Cases of Obedience in the Abu Ghraib Case

The acts of torture performed on the inmates at Abu Ghraib were both cruel and inhumane. But what if the reason the guards tortured the inmates was due to the result of obedience from their superiors. The cause of the torture of the prisoners at Abu Ghraib could have stemmed from situational factors instead of the will of a few aggressive soldiers. Authority figures that use persuasive methods can be very influential. There are many circumstantial possibilities as to why the guards treated the prisoners cruelly. Most people don’t attribute the torture to many situational and external causes. In this case, most people attribute the torture to the internal faults of the guards when it could very well be outside sources at fault.

Fear could have been a powerful persuasive technique used by the authority figures. From the looks of the pictures, the conditions at Abu Ghraib were a scary environment to begin with. Scaring the guards may have been a reason they obeyed and performed the acts they did.

…fear appeals can effectively persuade under the following four conditions: (1) the target of the message is convinced that the dangers mentioned are serious; (2) the target is convinced that the dangers are quite probable; (3) the target is convinced that the recommendations to avoid the dangers will be effective; and (4) the target believes that he or she can competently take the recommended action (Franzoi 206).

These fearful conditions could have been met at Abu Ghraib. The “target, better known as the guard were; (1) probably convinced that they would be reprimanded if did not follow orders; (2) the target thought that the authority figure would indeed carry out a punishment for disobedience; (3) the target was convinced that the punishment would have been severe; (4) the target knew he/she could complete the awful requests. If these conditions were met the, guards were persuaded by the authorities.

The involvement of the guards was obvious; they were doing their jobs. If they were ordered to torture the prisoners, and it was not from free will aggression, they were mostly issue involved. “Issue involvement is a type of involvement in which the attitudinal issue under consideration has important consequences for the self” (Franzoi, 2003, Pg 217). Once again, fear could have been an issue in the persuasion of the guards. The guards realized that they had to do their jobs and act in compliance with orders or face the consequences.

In many of the torture pictures at Abu Ghraib, the prisoners are wearing bags on their heads or something to mask their face. The supervisors of the jail could have masked the inmates to make the guards feel less responsible about the vicious acts. Since the victim was masked and cannot tell who is torturing them, a kind of separation is created between the guard and the inmate. “The results are also unequivocal in relation to the distance from the direct exertion of violence: the greater the distance, the less the subjects feel responsible and the greater the obedience” (Meeus & Raaijmakers 159).

By masking the prisoners a sense of deindividualization and lack of self-awareness occurred because the soldier knows that the inmate does not know who he/she is. “Without such self-awareness, the deindividuated don’t think of themselves as separate individuals and do not attend to their own inner values and behavioral standards” (Franzoi 336). With this sense of deindividualization, the guards performed actions they normally would not ever do. Since they remained anonymous with the inmates they could have felt at ease knowing they would not be blamed.

Breaking a social norm is always a hard thing to do once they are firmly established. “Social norms are expected standards of behavior and beliefs established and enforced by a group” (Franzoi 281). The group is the authorities at the prison camp and possibly other guards and staff members present. Most definitely there was a social norm that punishing the inmates was acceptable. The photographic evidence agrees with this. There are pictures of guards giving the “thumbs up” and smiling in pictures as prisoners are tortured naked in the background. Assuming that the guards were ordered to torture the prisoners at Abu Ghraib, another reason they may have proceeded with the torture could have come from the intent on not breaking the social norm and dealing with its social ramifications.

Abu Ghraib also has three traits that psychologist Herbert Kelman has described as necessary for torture: authorization, routinization, and dehumanization. To translate this jargon, authorization means that “someone with power needs to say that extreme measures are acceptable.” (Szegedy-Maszak) In a separate interview, Pfc. Lynndie England revealed