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November 23, 2006
The identity trap
I signed up for the upcoming "Internet Identity Workshop” happening at Computer History Museum (Dec 4th-6th, 2006)
On the occasion of the workshop, I want to recall the power of identity from the famous "Stanford Prison Experiment" which I learned about from Peter Senge's classic book “Fifth Discipline".
There was this experiment done at Stanford University during 70s. A researcher named Philip Zimbardo wanted to setup a mock prison experiment. Volunteers played the roles of guards and prisoners and lived in a mockup prison. Though the experiment was planned for two weeks, it had to be called off on sixth day since the situation got out of hand.
They advertised in local newspapers for volunteers for a mock prison experiment. Out of the people responded (mostly students), they did a psychological profile and picked a very healthy bunch of youth. Then they split the team into guards and prisoners on a random basis. They created mock prison cells in the basement of psychology department. On the first day of experiment, the prisoner volunteers were picked up from their homes by police and charged with fictitious charges.
Both the volunteer prisoners and the volunteer guards took their identities seriously. The guards really turned sadistic towards the prisoners. Some of the prisoners turned violent and some of them were really depressed. Some of the prisoners were released on third itself because of mental break down. The whole experiment had to be abandoned on the sixth day.
Even though, this whole thing was supposed to be a mock up experiment, within few days of mock identities, people really became those identities. This experiment really showed the power of "identity masks" we wear upon ourselves. Some times this mask is tagged on us by the external world. Even though we have power to see beyond these masks, in reality we get overpowered by the "identity trap".
Identity is a trap which even the sanest of people can not escape from.
Buddhism talks of illusion of a real core at the center of the self. The illusion of self is created by the various identity masks we wear upon. Even though they are just masks, the effect of the mask itself is so powerful that the illusion looks very real.
Next few years seem pretty critical for the development of identity abstractions on the internet. Identity is very deep concept. There are lots of good things happening in the identity space but there are lots of deep theoretical issues to understand. I am pretty excited to be at the workshop.
Posted by nachiketa at November 23, 2006 11:41 PM