Jay Van Bavel

Who they are

The sources used for this site give Van Bavel's name and the paper, and no reliable account of his position, so this page does not state one. The paper's own record lists him as one of three authors, with Haslam and Reicher as first and second.

His appearance on the paper is worth noting because it widens the set of researchers behind the identity-leadership reading beyond the two who ran the BBC Prison Study. It remains a single paper, and what can be said about his wider work is limited to what the sources for this site contain, which is nothing beyond this paper.

Key papers

Haslam, S. A., Reicher, S. D., & Van Bavel, J. J. (2019). Rethinking the nature of cruelty: The role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment. American Psychologist, 74(7), 809-822. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0000443

The paper was published online on 5 August 2019 and in the October issue of the journal. It revisits the view that assigning people to a harmful role is enough to produce cruelty. The authors argue instead that cruelty is more likely when leaders persuade people that their actions serve a noble group cause, and that archive material shows the experimenters directly encouraged the guards to adopt tough roles.

Key ideas

The paper's central term is identity leadership: the way a leader frames a group's cause so that harm to others reads as service to the group. The authors apply it to the Stanford tapes. In a Scientific American account of the paper, the authors report that the warden used collective pronouns 57 times in one short conversation, about once every 30 words, against once every 79 words for winning politicians and once every 136 for losing candidates. The same account describes a later study by Jared Bartels in which people reading the guard orientation script, nearly fifty years on, assumed hostility was expected of them.

The authors link the argument to Milgram's obedience studies, and they note that some guards resisted the abuse, asking that resistance be studied as closely as leadership.

The paper is one side of an active dispute. Zimbardo and Haney replied to the 2019 papers in a 2020 comment that was not opened for this page, and a joint statement of 28 August 2018 signed by Zimbardo, Haney, Haslam and Reicher agrees that traditional accounts understate how much the experimenters intervened. Van Bavel was not a signatory to that statement.

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