Philip Zimbardo was on the Radio 4 programme "Start the Week" this morning. He briefly described a famous experiment which he conducted in 1971.

Here is a description of it from Wikepedia:

The Stanford prison experiment was a psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular to the real world circumstances of prison life and the effects of imposed social roles on behavior. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. Undergraduate volunteers played the roles of guards and prisoners living in a mock prison that was constructed in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.

Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their assigned roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to genuinely dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.

The full Wikipedia entry is here.

I see a parallel between the Stanford experiment and the welfare state. The Standfor experiment showed that good people could, if their circumstances were changed, start acting very badly indeed. We humans are generally not so inherently virtuous that we can go on acting well regardless.

This chimes with one of the central claims that I make in The Welfare State We're In, that living within the structure of the welfare state has changed the character of the British people.

I do not think that the majority of young men who become criminal thugs were born to be that way. I suggest that the circumstances they found themselves in made it more likely to that they would turn out that way. The welfare state conditioned these circumstances. The welfare state caused more young men to be brought up in adverse circumstances. It caused:

- more to be brought up by an unmarried mother, perhaps with visiting boyfriends
- more to be brought up on a sink council estate
- more to be illiterate and alienated at school and therefore more likely to be in gangs and turn to delinquent behaviour
- more to be unemployed.

One could add a few more such circumstances. Add them together and you have a large-scale experiment in what those kind of circumstances do to people. We know that, in many cases, criminal activity has been the result.

The circumstances in which people - particularly the poorest fifth - are brought up in Britain has been changed by the welfare state. It has had a damaging effect on their behaviour. But they could just as easily have been fine, decent people. It was nothing about them genetically. It was the circumstances into which the welfare state put them - just as it was the circumstances into which students were put in Stanford which made them behave so awfully.

Posted by James Bartholomew • Indexed in Behaviour & Crime

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