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the students were told the debater had no choice in the matter and was assigned the position as either proor anti-Castro, the students didn’t buy it. If the debater was assigned a pro-Castro position and then gave a pro-Castro speech, the students reading that speech told the researchers they thought the debater really believed what he or she was saying. The situation’s influence didn’t play into their assumptions; instead they saw all the debaters’ words as springing from their character.

Variations of this experiment are still being conducted today. Each new twist of the variables leads to the same mistakes. In 1997, Peter Ditto had men meet with an actress working for the experimenters. She and the men would have short one-on-one conversations and then she gave a written report of her impressions.

When Ditto told the men she had been instructed to give a negative report, the men said she was just following orders. When told she had been asked to give a positive report, the men said although they knew she was just doing her job, they felt that she really did like them.

You commit the fundamental attribution error by believing other people’s actions burgeon from the sort of people they are and have nothing to do with the setting. When a man believes the stripper really likes him, or when the boss thinks all his employees love to hear his stories about fishing in Costa Rica, that’s the fundamental attribution error.

It’s hard to grasp just how powerful a situation can be, how much it can influence the behavior of you and people you think you know pretty well. In 1971, Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment at Stanford University that would rattle him to his core and change psychology forever. Zimbardo was interested in the roles you play throughout your life, the characters you create and then pretend to be depending on the situation. He thought perhaps the brutality displayed in war and in prisons had less to do with evil than it did with unconscious role-playing.

He had twenty-four male students flip coins to see who would be prisoners and who would be guards in a pretend prison set up on campus. Those who were randomly selected to be prisoners wore prison smocks with numbers on the back and ankle chains. Guards wore full uniforms with mirrored shades and wielded wooden batons. The guards were told to refer to the prisoners only by their numbers but never physically harm them. Zimbardo had the local police arrest the mock prisoners at their homes and undergo searches in front of their neighbors. They then went through a simulated booking at the police station, complete with mug shots and fingerprints. After the prisoners had waited blindfolded in a real cell, the police then took them to campus, where they were strip-searched and deloused in the fake jail. After all this, the experiment was supposed to take two weeks. Participants would pretend to be guards and prisoners while psychologists videotaped them and took notes. It ended after six days.

There was a riot on the second day. One person had to be released on the third day after suffering so much emotional distress the researchers couldn’t bear to keep him confined. What went wrong?

Zimbardo made sure his participants were middle-class college students with no history of violence or substance abuse. He told the guards to maintain order but didn’t give specific instructions as to how to go about it. At first, both guards and prisoners didn’t take the experiment seriously. They goofed around a bit and were slow to warm to the role-playing, but Zimbardo had the guards regularly wake up the prisoners with whistles and then count them, forcing the prisoners to recite their numbers one at time. Over time, the guards became more aggressive during these counts, more abusive, and cruel. If a prisoner broke a rule, the guards would force that person to do push-ups or place the prisoner in a closet as if it were solitary confinement. On the morning of the second day, the prisoners felt like they had endured enough and barricaded their cells with mattresses while yelling back at the pretend guards. In turn, the guards grabbed a fire extinguisher and doused the prisoners through the bars so they could force their way into the cells. They then stripped the prisoners naked, took away their beds, and began to insult and berate them. To prevent further insurrections, they allowed certain prisoners to wear clothes and sleep on beds if they maintained good, obedient behavior. They also were allowed better food and the indulgences of a toothbrush and toothpaste. After a few hours, the guards took all the privileges away from the compliant prisoners and had them switch places with the defiant ones in an attempt to scramble their minds and destroy any alliances they might have formed by creating doubt in their minds as to who was secretly cooperating with the guards.

Before long, the guards were forcing the prisoners to relieve themselves in a bucket and forcing them to simulate sodomy on one another.

Zimbardo became overwhelmed by the power of the situation just as much as the students had. He started imagining himself as a warden, and when he heard rumors of a possible escape plan being hatched by the prisoners, he tried unsuccessfully to move his experiment into a real jail. Once he saw footage of the guards becoming physically violent when they thought the psychologists weren’t looking, he realized that the situation was getting out of hand. When one of his graduate students visited for the first time and recoiled in horror at the conditions the prisoners were living in, Zimbardo finally saw through her eyes that things had gone too far. On the sixth day, they ended the experiment. The prisoners rejoiced; the guards complained.

In the interviews that followed, the students who role-played as prisoners said they felt as if they had lost their identity, and that the experiment had been replaced by a real prison. They questioned their own sanity.

They forgot they could leave if they only requested for the experiment to end. The guards said they were only following orders.

Remember, all of these people were just average, middle-class college students the week prior. Nothing