Two days into the good doctor's experiment, the normal, adjusted students were playing their prison roles with frightening reality. The "prisoners," fed up with having roll calls in the middle of the night, rebelled by pushing their beds against their cell bars and refusing to come out. The "guards" called in reinforcements, pulled the prisoners from their cells, striped them naked, and proceeded to humiliate and abuse them for hours. To further reinforce their power, the guards took away bathroom privileges and forced prisoners to urinate and defecate in buckets inside their cells, and to later clean the mess out with their bare hands. It got worse — so bad that Zimbardo halted the planned two-week study after only six days.

Fast forward to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and Zimbardo sees a connection. While American officials have been blaming the situation on "a few bad apples," Zimbardo told MTV News it's more like "a bad barrel converting good apples into bad apples." "When people are deindividualized, they are usually put in herds, or groups, and given numbers. Their identity is taken away," Zimbardo said. "[In Abu Ghraib] the guards had a mob mentality, a group mindset. You start to do things because other people in your group are doing them."

A lack of training, combined with the "Lord of the Flies effect", does not, in our view, give the guards at Abu Ghraib a pass for their actions. It does, however, place more blame on U.S. officials who should have predicted-- and taken steps to prevent-- the abuse.

Update: Read more by Van Jones at Alternet, Abuse From Sea to Shining Sea.