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The Stanford Prisoner Experiment - 40 Years On
cheros writes "It's now 40 years ago that the Stanford prisoner experiment went ugly so quickly it had to be aborted. Stanford has an interesting piece called The Menace Within that looks back on this momentous psychological experiment. From the article: 'What happened in the basement of the psych building 40 years ago shocked the world. How do the guards, prisoners and researchers in the Stanford Prison Experiment feel about it now?'"
And it all started to make sense.
I thought it was expanded to most modern IT departments ;-)
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I've long come to suspect the "experiment" was a politically motivated fake to demonstrate fascist tendencies in humans. It doesn't ring true, nor has it ever been backed up by other experiments. Prison guard abuse is real, but the conclusions of the study are much too broad.
By the way, Zimbardo's book about it, The Lucifer Effect is absolutely fascinating. The way they all got so pulled into the experiment is just crazy. Luckily, Zimbardo's grad student girlfriend came around. You see Zimbardo got so pulled into his own role as the experimenter/warden that he lost site of the fact that the experiment had become extremely inhumane and he needed to stop it. They needed new eyes to come in and end it.
What is even more interesting than Zimbardo not ending the thing was the prisoners not ending it. After all, they weren't actually prisoners. They should have just walked away.
He also has a fascinating discussion on Abu Ghraib. He discusses the personalities involved in the events and how it led to it. (The sociopath who started it. His girlfriend Lindy England, who got pulled in. The leader of the facility who couldn't pull the situation under control and who's appeals to superiors fell on death ears.)
It is amazing that we do actually live in a world where people willing become slaves. This experiment gave us great insights into social psychology.
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Now imagine this same experiment being done for for several years instead of days and with no one to step in when things get out of hand.
Now imagine if the guards were told the prisoners were evil terrorists.
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Probably the most important social psychology experiment ever. It's totally transformed the way the United States is governed.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Stanford prison experiment
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
Now imagine the same experiment being done when none of the participants are smoking pot or doing other drugs.
I am not a number, I am a free man
This experiment is being conducted right now by the TSA.
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Oh.. but it has been repeated recently...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8571929.stm
This is from 2010.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The German movie Das Experiment is based on this experiment. Although they exaggerate quite a lot towards the end, first few days of the movie are real. Overall, an entertaining watch.
After the Milgram Experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment) of 1961, were the SPE results so surprising?
I'm no psychologist and I know many psychologists have reviewed the experiment, so I'm pretty sure many of them already considered, and probably dismissed, this possibility: maybe the guards acted so badly not because they were in a position of power but bbecause they were in a game where no action would have long term consequences. The "it's just a game" and "it's just for fun" are extremely common excuses for inacceptable behavior.
The way they all got so pulled into the experiment is just crazy. Luckily, Zimbardo's grad student girlfriend came around.
This is one of the most fascinating insights: it's not crazy but typical. These were students who tested average on psychological exams (to the extent you can measure average), and still did these atrocious acts on people just like themselves. On fellow students whose only crime was the flip of a coin. Want further evidence? See the Milgram experiment, where 2/3rds of people were willing to kill another person because an authority figure told them to. Not bad apples, not racists, not evil doers, not terrorists, just people--you and me and our neighbors.
The experiments are no longer allowed in psychiatric studies, but are allowed in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Egypt (under Mubarak, not sure about now), Romania, Israel (where torture testimony is admissible), Afghanistan, and others. Where is Zimbardo's girlfriend now? You, me, our neighbors?
The simple conclusion demonstrated by this experiment is that, while sometimes people will live up to others' expectations for them, we we have an even stronger tendency to live down to what's expected of us. I think Richard Yacco (a "prisoner") made the most insightful comment in the article:
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
lots of archival footage from 1970 plus interviews from 2002
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=677084988379129606
I'm not sure if everyone should go though the experiment per se, but certainly societies would benefit if everyone was taught about it, and human behaviour and moral in general.
Germany in the 1930s and 1940s after the Nazional Sozialists had grabbed control of the government (and the media) is a very good case study of what happens when sections of population are labelled "enemies", "unfit" and eventually even sub-human. There the perpetrators had been brainwashed with a sense of injustice and anger over post-WWI suffering and the domestic "unfits" (based on propaganda definitions) were made scapegoats.
Yet repression and murder in even larger scale took place after the Nazi "experiment" - in the gulags and laogai under Stalin's and Mao's communist party dictatorships.
Arguably the Chinese were the most brutal in the treatment of their enemies (something to do with the traditional art of torture and the domestic imperial history there?). Under the territories invaded by Mao's red army the foreign enemies (like Tibetans, Mongolians and Uighurs) were easy to identify as they didn't share any of the sinized Han-people's charasteristics - they were also commonly treated as sub-humans for that very reason (Tibetans as devout buddhists were targeted for particularly brutal punishment), but after the initial phase of Chinese military expansion and consolidation something unique happened: Mao's "Cultural Revolution".
While the title sounds deceptively docile, the reality was anything but. Here, in mid-60s, Mao decided that "old thinking" had to go. All of it. A horde of young, maoism-indoctrinated youth were given the authority / order to challenge anything that could somehow be perceived to contradict the infamous Mao's red book. For about a decade _everyone_ was an enemy unless he or she could prove the Red Guards - often by committing acts of brutality against "other enemies" - his or her blind loyalty to the "cause" of New China. One of the saddest representations of this was the widespread turning of children against their own parents who had until then loved and cared for them! The loyalty towards one's family had to be destroyed as it threatened the absolute power of the Party.
After the Tiananmen massacre in 1989 that Party held an emergency meeting in Beijing and after coming to the conclusion that communism as a political doctrine or economic model simply wasn't effective any longer, they decided - internally - to switch de facto doctrines to Confucianism (as nationalistic philosophy) and... national socialism (adapted to globalist markets), with capitalist/corporatist carrots for the Party's inner core (the leading families of "PRC" are now fabulously wealthy!). Old communist propaganda is still being played out as a justification for the Party's "legitimacy" though, and such propaganda is still key part of everyday control in poorer inland parts of China and especially in the occupied territories annexed through military force. Foreigners are still depicted as criminals who haven't paid for their sins over the "humiliation of China", although various "domestic movements" there (not forgetting the bloody war by communists themselves against the Republic of China) account for the vast majority of human cost and every other once wholly western-ruled nation (incl. the multi-cultural India) has gotten over their past "humiliation". What does needing artificial external enemies say about China's ruling dictatorship itself?
Blind obedience, often in order to benefit oneself or to save one's own life, and the accompanying willingness to inflict suffering on others... it tends to go together with ignorance (then redefining) of morality (right vs wrong, perceived or imaginary injustice), absolute propaganda to shape the population's value models and numbing violence and abuse.
I believe we have enough examples of abuse of authority by now. What we need is to actually make learning about them, and morality and philosophy in general, a truly intergral part of education so that most p
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
I don't think that the events of the experiment are in any way unexpected, with the exception of Zimbardo's girlfriend intervening.
I think quite highly of Zimbardo, so I don't believe it's his fault. It's because of all of our social conditioning.
We're never schooled in ethics. We're only occasionally *sometimes* told the difference between right and wrong, but overall we're just expected to know where these concepts are without a map. Breaking a promise is wrong, but when the principal wants to know something you promised to keep secret, see if he thinks ethics is a good excuse.
Schools teach compliance in a big way. Government and industry and pretty much everyone in charge will tell you that it's no use - there's nothing you can do. Be on the wrong side of a policeman, prosecutor, judge, politician, your boss, or the town council to see what I mean.
And even if anyone knows where the boundaries of ethics lie, there's no real chance to practice the decisions in the field. In any emotional situation your cognitive functions shut down and you rely completely on stored habits. That's a survival tactic - the stored programs can be executed very fast without spending any time to think - but it means that if you haven't set up any mental patterns to recognize injustice and speak out against it it won't happen during a situation where it's needed. Only after the fact.
People who practice role-playing in various forms (LARP, emergency training, EMT, police, navy seals) get around it by learning not to react emotionally and by making patterns which are useful because they've been thought out in advance.
So we have a big population which is schooled in compliance, where no formal ethical standards are taught and where ethical rules are often violated for any expedient reason. Drop some of these in a fearful situation and you're surprised that they don't react?
I'm surprised at the reaction of his girlfriend, and much more surprised that she *insisted* in the face of his resistance.
When the abuse in Abu Ghraib became public I was surprised by the reactions. Not the shock and/or denial by the public. But the way the soldiers were singled out as a "few bad apples" by people higher up in command.
How apparently normal, non-sadistic, average 20 year olds turned into sadistic guards was classic Zimbardo. I immediately thought of Zimbardo's prison experiment: There doesn't need to be a direct order, all it takes is an environment with unspecific rules and guards wanting to fulfill their role.
Not to defend the soldiers involved in the abuse, but Zimbardo is pretty well known. Either people in charge didn't have the proper skills to set-up a clear structure that would prevent this or they deliberately counted on it to happen, being later able to deny any responsibility and scape-goat the "guards".
Why does Zimbardo look like the Master?
Even 40 years later Zimbardo still talks about the "prisoners" by number denying the fact that they are real men with names. He encouraged the "guards" to be cruel and pressured the "prisoners" to remain even after they wanted to leave. He should never be allowed to get recognition for his actions. He regularly appears in the media to talk about this. It only feeds into his sick ego.
This is what happens in real life and they just stopped the study. Obviously there was indeed physiological trauma but life is full of trauma. We need to understand how people are affected and possibly how to mitigate the damage. What those students went though was nothing compared to real life. God forbid they actually had to fight a war, go to real prison, or be a bullied minority in a society.
We have children in foster care and the juvenile delinquent system that have to live through a minimum of ten times worse for their entire childhood. Domination, submission, aggression, self identity, group consciousness, cruelty, self justification, compassion... we need human studies.
Come to think of it, our whole society is one big Stanford Prisoner Experiment. The uniformed "civil servants" around us have no more power than what we have allowed them to have.
you know, that's a great set up for a perfect murder.
While the hosts of the show think that the people, who are being electrocuted are actors, just pretending to be in pain, if somebody in the group wanted one of those actors dead, they'd devise a plan to pass real current through the wires and connect that to one of the participants control boards...
You can't handle the truth.
This, along with the Milgram Experiment shows that, despite the veil of civility, morality and society that we humans hide behind every day, underneath we're really just savages. Brutal, animalistic savages.
Germans at the time were very submissive to authority - like the Japanese, they believed that, above all, there was duty, i.e. submission to the people above them in the social hierarchy.
And although many had doubts about what they were doing, in the end, they did what allowed for the monster that was Nazi Germany to be created.
I feel fine about it, and my Iraqi buddies get a real jolt out of it too.
For decades Jane Elliott has made a business out of doing this sort of thing to/for people and she's still doing it today. http://www.janeelliott.com/
Is it a coincidence that the prisoner experiment was conducted at the same institution as the Milgram experiment and both studies yielded such horrifying results? No! Stanford faculty and students are bizarro!!!!
"The study began on Sunday, August 17, 1971. But no one knew what, exactly, they were getting into." -TFA
"The experiment was conducted from August 14th to 20th[1], 1971 by a team" -TFWiki
We are in July last I checked.. unless there was a time shift recently that I'm unaware of?
I don't think you should just single out the Germans and the Japanese there. Attitudes ALWAYS flow downwards, that's how leaders lacking any kind of moral fiber can create so much damage.
Bush, Blair, Enron, Lehman Brothers, Murdoch: in both politics and business, leaders shape the kind of attitudes you get and thus wether you're heading for a society or for a mess.
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