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Psicologia & Giustizia

Anno XVII, numero 2

Luglio – Dicembre 2016

THE DILEMMA OF FREE WILL

C. Bertocchi1

Summary

Do men hold free will over their behaviors? Under what conditions do we consider people morally

responsible and therefore deserving blame for their actions? Can someone be blamed or “praised”

for his behaviors if these actions are determined, rather than freely chosen? As will be evidenced by

a brief historical digression, the question about whether we have free will or our actions are

determined has been a matter of dispute for a long time in philosophical and scientific circles, but

that obviously today has important implications also for the foundations of our legal system. Recent

developments in the biological sciences, especially genetics and neurosciences, have made inroads

into our conception of free will. Several neuroscientists seek to study how brain function affects

behavior. The law is concerned with regulating behavior, and so it is reasonable to ask whether and

if so how, neuroscience could, or should, inform the law.

Riassunto

Gli uomini possiedono libero arbitrio sulle proprie condotte? A quali condizioni consideriamo le

persone moralmente responsabili e pertanto colpevoli per le loro azioni? Può qualcuno essere

incolpato o elogiato per i suoi comportamenti se questi sono determinati, invece che compiuti

secondo libero arbitrio? Come verrà evidenziato da una breve digressione storica, la discussione

relativa a se abbiamo libero arbitrio o se le nostre azioni siano determinate è stata motivo di disputa

per molto tempo nei circoli filosofici e scientifici, e tutt’oggi tale dilemma ha importanti

implicazioni anche per le fondamenta del nostro sistema giudiziario. Recenti sviluppi nelle scienze

biologiche, soprattutto nella genetica e nelle neuroscienze, hanno fatto breccia nella nostra

concezione del libero arbitrio. Diversi neuroscienziati cercano di studiare come la funzione del

1 Graduated in Psychology at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan. Currently post graduate trainee at

“Fondazione Guglielmo Gulotta di Psicologia Forense e della Comunicazione”, Milan.

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cervello possa influire sul comportamento. La legge si occupa di regolare il comportamento, e

quindi è ragionevole chiedersi se, e se così fosse come, le neuroscienze potrebbero o dovrebbero,

informare la legge.

1 Introduction

The issue of whether or not we own free will, freely choosing our actions, is important for a

variety of reasons, including implications related to moral responsibility and moral judgment2 (MJ)

(Kane 2002). In particular, MJ refers to what individuals should do based on principles and

judgments (i.e. moral values) shared with other members of their social environment (Ciaramelli,

Muccioli et al. 2007) and it settled down in the concepts of free will and determinism through the

human history and philosophy3 (Timpe 2006).

Some contemporary thinkers have different opinions about this viewpoint since free will is a

necessary element for self-determination and for attributing personal responsibility for one’s

actions. Actually philosophers, psychologists, biologists have taken positions on each side of the

debate (Berofsky 1966).

It is necessary to begin by making at least some attempt to define the concept of free will.

Philosophical definitions of free will seem to fall into three categories. One position, called

“liberalism”, considers man absolutely responsible for his actions (Fischer, Kane et al. 2009).

Liberalists, also called “compatibilists”, concentrate on whether or not there are constraints on a

particular action or whether the actor is free to choose his own course (Pockett 2007). The “radical

determinism” sees the human being not responsible for his actions and so because all behavior is

determined by biological or environmental events (Merzagora Betsos 2012). Incompatibilists define

free will as requiring the causation of voluntary bodily movements by a conscious self; they see no

room in the causal chain of brain events for consciousness (Pockett 2007). A recent position,

“indeterminists causation”, suggests to overpass the distinction between a reflex or an action guided

by cognition, between determined or undetermined actions and consider the brain like a

probabilistic machine in which proximal or distal causes increase the possibility that an event may

occur but not strictly determine it (De Caro 2004, Glimcher 2014).

2 Moral judgment (MJ) is a core feature to several human behavior and is increasingly coming under scientific scrutiny (Youssef,

Dookeeram et al. 2012). Morality can be defined as a shared code of values and customs that guide social conduct (Mendez 2009). 3 Considering neuroscience and psychology, current research debate about whether moral judgment is caused by emotional or

cognitive processes, and how this two component interact in determining the final moral judge (For more on the issues involved, see Greene’s studies (e.g. Greene, Sommerville et al. 2001, Greene and Haidt 2002, Greene 2007).

Neuroscientist are trying to demonstrate the specific brain mechanisms for morality as well as brain disordered patients with impaired

morality.

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The acceptance of the existence of free will has undergone many changes over the centuries. During

the Homeric period of ancient Greece, external influences were believed to influence a person’s

decisions, so personal free will was not thought to exist (Simon 1978). In the Republic, Plato (427

a.C.-347a.C.) came to the conclusion that man’s decisions strictly deriving from heredity,

education, or even from other external forces address the issues of voluntary behavior and social

order. The stoic philosophers believed that it is necessity to dominate the process of choice even to

the smallest detail; choice, therefore, is a result of the interplay of man’s own nature and the world

in which he exists. As exposed by Seneca man does not have the freedom to do as he will; rather, he

has the freedom of willing as he must (Oakley 1925). Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) argued that

freedom was a postulate of pure practical reason. For there to be morality and moral agency

freedom was necessary. The universal obligation of duty, or the moral action of persons, discloses

the presence of a reality beyond scientific knowledge with its adherence to cause and effect. By the

same token, not everyone in that century adhered to the same degree of free will. Arthur

Schopenhauer (1788-1860), who followed Kant, was committed to the strict necessity of human

actions. He viewed motivations as reactions to the stimulus of the moment. Even though humans

may construct explanations for their motivations and behavior based on experiences from memory

or some notion of future expectations, Schopenhauer claimed that actions were determined as part

of a causal chain; man’s guilt is related to how he is made, everything depends on what everyone

is,“[…] in what we do we recognize what we are. On this and not on the alleged liberum arbitrium

indifferentiae, rest the awareness of responsibility and the moral tendency of life. What he does will

be automatically result from it as a necessary corollary” (Schopenhauer 1841).

During the 20th century, the mentalist tradition put a focus on mental process. One of the prominent

thinker of this period was Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who stated that although the unconscious

and other factors outside of a person’s control influence his decisions and behavior, there is still an

affirmation of change and freedom through in-depth understanding of oneself. With the advent of

behaviorism the focus move from the mental to the physical.

John Watson was the first to propose this theory to understand the basis of human actions. He

argued that psychology should be concerned with behavior rather than unconscious process or

mental states. He advocated that introspection be given up, and that the emphasis change depending

on the way people behave under different situations (Cohen 1979).

B.F. Skinner was even more adamant about the merits of behaviorism. He was highly deterministic

in his thinking. He not only ignored the presence of free will as a factor in human decisions and

behavior, but actually explicitly belittled the idea. In effect, behaviorists claim that the mind does

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not cause action. They have developed extensive evidence that behavior can be effectively predicted

by conditions that precede and follow actions, without reference to the mind (Skinner 1965).

In light of the current research, Skinner’s point of view is outdated. In fact, since the core of any

free will that might exist is the ability to make choices, it is important in this debate to think about

the neural mechanisms of human decision making, and whether or not we have absolute control

over this mechanism (Burns and Bechara 2007). Many questions have been asked about what

neuroscience might offer for the law. For instance, might neuroscience fundamentally change

concepts of legal responsibility? Or could aspects of a convicted person’s brain help to determine

whether they are at an increased risk of reoffending? (Jones, Marois et al. 2013).

Neuroscience is rapidly increasing our knowledge of the functioning, and malfunctioning of the

human brain (Jones, Marois et al. 2013): these advances will cause changes in both our society and

its laws (Gulotta 2009).

“Neuroscience will put us with new ways to understand the behavior. However, what we

have to realize is that, even if the cause of an act (criminal or otherwise) is explained by

functioning of the brain, this does not mean that the author of the act should be released

[…], the brain is an automatic device, rule-governed and determined, but instead people are

personally responsible agents, free to make their own personal decisions” (Gazzaniga

2006).

2 The intersection of neuroscience and the law

The echo of the millenary debate in the ethical and philosophical realm on free will versus

determinism resonates in the courtroom. A cornerstone of the criminal justice system is that

everyone has free will and thus the capacity and ability to choose between good and bad conduct,

but also to decide to act in one way or another (Pietrini P., Pellegrini S. 2010). Law and

neuroscience seem strange bedfellows (Jones, Marois et al. 2013). Progress in neuroscience has led

to the born of a new interdisciplinary field, called "Neurolaw", whose goal is to explore the

consequences of neuroscientific discoveries on legal proceedings and legal rules and standards

(Meynen 2013). The efficiency of legal systems in regulating behavior and meeting out justice often

depends on weighing evidence about how and why a person behaved as he or she did, issue that is

strictly linked to what we discussed so far (Hadfield 2000, Bianchi et al. 2009).

In the United States, a lot of neuroscientific studies are built specifically to explore legally relevant

topics and a case law has already been developed. In Europe, neuroscientific evidence is

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increasingly being used in criminal courtrooms, as part of psychiatric testimony, nourishing the

debate about the legal implications of brain research in psychiatric-legal settings (Gkotsi, Moulin et

al. 2014).

Though largely debated, up to now the use of neuroscience in legal contexts had not specifically

been regulated by any legislation. In 2011, with the new bioethics law, France has become the first

country to admit by law the use of brain imaging in judicial expertise (Gkotsi, Moulin et al. 2014).

Modern techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), have offered

neuroscientists the possibility to more fully appreciate the brain correlates of human behavior and

moral judgment (Mendez 2009). Morality and moral reasoning are relative novices to the growing

literature on decision neuroscience. With recent attention given to the prominence of moral factors

in the process of decision making, neuroscientists have begun to give helpful frameworks for

understanding the interplay between the brain, morality, and human decision making (Knabb,

Welsh et al. 2009).

Surely the relevance of neuroscience to law depends intimately on the specific legal issue and

context (Jones, Marois et al. 2013). An important field of interest in this trade is, for example, the

neural basis of legal decision making that is prone to the same influences and vagaries as are other

decision making processes and might ultimately aid efforts to improve the fairness and effectiveness

of the criminal justice system (Jones, Marois et al. 2013). Several factors clearly influence mental

activity (e.g. brain health, substance dependence or depression, and various personality disorders)

and their impact upon volition also is important, with serious consequences on the ability of

discernment of an individual. The neuroscience of free will places limitations on free will

conceptions, both compatibilist and incompatibilist (Gulotta 2005; 2009).

The implications of neuroscience may have in criminal proceedings are also be contemplated even

beyond the field of guilty: among the areas privileged for its applications, the evaluation of

innocence is on top (Greene and Cohen 2004).

On the one hand, it is easy to capture the charm of similar scenarios of investigations, but, on the

other, we must to be aware that usually neuroscience contribution will be evaluated by the judge

with extreme caution and critical sense.

Nevertheless, a presence of important minority voices also exists, trying to resize the employment

of these scientific techniques in judging someone guilty or not (Gulotta 2005). In these cases, the

focus is pointed on the only descriptive role and not explanatory of neuroscience, and emphasize

that their fortune depends probably from the emotional impact related to "a sort of deference to the

machines and neuroscientific techniques" (Zanardi, Barbini et al. 2008). Others point out that, even

if the results obtained with the new techniques prove to be true in a number of cases, these results

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do not correspond to the truth in any other percentage. Indeed, in the specific, it is questioned

whether the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging is able to meet, at present, the parameter

of the "error rate" (Kanwisher 2009).

In contrast of the use of fMRI and other techniques in law is the position of Alva Noë, professor of

philosophy at the University of Berkeley: “it is not true that we are our brain, but rather our brain

is a part of what we are. Our mind surpasses the limits of cranium” (Noë 2010).

The field of cognitive neuroscience holds the promise of investigating the operations of the mind in

terms of the physical operations of the brain. Some scholars suggest that our emerging

understanding of the physical causes of human behavior will have a changing effect on the law.

Surely neuroscience will change the law by transforming people's moral intuitions about free will

and responsibility. This change in moral outlook will result from a new appreciation of old

arguments, bolstered by vivid new illustrations provided by cognitive neuroscience (Greene and

Cohen 2004).

Therefore the topic is very fragile, and the neuroscientists and judges are divided between pro and

versus about using neuroscience in law: so far the idea that seems to be approved by the most is to

use scientific progress, but always with prudence and caution, still we are not sure totally about

truthfulness of this (Aharoni, Funk et al. 2008).

“Neuroscience will never find the brain correlate of responsibility because that is something

we ascribe to humans, not brains. It is a moral value we demand of our fellow, rule following

beings […]. Brains are not held responsible. Acting people are” (Gazzaniga 2005).

Surely discoveries in neuroscience (or in genetics or in psychology) will not completely

revolutionize the theory and practice of the law in the near future; but there are already some

important neuroscientific discoveries, which should impact on the law, and there will certainly be

many more over the next few years.

3 First steps in morality and free will studies

Neuroscientists and philosophers are quite controversial about the issue that decisions to

move are made unconsciously (Meynen 2013). Neuroscience critics highlight specific

methodological weaknesses of the studies that focus on this theme (Joordens, Spalek et al. 2004).

The nature of the underlying decision making processes has been questioned by philosophers and

they claim that the reported biological measures must index them (Melé 2009).

Here there are listed the most important experiments conducted in free will and conscious field:

firstly, I am going to detail Libet’s studies (Libet 1982, Libet, Gleason et al. 1983, Libet 1991, Libet

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1992, Libet 1993, Libet 1999), more focused on the concept of awareness and consciousness of

motor movement. The aim is to elucidate some important technical features compared to the age-old

question of determinism and free will and to answer a question that has been regarded as perhaps

the most challenging one facing science: how does the brain produce conscious subjective

experience, an awareness of something?

After this, I am going to move the attention on the social side of free will and implications on how

people decide and judge actions, focusing on Milgram and Zimbardo famous social experiments.

The first study measures the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who

manages them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Milgram devised his

psychological study to answer the popular question at that particular time: could it be that Eichmann

and his million accomplices in the Holocaust were just following orders? Could we call them all

accomplices? (Schulweis 2010).

Zimbardo’s research, based on Milgram’s experiment, was aimed to test the hypothesis that the

conditions and behavior were influenced by the social roles that people are expected to play, in this

case prisoners and prisoner guards (Githaiga 2008).

4 Are we our brain? The Timing of Mental Events: Libet’s experiments

Different studies underline that brain activity related to a decision can be seen before a

person reports being consciously aware of having taken that decision (Libet, Gleason et al. 1983,

Soon, Brass et al. 2008). If the neural events, decision-related brain activity, arise after the

conscious decision, then the conscious decision may be- or not- the cause of the neural events. But

if the beginning of the neural events occurs before the conscious decision, there is no way that the

conscious decision can be considered the cause of the neural events (Pockett 2007).

Benjamin Libet is known for the experiments conducted on how the brain produces conscious

awareness, on what the brain must do in order to produce a conscious experience, and he also

questioned the existence of free will when making a voluntary motor movement (Pierre 2014).

Though his important experimental discoveries, Libet underlines that brain needs about 500 ms of

activations in response to a somatosensory stimuli to elicit awareness of a sensation, shorter

durations don’t elicit any awareness of sensation. This period of activation is independent of the

frequency of stimulus pulses (Libet, Alberts et al. 1964, Libet 1967, Libet 1991, Libet 1992). There

is a delay at about 500 ms for sensory awareness even if the sensation is produced by a single pulse

applied to normal sources at the skin.

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The unconscious detection of a somatosensory stimulus can be caused by the activations of shorter

durations at the same intensity: an additional 400 ms of repetitive ascending inputs to the sensory

cortex converts an unconscious correct detection to a conscious sensory experience (Libet 1991).

Libet verified this condition by applying stimulus trains of different duration (0-750 ms) to a

subject’s ascending sensory pathway in the thalamus and having the subject face a panel with 2

buttons, each of which could be lit up alternatively for 1 second. The subject must then tell in which

of the two periods the stimulus was delivered, telling his level of awareness about the stimulus. The

results underline that the difference between the awareness condition and the no awareness

condition is due to an increase in stimulus duration.

Libet bears also on the idea that the subjective timing of the input is referred backward in time to

coincide with the starter primary elicited response of the sensory cortex to the stimulus: this

mechanism is represented by the primary evoked cortical response . The skin induced experiences

appears subjectively as if there were no delay. So we are supplied with a neural mechanism that

accounts for subjective feeling which we become aware of a sensory signal virtually immediately,

even though there is a delay.

A second important concept showed by Libet is provided by an experiment in which subjects, who

were fixing their gaze on the center of an oscilloscope’s face arranged like a usual clock, were asked

to perform a freely action, flection of the wrist or of the finger, any time they felt like doing it. The

subjects have also to associate their first awareness of the intention to act with the clock position of

the revolving light spot: “wanting or wishing to move”. From the result of this trial, Libet observed

that the process leading to a freely voluntary act started by the brain unconsciously, before the

conscious will to act appears (at about 550 ms before), thanks to a comparison between W,

“wanting or wishing to move”, and RPs, an initiating process, “readiness potential” (RP) or

Bereitschaftspotential (Kornhuber and Deecke 1965) (Figure 1).

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Even though Libet’s studies are concerning concepts of awareness and consciousness of decision

and perception, we can easily draw conclusions connected to moral judgment, considering this

studies as first step of our field of interest.

In fact, Libet's findings proposed that decisions made by a subject are first being made on a

subconscious level and only afterward being translated into a "conscious decision", and that the

subject's belief that it occurred at the behest of his will was only due to his retrospective perspective

on the event. In addition to this, subjects that have planned an act can veto it during the last 100-200

ms before the expected time of the action.

What do these concepts tell us about free will? Knowing the neural mechanisms of decision making,

can we say that our choices are free?

Libet refused to accept such an implication. A lot of scholars think that there is no such thing as free

will that is too unpalatable to be contemplated. Some of them have tried to avoid the conclusion that

Libet’s experiments entail the illusory nature of free will by debating that the movements in Libet’s

paradigm are far simpler than those to which the term free will should reasonably be applied. In

addition to this, Libet’s subjects reported only an ‘‘urge’’ to move, which is something different

from a decision (Melé 2006).

Surely, after these experiments we can affirm that an act that the subject perceives as being entirely

voluntary is probably not started by what the subject thinks is a conscious decision to act, but by

something else, something unknown, preconscious, neural events (Libet 2000).

“If we are sometimes mistaken about the causes of our actions, might we always be

mistaken? At the very least, the fallibility of our intuitions regarding autonomy shows that

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any satisfactory defense of free will must go beyond merely appealing to the intuition that we

have it. If neuroscience shows us anything, it fallibility of our intuitions when it comes to

understanding the origins of our actions” (Morris 2009).

Interesting studies recently conducted on the topic, of particular note the recent work of Schultze-

Kraft and colleagues in 2016, which has investigated the possibility to delete a movement after the

appearance of the Readiness Potential. Participants were able to put a veto on the movement after

the appearance of the Readiness Potential but previously the onset of the movement itself. This

shows that you can cancel a move up to 200 ms before the start of the action.

5 “The banality of evil”: social influence on willingness

It is necessary for the issue we are discussing to shed light on the impact that social

influence can exercise on someone’s willingness, due to the large scope of this field.

The matter that we want to approach is if we could all become very aggressive and evil in a specific

condition of degradation or obligation, or if subjects that commit criminal acts are different from all

the others; if they have some particular predispositions to evil or if in bad conditions everyone could

commit offences and violations.

The experiments that are shown below are evidence of what is known as “banality of evil”. This

term was first used in Hannah Arendt’s account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a paramilitary and a

German official, who was considered one of the major operational managers of the extermination of

Jews in Nazi Germany (Cesarani 2004). Despite this, Hannah Arendt states that he was not a

psychopath but a diligent and efficient bureaucratic person and that tyranny seems to be a natural

and unavoidable consequence of humans’ inherent motivation to make curved to the will of one

authority (Vaknin 2007).

Much of the power of Milgram and Zimbardo’s research come from the concept that it appears to

give empirical substance to the claim that evil is banal, “our desire to be good subjects is stronger

than our desire to be subjects who do good” (Novick 1999). They helped consolidate a growing

conformity bias in which the focus on compliance is so strong to obscure evidence of resistance and

disobedience.

Milgram's series of obedience experiments and Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment are

probably the two best-known psychological studies contesting the nature of conforming and the

obedience to authority and remain two of the most inspired contributions in the field of social

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psychology (Haslam and Reicher 2012). This research has been included to display that people

conform passively and unthinkingly to both the behest that authorities give.

5.1 Milgram’s experiment

“When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes

have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name

of rebellion. If you doubt that, read William Shirer’s "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." The

German Officer Corps were brought up in the most rigorous code of obedience…In the

name of obedience they were party to, and assisted in, the most wicked large scale actions in

the history of the world” (Milgram 1963).

Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment (1960) of a man that would administer lethal electric

shocks to a stranger at the order of an authority figure remains critical to understanding obedience

(Slater, Antley et al. 2006).

The experiment was conducted on the grounds of the laboratory of the Yale University, detail that

underlines the perceived legitimacy of the project. Members of the general public adhere voluntarily

to an experimental study on memory. They find themselves cast in the role of a “teacher” that

consists in administering electric shocks (from 15 V to 450 V in 15 V increments) to a victim, the

“learner”, every time he doesn’t succeed to recall in a word memory experiment. The responses of

the victim, Milgram’s confederate, are standardized.

As the experiment proceeds, the naive subject is forced to deliver increasingly more intense shocks

to the victim, even reaching the level marked “Danger: Severe Shock” (from 15V to 450V). It was

specified that the punishment must always be harder than the one administered before, if the subject

kept missing the answer. The subject refuses to continue the experiment when internal resistances

become stronger. This behavior is considered “disobedience”, and instead the behavior that appears

before this rupture is called “obedience”. The maximum intensity shock that the subject administers

before his rejection to go on represents the quantitative value assigned to the subject’s performance.

Contrary to expectations, all participants proves willing to administer shocks of 300 V and 65% go

up to 450 V. This appears to provide compelling evidence that normal well-adjusted men would be

willing to kill a complete stranger simply because they were forced to do so by an authority

(Haslam and Reicher 2012).

Through this experiment, Milgram tried to explain how it had been possible to justify the Holocaust

as the result of obedience to an authority figure, even though we are all aware of the different

conditions of Milgram’s experiment compared to the World War.

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“What are the limits of obedience? We’re tried to define more than one time. We’ve insert

victim’s shout of pain in the experiment: these weren’t enough. The victim lament because of

cardiac disorder: subjects went on to obey experimenter’s orders. The victim requested for

being released and stopped to answer: the subjects went on to push the buttons” (Milgram

1968).

After this experiment, Milgram proceed to manage 18 experimental variations of the first one,

changing only one social psychological variable and observing its impact on the extent of obedience

to the unjust authority pressure to continue to shock the “learner”. The results highlight the pliability

of human nature, indeed almost everyone could be totally obedient or almost everyone could resist

authority pressures and this depends on the situational variables Milgram introduced in each study.

He was able to demonstrate that compliance rates could soar to 90 percent of the people who

delivered the maximum 450 volts to the Learner-Victim, or could be reduced to less than 10 percent

of total obedience by introducing one variable into the compliance recipe. In order to obtain

maximum obedience it is necessary and sufficient to provide social models of compliance by having

participants observe peers behaving obediently. Instead of obtaining people to resist to someone’s

pressure in which it is necessary and sufficient to provide social models of peers who rebelled.

Different studies have replicated this one and confirmed this conclusion (Slater, Antley et al. 2006),

not simply applying this experiment to obedience research but to all social and psychological ones,

but on the other hand, others had shed light on the limits of this experiment refuting the principles

on which it is based (Haslam and Reicher 2012).

5.2 Zimbardo’s experiment

"How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our

planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended after only

six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In

only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and

showed signs of extreme stress. Please read the story of what happened and what it tells us

about the nature of human nature” (Zimbardo 2012).

Philip Zimbardo was interested in expanding Milgram’s research: he studied the impact of

the detention, observing the interaction between and within two groups of subjects in absence of an

authority, setting up an experiment, known as “Zimbardo’ Stanford experiment” (Zimbardo 1973).

In the project, he paid attention to variables of anonymity of places and persons, which contribute in

producing states of deindividuation, of dehumanization of victims.

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Zimbardo used a basement of Stanford’ University as a prison and then selected 24 undergraduate

students to play the roles of both prisoners and guards. After a detailed and precise psychological

evaluation, that assessed the participants as physically and mentally healthy and without any history

of being involved in drugs or violence, subjects were randomly divided between two different roles,

guards and prisoners. Another precondition was the absence of any prior training in how to play the

randomly assigned roles of prisoner and guard, leaving that up to each subject's prior societal

learning of the meaning of prisons and to the behavioral scripts associated with roles (Zimbardo

1971).

Prisoners had to stay in prison for 24 hours a day for the whole duration of the study and on the

other hand guards were assigned to work in teams made up of three people for 8-hour shifts, after

which they were allowed to return to their homes until their next shift (Zimbardo 1999).

The experiment extended over a two-week period to provide the research participants with

sufficient time to become fully engaged in their experimentally assigned roles of either guards or

prisoners, but it had to be stopped after just 6 days due to the fact that the interactions between

guards and prisoners were hostile or even dehumanizing (Zimbardo 1971).

The Stanford Prison Experiment demonstrated how the situation and the covered roles could play a

powerful part in acting human behavior. In fact, the negative situational forces overwhelmed the

positive dispositional tendencies (Zimbardo 2001). Pacifist young men were behaving sadistically

as guards, inflicting humiliation, pain and suffering on other young men if they had the inferior

human status of prisoner and some of them even reported they were enjoying doing so (Myers and

Hansen 2011). Others, who had been intelligent, healthy college students were behaving

pathologically, many having so extreme "emotional breakdowns" typical of stress disorders that five

of them had to be dismissed within the first week. Their fellow prisoners who adapted better to the

situation were those who mindlessly followed orders, became blindly obedient to authority and

allowed the guards to dehumanize and degrade them ever more with each passing day and night

(Myers and Hansen 2011). The Evil situation triumphed over the Good people. The question that

arose from the experiment is if it is possible that the responsible of tragedies and murders are all

monsters with particular genetic predispositions. Zimbardo defined the process highlighted by his

experiment “Lucifer effect”: the effect due to those factors that can create a "perfect storm" which

leads good people to engage in evil actions (De Vos 2010).

“The experiment disclosed like an efficient illustration of the potentially toxic role of evil

systems and evil situations to induce good persons to behave in a psycho pathological way,

extraneous to their nature. […] the border between right and wrong is showed very permeable.

[…] the germ of insanity could be planted in the garden of everyone” (Zimbardo 1971).

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6 Final thoughts

Despite the breadth of consensus about the “banality of evil” that is given prominence in

different fields, in recent years different scholars underlined and re-questioned the underpinnings of

this issue, shedding also light on the limits of Milgram’s and Zimbardo’s experiment (Druckman

and Kam 2009).

In particular, the first experiment raised questions about research ethics of scientific

experimentation because of the extreme emotional stress and inflicted insight suffered by the

participants. Milgram attributed this ethical criticism to the unwelcome truths about human nature

revealed by hid research (Russell 2011).

Different studies highlighted that the primary depend measure (flicking a switch) offers few

opportunities for creativity in carrying out the task. Several Milgram’s findings got away from

standard reviews in which the paradigm is depicted as only yielding up evidence of obedience. The

baseline study is not typical of the different variants of the paradigm that Milgram conducted.

Despite a percentage of subjects going up to 450 V and some from 0 to 65%, the majority of

participants chose not to go this far (Haslam and Reicher 2012)

The participants continue with the experiment in front of the order “The experiment requires that

you continue” but if the Experimenter gives them a direct order like “You have no choice”,

participants usually stop. Therefore, the Milgram studies seem to be less about people blindly

conforming to orders than about getting people to believe in the importance of what they are doing

(Haslam and Reicher 2012).

On the other hand, the studies that focus on Zimbardo’s experiment questioned if the conformity to

the rules in prison was the primary cause of guard brutality. Indeed Zimbardo’s assertion was

“behavioral scripts associated with the dispositional roles of prisoners and guard were the sole

guidance” and instead of this he told them “you can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a

sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally

controlled by us, by the system, you, me… We're going to take away their individuality in various

ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness” (Zimbardo 1971). Contrary to

the banality of evil thesis, the Zimbardo-inspired tyranny was made possible by the active

engagement of enthusiasts rather than the led conformity of automatons.

Despite these criticism, Milgram’s and Zimbardo's experiments remain important studies in our

understanding of how the situation can influence human behavior. As such, they can be understood

15

as central to the broad process of “psychologization” in the post Second World War era (Salem

1993).

In particular, these discoveries put light on the conformism, describing the fundamental relationship

between the group of reference and the individual person. A subject who has neither ability nor

expertise to make decisions, especially in a crisis, will leave decision making to the group and its

hierarchy. The group is the person's behavioral model and on the agentic state wherein, for

Milgram, "the essence of obedience consists in the fact that a person comes to view themselves as

the instrument for carrying out another person's wishes, and they therefore no longer see

themselves as responsible for their actions. Once this critical shift of viewpoint has occurred in the

person, all of the essential features of obedience follow” (Nissani 1990).

Concerning the problem of the freedom of decisions, these findings support the situational

explanation of behavior rather than the dispositional one and give centrality to the roles that people

play, shaping their deep behavior and attitudes.

If one cannot be responsible for consequences of one's acts due to factors beyond one's control or

for antecedents of one's acts that are properties of temperament not subject to one's will, or for the

circumstances that pose one's moral choice in how we can be responsible even for the stripped

down acts of the will itself, if they are the product of antecedent circumstances outside of the will's

control? It should be obvious that there is a connection between these problems about responsibility

and control and an even more familiar issue, that of moral judgment (Nagel and Waldmann 2013).

In particular, the belief in free will arises from the requirements of social systems, specifically the

need to regulate one’s own behavior: choosing to do (or not to do) this or that, and from the need to

regulate the behavior of others (i.e., moral judgment and punishment) (Clark, Luguri et al. 2014).

16

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