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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 ;-)
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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.
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/
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 think you'll find that "locking up" people who enter the country illegally is a pretty consistent reaction by any functioning state.
Actually, the BBC performed a similar experiment in The Experiment with slightly different results.
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
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?