How Could This Happen? Control Measures Meant for Good Often Lead to Atrocities

WCH Mind Health Committee member Dalinda Reese led an eye-opening webinar on July 5 about the hidden power of Behavioral Engineering.

"There was a Stanford Prison Experiment that was supposed to [...] last for two weeks, and they actually had to stop it because of the harms, the psychological harms it was causing to the participants. They were testing out whether there was something about guards that made them sort of seek out being prison guards and sort of preconditioned their behaviour to be sort of brutal or not. And so, anyway, they got these young college age males do this two week experiment and had half of them randomly assigned to be guards and the other half to be prisoners."

"They found there that de-humanization, de-individualization, and accepting having it socially acceptable to have dominance roles—just following orders or trying to keep order—these were among the factors that allowed the harms that they were seeing in that prison experiment. And you also have to think of Abu Ghraib prison in 2003/2004, where military guard were actually sort of abusing the prisoners there."

"So, again, such things can happen, even when they're not intended to. Control measures—again, socially accepted dominant roles or control measures that are meant for good, but that end up segregating, stigmatising, shaming, isolating or disadvantaged one particular group of people, that is a pure setup for abuse."

Watch full webinar for free:
https://worldcouncilforhealth.org/multimedia/behavioral-engineering/