The Stanford Prison Experiment's Torture Hermeneutics: Difference and Morality in the US University, 1968 to 9/11

Abstract

Beginning with Talal Asad's (2007) claim that torture is a hermeneutic, this article investigates the ongoing relationship between torture and the US university's primary ways of making meaning about racialized difference. The Stanford prison experiment is routinely referenced as a seminal study revealing why people engage in torture. Through a close reading of Philip Zimbardo's The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, the major account of the SPE, I raise concerns about how torture is used to enable moral development and to promote an understanding of difference as a “problem” to be managed by institutionalized diversity projects.