Attitudes entails behaviors, emotions and beliefs that an individual have towards a person, object, thing or event. Attitudes come from experiences, learning, observations and conditioning, and can be changed. A change of attitude involves altering what a person believes in, his or her emotions and behaviors. Attribution involves inferring the root cause of behavior. For example, what happened at Abu Ghraib prison may be attributed to a culture among the guards or the prison itself.
The Asch Conformity Experiment is one of the contribution of Solomon Asch in psychology. In his experiment Asch discovered that people have the will to do wrong in order to fit in a group or gain accurate knowledge. The social concepts in the Asch paradigm are; human beings have a need of social ties and can do what is wrong in order to attain it, people have expectations of how others should behave and may ignore what is right as they pursue their pre-existing beliefs (Cherry K., 2020), and people tend to believe an individual behavior reflects his or her personality. But, the fact is some behaviors are as a result of a situation a person is in. For example, a nurse may help a patient while at the hospital because that is his or her roles, the same nurse may decline to offer his or her help outside the workplace.
The actions of guards at Abu Ghraib prison can be described using the Asch Conformity Experiment. The guards after the discovery of the scandal were charged with similar offences that included maltreatment, assault, dereliction of duty, battery, conspiracy and cruelty among others (CNN, 2021). The similarity of the charges shows the guards were involved in the same misconducts. That clearly indicates the guards were copying what others were doing.
The guards were influenced by their colleagues. This can be due to copying the experienced soldier’s habits or a desire to be like the rest guards in the prison. The inexperienced guards perhaps were conforming to what their seniors were doing. They took inhumane acts as a personality of their leaders and chose to conform to bogus behavior. When the majority of people are doing what is wrong, the few on the right course are swayed by popular opinion and that is what happened at Abu Ghraib prison (Cherry K., 2020).
The idea of the guards conforming to what is wrong can be changed by cultivating values such as a need for being unique. There may be an injustice culture in the prison guards but the new prison guards can decide not to conform to it. Though, this may create a bad relationship between conformist and nonconformist. But, should one agree with what is wrong in order to have a good working environment?
In conclusion, the attitudes of an individual should be worked on consistently so that an individual does not conform to what is wrong as was the case of the guards. It is evident that when guards are leaving training camps, they make a commitment to remain on the right course despite the situation or the people around. But, that commitment changes with time due to a change in attitude.
