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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
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,
Obviously you have no understanding of the nature of power and desire for it. It has been been well documented since ancient times. And the biggest "experiment" ever in 1920s-30s Germany has been written up in the most convincing manner by many psychologists.
It's too bad they say the experiment should never be performed again. Every student should be required to go through it, and maybe we can mitigate the revival of the savagery we are going through now. Simply reading up on it is not enough.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
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.
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.
You might want to read the article then - that was an initial theory but turned out not to be true..
Insert
There's faked and then there's faked.
If you mean "they made the whole thing up like the moon landing," then no. There's no reason to believe that kind of conspiracy.
But based on contemporary accounts, even from Zimbardo himself, it's pretty clear that he stepped well past his role as an objective researcher and became an active instigator -- appointing himself warden and egging on the guards. But even with that acknowledged, the fact that he was able to succeed so easily is part of what makes it an important demonstration.
Actually it is repeated every day. I am pretty sure that is what happens to people employed by the TSA.
In Australia we lock up innocent[1] foreigners who come here illegally, so there is probably a lot to be learned from the behavior of guards and prisoners in that situation. Given the nature of their arrival the foreigners aren't necessarily already completely undamaged from a psychological point of view but i'm sure we can learn things from this situation... even if the thing we learn is that locking up innocent people isn't the best thing for their mental health.
[1] While it's possible that some of them come here illegally as a means to shortcut the legal means of coming here, a lot are tricked into coming here illegally by people smugglers or are children who have no choice but to come with their parents, so I think "innocent" is perfectly valid in this context.
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?
It's too bad they say the experiment should never be performed again. Every student should be required to go through it, and maybe we can mitigate the revival of the savagery we are going through now. Simply reading up on it is not enough.
I've often wondered what would happen if the experiment were repeated with people who were aware of the original outcome. And I mean really aware of it, not just that they heard about it in passing. Would knowledge of how low people can sink keep them on the straight and narrow? If so, it could become a useful training exercise for prison guards.
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?
There's also a movie about that book, and it's pretty good.
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?
Probably not. The shocking part about the Zimbardo experiment was not that guards are cruel; the shocking part is that there were no ground rules insisting that the "guards" be cruel. They could have chosen to play cards with the "prisoners" - given that they were mostly (all?) Stanford undergrads, they very likely knew some of them. Once you go to a real prison, the prisoners are just more scumbags you have to keep in line.
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.
The modern rules you're referring to were specifically drafted in response to the Stanford Prison Experiment. A review board determined that they weren't violating any rules at the time, and suggested making new rules so it couldn't be repeated.
I know how the experiment worked. It is established that people given power with no (or poor) guidance on how to use that power will abuse it. But if people are made acutely aware of that fact, will they think "Hey, I don't want to be like that" and make a conscious effort to control their own actions?
For example, if you give unlimited alcohol and no ground rules to a bunch of teens, they're probably going to get drunk out of their minds. But once they've learned about alcohol abuse, and gone to a few parties and seen how drunken idiots act, they'll drink more responsibly, simply because they don't want to be that guy. This experiment is repeated all across the country every year, and it seems to work out.
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".
I read this book while on a family trip to Washington, D.C., shortly after visiting the Holocaust museum (which is, in fact, where my mom bought it -- in the gift shop -- and is it weird that the Holocaust museum has a gift shop? Even if the proceeds go to the museum?).
Perhaps that wasn't the best time to pick up a book that seeks to grossly oversimplify how fascism can slowly creep up and overtake a society of otherwise well-meaning people, but what with the blatant metaphors and bad, bad dialogue, I could never shake the impression that I was reading an after school special.
Then I read the back and discovered it WAS a novelization of an after school special, and all was made clear, but I still thought it was a pretty annoying book. More something to read to introduce the concept to children than enjoy as an adult -- good ideas, but terrible, terrible writing, characterization, everything.
Why does Zimbardo look like the Master?
I think you'll find that "locking up" people who enter the country illegally is a pretty consistent reaction by any functioning state.
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.
Actually, the BBC performed a similar experiment in The Experiment with slightly different results.
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.
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'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.
Derren Brown did a show in the UK where he basically replicated the experiment, to see how conformist and suggestible potential contestants were. The number of people who kept on administering shocks after the victim was screaming in pain was depressingly high.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
For example, if you give unlimited alcohol and no ground rules to a bunch of teens, they're probably going to get drunk out of their minds. But once they've learned about alcohol abuse, and gone to a few parties and seen how drunken idiots act, they'll drink more responsibly, simply because they don't want to be that guy. This experiment is repeated all across the country every year, and it seems to work out.
I don't know what planet you live on, but here on Earth, people continue to get drunk and act like idiots well past their teens. "Drinking responsibly" is tautological. The whole point of drinking is getting drunk enough to enjoy yourself without actually passing out.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Actually, I think that they were not friends or acquaintances of each other. From my understanding of the article, they had to figuratively put on masks, in order to do what they did.
testing out my trending skills
Nearly two months ago I was subject to a similar abuse of power, by Dutch police: http://mayaposch.blogspot.com/2011/05/taking-nightmare-notch-further.html
Basically I had done nothing but suffer a dissociative episode at my family doctor's office, for which I had warned them, but which they had dutifully ignored. I knocked over some glass items, they called the cops, and despite not resisting I was forced against the ground, the cuffs forced on so tight that they had trouble removing them, and I will suffer from nerve damage in my wrists for a long time.
I was locked in a jail cell for nearly 24 hours, only allowed to leave it to visit the hospital for some glass cuts I had suffered. I was crying and screaming and basically breaking down the whole time while I was in the cell. The feeling of powerlessness was just beyond any words. I have been persecuted for my IS and denied medical help for years already, but at least then I still had the choice to walk away. When I begged some cops to let me out, they just laughed at me and threw me against the nearest wall.
Abuse of power is very real. And it's everywhere.
Site & blog: http://www.mayaposch.com
I would've argued that states that unnecessarily restrict immigration are not "functioning" states.
Here in the USA I see a dozen illegals every single day, mowing the rich people's lawns, tending the rich people's children, painting the rich people's houses... and none of them are being "locked up".
So, by either definition, the USA is not a "functioning state" at this point. Clearly both our definitions are overly simplistic... the USA is severely dysfunctional in many ways, yet still robustly functional in many others.
I thought one of the quotes from one of the "guards" in the linked article, was very interesting. . .
What came over me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a country club? So I consciously created this persona.
So, this guy was given a task, by an authority figure (a science professor), and he did the task. To that extent, this wasn't a 'fake' prison, it was a real prison, if only for a few days.
Every participant came into this with their own motivations. One of the prisoners said they were trying to use this as "practice" for resisting The Draft. Because that was his motivation, he decided to lead the other prisoners in a 'resistance movement'. So, they decided not to just sit around and play cards either.
I have to wonder to what extent the prisoners playing their part, and the guards playing theirs, created a feedback loop of escalation - sounds like, from the article, it did.
When you were a kid, were you ever playing with other kids - play fighting, for example - which escalated to very real fighting? It starts out a game, but then somone hits a little bit harder. That hurts, you get angry, so you hit back just a little bit harder, and pretty soon it's full punches and kicks.
I wonder if that was sort of the dynamic here?
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/
That was a different experiment.
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You think fraternity hazing happens by accident? Give one group of people even slight power over another group (unsupervised), and they will quickly find "creative" ways to explore and emphasize that power.
States have been restricting immigration essentially since the concept has existed. As to when it is and isn't "necessary" is an issue prone to much debate.
Personally I don't see anything "unnecessary" about restricting immigration of those who arrive with no warning, no documentation, no history and no means of support. In fact, that's pretty much a textbook example of exactly the kind of immigrant you *do* want to "restrict".
Immigration control is one of the fundamental reasons societies form governments. It's part of self defence.
Tell the police and see how long they last before being locked up. Do not mistake ignorance for permission. I will also point out that - having experienced a portion of the process myself - *legally* coming into the USA to work is a time-consuming process fraught with difficulty, surprise, and expense.
"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 thought one of the quotes from one of the "guards" in the linked article, was very interesting. . .
What came over me was not an accident. It was planned. I set out with a definite plan in mind, to try to force the action, force something to happen, so that the researchers would have something to work with. After all, what could they possibly learn from guys sitting around like it was a country club? So I consciously created this persona.
Or not. To me, it looks like a good old "I didn't want to really hurt anyone, it was all good fun" excuse for bullying.
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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No, they don't prove that at all. What they do prove is that we are social animals, and are capable of good things with good leadership. Morally defunct leadership gives you a mess. See Bush/Blair..
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If I call the police they will lock up (and possibly beat up) and deport a bunch of hard-working poor people who are doing nothing but trying to provide for their families. I refuse to be a part of that evil; thanks anyway.
The employers will take no harm, and they will have another dozen illegal Mexicans doing yardwork and another Guatemalan nanny looking after their kids within the week. It's cheaper for them to exploit illegals and pay any fines they might incur than to pay real wages.
Exactly my point, though you seem to have missed it. He's using science (which is recognized as a form of authority) as an excuse for cruel behavior.