STANDFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT

Stanford Prison Experiment



Stanford Prison Experiment

Introduction

Those who have heard of Philip Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Stanford University, know about his Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo recently published The Lucifer Effect, which is an account of that experiment conducted in 1971. Professor Zimbardo is one of those extraordinary social scientists who have demonstrated a rather startling phenomenon in human relations. The interpretation of that phenomenon is dependent on a person's understanding of the way that groups can influence and shape individual behavior. It is interesting and disturbing to see how ordinary individuals can become persecutors and predators of their own peers. All that is necessary is a group structure that permits and encourages the scapegoating and dehumanization of one subgroup by another.

Discussion

There has been a lot of discussion and debate over the abuse and torture faced by prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. This has invoked a renewed interest in the earlier experiments of obedience. There have been other experiments similar to Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment. Milgram and Miller's studies have been replicated many times, and they demonstrate that inhibitions that prevent people from causing physical and psychological pain in fellow human beings can readily disappear under certain social conditions. Zimbardo's video seems to corroborate this conclusion.

In Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment, 24 male college students were randomly assigned the role of either prisoner or guard. Police arrested the "prisoners" and brought them in handcuffs to the detention center in the psychology building of the Stanford campus, converted to closely resemble an actual prison environment. Guards wore uniforms of authority and were given the power to manipulate the lives and living conditions of their prisoners, who were referred to by numbers, not names. Zimbardo narrates the video and says at one point, "Imprisonment is about power, dominance, and mastery." On the second day of the experiment, the prisoners rebelled against the guards' demands. The guards put down the rebellion by punishing and isolating its leader. They inflicted communal punishment on the other prisoners, manipulating them to shame and blame their leader for creating more hardship for diem. Each day the guards escalated their dominance over prisoners, demanding more of them and punishing those who refused to comply. The guards exercised control over all aspects of the prisoners' lives, creating a sense of powerlessness and a loss of identity. The verbal abuse, sexual humiliation, and sadism by the guards increased to such a level that by the sixth day Zimbardo cancelled the experiment, eight days short of the planned ending.

How Zimbardo came to abort the experiment is riveting. He admits that he had become so identified with his role as prison administrator that he failed to see the abuse and damage that he was perpetrating. It took the protests of someone outside the system to alert him of the harm he was doing. Christina Maslach, a graduate student who later became his wife, fought with him to end the experiment, and eventually got him to relent and bring it to a ...