> I'm not a psychologist ... > that's the whole idea behind prison guard training! If you insist on studying these scenarios in a sterile, painstakingly-ethica

> I'm not a psychologist ... > that's the whole idea behind prison guard training! If you insist on studying these scenarios in a sterile, painstakingly-ethical Thing is though, when the behaviour emerges you can't see if it's to do with the training, or the mere adoption of the prison guard role. When you "condition" your participants to behave in a particular way then that can become a confounding factor and then when it comes time to appraise the results you can be left scratching your head. Precisely what you want to understand when an Abu Ghraib scenario occurs is whether it could be the training or innate characteristic emerging from the role. Of course you could do a between-groups study where some were conditioned and some weren't but what would that prove? That the conditioning had the expected effect?