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?'"

Comments

Re:Faked?

[countertrolling]

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 those of us who are scratching our heads

[Meshach]

Stanford prison experiment

Re:The Lucifer Effect

[Man On Pink Corner]

Zimbardo essentially selected the people most likely to produce the result that would "confirm" his hypothesis.

Which is the most chilling implication of the experiment! The idea that you can always find people willing to do harmful things while the rest stand aside is enough to undermine the whole concept of individual morality.

Together with the equally infamous Milgram experiment, which has been shown to be reproducible under all sorts of conditions, Zimbardo's work shows how humans, as basically non-'evil' beings, rationalize and perpetuate organized acts of evil. (How many times have you heard someone say, "If I don't do $BAD_THING, somebody else will. Maybe the best thing to do is for me to take the job, and try to change the system from within"?)

Re:Movie

[yali]

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.

Re:Faked?

[Manos_Of_Fate]

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)