Preventing the next Abu Gharib

The cruelty of Military Police guards at Abu Ghraib prison contributed to American shame and questions regarding how such cruelty emerges. The accepted approach of "situational attribution theory" - based upon Zimbardo's (1973, 2007) social psychological perceptions and results of the Stanford Prison Experiment - proposed that personality or "disposition" has little role in the emergence of such cruelty. Termed "institutional cruelty," this manuscript presents the possibility that understandings and preventive measures afforded by situational attribution theory can be extended via acknowledgement of a greater role played by disposition. Psychoanalytic and object relations approaches are presented to this end. The manuscript addresses the most puzzling characteristics of institutional cruelty: 1) rapidity of onset, taking days or, at most, weeks for initial expression, 2) emergence in ordinary, normal individuals, and 3) emergence in the "mock" situation of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Criminological, organizational culture, and social psychological theories are explored for their application to institutional cruelty.