The Power of the Context

Currently, Nigeria is being rocked by days of nationwide protests against police brutality following numerous allegations of harassment and extortion by a controversial police unit known as the Special Anti — Robbery Squad (SARS) [1]. The interesting thing about the SARS police unit is that the government has permitted them to do whatever they want to stop crime in Nigeria [2]. A similar kind of incident happened in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003, where American soldiers tortured and abused Iraqi prisoners in brutal ways. “We hurt people, and not just physically, we destroyed them emotionally, and… I think at the very least it’s a just punishment for us that we suffer some of those consequences, too” [3]. These were the words of an American soldier who was in the Abu Ghraib prison at that time which implies the horrid nature of that incident. If we observe these two incidents, we can see that there are a few similar factors in these two incidents. On both occasions, the context seems to be rewarding and encouraging for foul behaviour. Is this the reason for the above incidents? Let’s talk about it today.

To talk about that, let’s look into one of the most controversial experiments ever conducted in the history of psychology, ‘The…