They tend to find excuses for their cruelty. It is easier for the people who are vulnerable to victimization to change; they have more of a motivation. Such people, sometimes referred to as “self-defeating personalities,” are more likely to seek professional help and more likely to find ways to change their behavior and, ultimately, avoid cruel people.

Experiments such as Zimbardo’s and Milgram’s show the relationship of an authority to cruelty and how contagious cruelty can be.