Edge 151: YOU CAN'T BE A SWEET CUCUMBER IN A VINEGAR BARREL

"You could put virtually anybody in it and you're going to get this kind
of evil behavior," he continued. "The Pentagon and the military say that
the Abu Ghraib scandal is the result of a few bad apples in an otherwise
good barrel. That's the dispositional analysis. The social psychologist
in me, and the consensus among many of my colleagues in experimental
social psychology, says that's the wrong analysis. It's not the bad
apples, it's the bad barrels that corrupt good people. Understanding the
abuses at this Iraqi prison starts with an analysis of both the
situational and systematic forces operating on those soldiers working
the night shift in that 'little shop of horrors.'"

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