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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?'"
All of this would be very fascinating if the whole experiment hadn't been irreparably flawed from the beginning. Zimbardo essentially selected the people most likely to produce the result that would "confirm" his hypothesis.
The greatest insights that came from this procedure were insights into how easily people will assimilate a faux-science "finding" into popular psychology, especially when the result is "shocking" in a way that allows them to denounce the immorality of society.
Stanford prison experiment
"Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
Aldous Huxley
It hasn't been backed up by other experiments because conducting such experiments violates modern standards of ethics (and in fact arguably violated the standards at that time as well). Similar effects have been observed in the field however, most famously at Abu Ghraib. Obviously those aren't properly controlled experiments, but until we decide as a society that subjecting people to lasting mental and physical harm in psychological studies is okay again, it's the closest we're likely to get.
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.
Check out the book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland by Christopher Browning. Apologies for Godwinning this thread, but it is necessary.
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.
For the record, Zimbardo has objected to Das Experiment's portrayal of his experiment, on the grounds that (a) it isn't clear which parts are reenactments and which parts are fictionalized, and (b) in his view the movie doesn't properly explain why the study was scientifically important. Read his side of it here.
You should check out the book The Wave, which is a fictionalized telling of a real experiment conducted by a high school teacher to help his students understand how something like the Holocaust could happen without anybody stepping in to stop it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(novel)
Isn't enough that I ruined a pony, making a gift for you?
There's also a movie about that book, and it's pretty good.
Actually, the BBC performed a similar experiment in The Experiment with slightly different results.