CambridgeBayWeather (talk | contribs) m Reverted edits by 81.79.64.174 (talk) to last version by Jghaines |
Burntsauce (talk | contribs) - popculturectomy |
||
Line 87: | Line 87: | ||
In 2002, the [[BBC]] conducted a similar experiment in the [[BBC Prison Study]] |
In 2002, the [[BBC]] conducted a similar experiment in the [[BBC Prison Study]] |
||
== References in popular culture == |
|||
{{Prose|date=September 2007}} |
|||
* 1977 — An Italian TV movie called "La Gabbia" (The Cage), by Carlo Tuzii <ref>http://www.citwf.com/film125961.htm</ref>, exploited an original story vaguely based on the Stanford experiment. |
|||
* 1997 — A rock band came to use the title of the incident as their band name. |
|||
* 1999 — A novel by German author [[Mario Giordano]] entitled ''[[Black Box (novel)|Black Box]]'' was inspired by the Stanford experiment. |
|||
* 2001 — The [[BBC]] commissioned a live [[fly on the wall]] documentary, ''[[The Experiment]]'', recreating this experiment with volunteers. This was halted after concern for the welfare of the participants.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/socialsciences/story/0,9846,638487,00.html|title=education.guardian.co.uk/higher/socialsciences/story/0,9846,638487,00.html<!--INSERT TITLE-->|accessdate=2007-03-20}}</ref> |
|||
* 2001 — The German film, ''[[Das Experiment]]'', was based upon the Giordano novel. |
|||
* 2002 — An episode of [[CSI: Miami]], entitled ''A Horrible Mind'', compared a mock lynching to the experiments. |
|||
* 2005 — ''The Black Box'', a play adapted from ''Das Experiment'', was directed by Dr. Anthony S. Beukas and performed by the Yeshiva College Dramatics Society at [[Yeshiva University]]. |
|||
* 2006 — A documentary entitled ''The Human Behavior Experiments,'' directed by [[Alex Gibney]], aired on [[CourtTv]] and the [[Sundance Channel]]. |
|||
* 2006 — The episode "[[My Big Fat Greek Rush Week]]" of the television series ''[[Veronica Mars]]'' alludes to the experiment when several main characters participate in a recreation of it. Two characters in particular are paralleled to "Prisoner #416" and "John Wayne". |
|||
* 2006 — In Britain's ''[[Big Brother (UK)|Big Brother 7]]'', the house mates were separated into Prisoners and Guards in a way that was reminiscent of the Stanford prison experiment. |
|||
* 2007 — A film entitled ''The Stanford Prison Experiment'' is slated for filming by [[Christopher McQuarrie]] (writer of ''[[The Usual Suspects]]'') from a script he co-wrote with [[Tim Talbott]]. |
|||
* The Hungarian [[BDSM]] film company, Mood Pictures Inc., released a film titled "Stanford Prison Experiment", casting women as the test subjects instead of the original experiment's men. |
|||
==See also== |
==See also== |
Revision as of 22:00, 8 October 2007
The Stanford prison experiment was ostensibly a psychological study of human responses to captivity and its behavioral effects on both authorities and inmates in prison. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. Undergraduate volunteers played the roles of both guards and prisoners living in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building.
Prisoners and guards rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies, while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized and two had to be removed from the experiment early.
Ethical concerns surrounding the famous experiment often draw comparisons to the Milgram experiment, which was conducted in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram, Zimbardo's former high school friend.
Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman Jr wrote in 1981 that the Milgram Experiment in the 1960s and the later Zimbardo Experiment were frightening in their implications about the danger which lurks in the darker side of human nature.[1]
Goals and methods
Zimbardo and his team intended to test the hypothesis that prison guards and convicts were self-selecting of a certain disposition that would naturally lead to poor conditions. Participants were recruited via a newspaper ad and offered $15 a day ($75 adjusted for inflation in 2007) to participate in a two-week "prison simulation." Of the 75 respondents, Zimbardo and his team selected 24 males of whom they deemed to be the most psychologically stable and healthy. These participants were predominantly white and middle-class.
The prison itself was in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department, which had been converted into a mock jail. An undergraduate research assistant was the "warden" and Zimbardo the "superintendent". Zimbardo set up a number of specific conditions on the participants which he hoped would promote disorientation, depersonalization and deindividuation.
Guards were given wooden batons and a khaki, military-style uniform that they had chosen at a local military surplus store. They were also given mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact. Unlike the prisoners, the guards were to work in shifts and return home during off hours, though at times many would later volunteer for added duty without additional pay.
Prisoners were to wear only intentionally ill-fitting muslin smocks without underwear and rubber thong sandals, which Zimbardo said would force them to adopt "unfamiliar body postures" and discomfort in order to further their sense of disorientation. They were referred to by assigned numbers instead of by name. These numbers were sewn onto their uniforms, and the prisoners were required to wear tight-fitting nylon pantyhose caps to simulate shaven heads similar to those of military basic training. In addition, they wore a small chain around their ankles as a "constant reminder" of their imprisonment and oppression.
The day before the experiment, guards attended a brief orientation meeting but were given no formal guidelines other than that no physical violence was permitted. They were told it was their responsibility to run the prison, and they could do so in any way they wished.
Zimbardo provided the following statements to the "guards" in the briefing:
You can create in the prisoners feelings of boredom, a sense of fear to some degree, you can create a notion of arbitrariness that their life is totally controlled by us, by the system, you, me, and they'll have no privacy… We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. In general what all this leads to is a sense of powerlessness. That is, in this situation we'll have all the power and they'll have none. — The Stanford Prison Study video, quoted in Haslam & Reicher, 2003.
The participants who had been chosen to play the part of prisoners were told simply to wait in their homes to be "called" on the day the experiment began. Without any other warning, they were "charged" with armed robbery and arrested by the actual Palo Alto police department, who cooperated in this part of the experiment.
The prisoners were put through a full booking procedure by the police, including fingerprinting, having their mug shots taken, and information regarding their Miranda rights. They were transported to the mock prison where they were strip-searched, deloused, and given their new identities.
Results
The experiment quickly grew out of hand. Prisoners suffered — and accepted — sadistic and humiliating treatment from the guards, and, by experiment's end, many showed severe emotional disturbances.
After a relatively uneventful first day, a riot broke out on the second day. The guards volunteered to work extra hours and worked together to break the prisoner revolt, attacking the prisoners with fire extinguishers without supervision from the research staff.
Prisoner counts, initially devised for the prisoners to learn their identity numbers, degenerated to hour-long ordeals where guards tormented the prisoners and imposed physical punishments, including long bouts of forced exercise. The prison became dirty and inhospitable; bathroom rights became privileges, which could be, and frequently were, denied. Some prisoners were forced to clean toilets with bare hands. Mattresses were removed from the "bad" cell block and the prisoners forced to sleep naked on the concrete floor. Moreover, prisoners endured forced nudity and even sexual humiliation.
Zimbardo cited his own absorption in the experiment he guided, and in which he actively participated as Prison Superintendent. On the fourth day, he and the guards reacted to an escape rumour, by attempting to move the entire experiment to a real, unused cell block at the local police station, because it was more secure. The police department refused, citing insurance liability concerns; Zimbardo recalls his anger and disgust with the lack of co-operation, between his and the police's jails.
As the experiment proceeded, several guards became progressively sadistic. Experimenters said that approximately one-third of the guards exhibited genuine sadistic tendencies. Interestingly, most of the guards were upset when the experiment concluded early.
Zimbardo argued that the prisoner participants had internalized their roles when they accepted parole in exchange for forfeiting all of their experiment-participation pay. Yet, when their paroles were denied, none of the prisoner participants quit the experiment. Zimbardo argued they had no reason for continued participation in the experiment after having lost all monetary compensation, yet they did, because they had internalised the prisoner identity, they thought themselves prisoners, hence, they stayed.
A replacement prisoner was introduced; Prisoner No. 416, horrified at the guards' treatment of the other prisoners, went on a hunger strike in an attempt to force his release. Instead, he was forced into a small closet for three hours of solitary confinement.The other prisoners perceived Prisoner 416 as a troublemaker. To exploit this feeling, the guards offered the prisoners a choice: Either the prisoners could give up their blankets, or No. 416 would be kept in overnight solitary confinement. All, but one, of the prisoners chose to keep his blanket.
Zimbardo concluded the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student he was then dating (and later married) objected to the appalling conditions of the prison after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that of more than fifty outside persons who had seen the prison, Maslach was the only one who questioned its morality. After only six days, of a planned two weeks' duration, the Stanford Prison experiment was shut down.
Conclusions
The Stanford experiment ended on August 20, 1971, only 6 days after it began instead of the 14 it was supposed to have lasted. The experiment's result has been argued to demonstrate the impressionability and obedience of people when provided with a legitimizing ideology and social and institutional support. It is also used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority.
In psychology, the results of the experiment are said to support situational attributions of behavior rather than dispositional attribution. In other words, it seemed the situation caused the participants' behavior, rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities. In this way, it is compatible with the results of the also-famous Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be damaging electric shocks to a confederate of the experimenter.
Coincidentally, shortly after the study had been completed, there were bloody revolts at both the San Quentin and Attica prison facilities, and Zimbardo reported his findings on the experiment to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary.
Criticism of the experiment
The experiment was widely criticized as being unethical and bordering on unscientific. Critics including Erich Fromm challenged how readily the results of the experiment could be generalized. Fromm specifically writes about how the personality of an individual does in fact affect behavior when imprisoned (using historical examples from the Nazi concentration camps). This runs counter to the study's conclusion that the prison situation itself controls the individual's behavior. Fromm also argues that the amount of sadism in the "normal" subjects could not be determined with the methods employed to screen them.
Because it was a field experiment, it was impossible to keep traditional scientific controls. Zimbardo was not merely a neutral observer, but influenced the direction of the experiment as its "superintendent". Conclusions and observations drawn by the experimenters were largely subjective and anecdotal, and the experiment would be difficult for other researchers to reproduce.
Some of the experiment's critics argued that participants based their behavior on how they were expected to behave, or modeled it after stereotypes they already had about the behavior of prisoners and guards. In other words, the participants were merely engaging in role-playing. In response, Zimbardo claimed that even if there was role-playing initially, participants internalized these roles as the experiment continued.
Additionally, it was criticized on the basis of ecological validity. Many of the conditions imposed in the experiment were arbitrary and may not have correlated with actual prison conditions, including blindfolding incoming "prisoners", not allowing them to wear underwear, not allowing them to look out of windows and not allowing them to use their names. Zimbardo argued that prison is a confusing and dehumanizing experience and that it was necessary to enact these procedures to put the "prisoners" in the proper frame of mind; however, it is difficult to know how similar the effects were to an actual prison, and the experiment's methods would be difficult to reproduce exactly so that others could test them.
Some said that the study was too deterministic: reports described significant differences in the cruelty of the guards, the worst of whom came to be nicknamed "John Wayne." (This guard alleges he started the escalation of events between "guards" and "prisoners" after he began to emulate a character from the Paul Newman film Cool Hand Luke. He further intensified his actions because he was nicknamed "John Wayne" though he was trying to mimic actor Strother Martin who played the role of the sadistic "Captain" in the movie.[2]) Other guards were kinder and often did favors for prisoners. Zimbardo made no attempt to explain or account for these differences.
Lastly, the sample size was very small, with only 24 participants taking part over a relatively short period of time.
Haslam and Reicher
Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher (2003), psychologists from the University of Exeter and University of St Andrews, conducted a partial replication of the experiment with the assistance of the BBC, who broadcast scenes from the study as a reality TV program called The Experiment. Their results and conclusions were very different from Zimbardo's and led to a number of publications on tyranny, stress and leadership (moreover, unlike results from the SPE, these were published in leading academic journals; e.g., British Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Social Psychology Quarterly) . While their procedure was not a direct replication of Zimbardo's, their study does cast further doubt on the generality of his conclusions. Specifically, it questions the notion that people slip mindlessly into role and the idea that the dynamics of evil are in any way banal. Their research also points to the importance of leadership in the emergence of tyranny (of the form displayed by Zimbardo when briefing guards in the Stanford experiment). [3]
Abu Ghraib
When the Abu Ghraib military prisoner torture and abuse scandal was published in March 2004, many observers immediately were struck by its similarities to the Stanford Prison experiment — among them, Philip Zimbardo, who paid close attention to the details of the story. He was dismayed by official military and government efforts shifting the blame for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison on to "a few bad apples" rather than acknowledging it as systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration system.
Eventually, Zimbardo became involved with the defense team of lawyers representing Abu Ghraib prison guard Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick. He had full access to all investigation and background reports, testifying as an expert witness in SSG Frederick's court martial, resulting in an eight-year prison sentence for Frederick in October 2004.
Zimbardo drew on his knowledge gained from participating in SSG Frederick's case to write The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, (Random House, 2007), dealing with the many connections between the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Abu Ghraib abuses.[4]
Similar Incidents
In April 2007, it was reported[5] that high-school students in Waxahachie, Texas who were participating in a role-playing exercise fell into a similar abusive pattern of behaviour as exhibited in the original experiment.
In 2002, the BBC conducted a similar experiment in the BBC Prison Study
See also
- Das Experiment, a 2000 film inspired by the Stanford events.
- The Third Wave, a 1967 recreation of Nazi Germany by high school teacher Ron Jones
- The Wave, a novel by Todd Strasser based on the incident
- The Wave, a short film based on the incident
- Milgram experiment on obedience to authority
- Peer pressure
- Lord of the Flies, a 1954 novel by William Golding, in which a group of youths degrade into dictatorship
- The House of Stairs, a 1974 novel by William Sleator, in which a group of youths become subordinate to an enforced pattern of behavior
- Natural Justice, a charity that performs studies intended to show a relation between nutrition and violent behavior
- The Dispossessed, a 1974 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which the protagonist Shevek took the part of a jail guard in a childhood game with very similar conditions and outcome.
- The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, a book by Malcolm Gladwell, addresses this experiment.
- Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse
Footnotes
- ^ Peters, Thomas, J.,, Waterman, Robert. H., "In Search of Excellence", 1981. Cf. p.78 and onward.
- ^ "John Wayne" (name withheld). Interview. "The Science of Evil." Primetime. Basic Instincts. KATU. 3 Jan. 2007.
- ^ see interviews at http://education.guardian.co.uk/academicexperts/story/0,,1605313,00.html and http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/interviews/experiment.htm
- ^ Lucifer Effect.
- ^ Holocaust Lesson Gets Out Of Hand, http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/jews-and-germans-lesson-gets-out-of-hand/2007/04/11/1175971162172.html
References
- Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Naval Research Reviews, 9, 1–17. Washington, DC: Office of Naval Research
- Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology and Penology, 1, 69–97.
- Haslam, S. Alexander & Reicher, Stephen (2003). Beyond Stanford: Questioning a role-based explanation of tyranny. Dialogue (Bulletin of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology), 18, 22–25.
- Musen, K. & Zimbardo, P. G. (1991). Quiet rage: The Stanford prison study. Videorecording. Stanford, CA: Psychology Dept., Stanford University.
- Reicher, Stephen., & Haslam, S. Alexander. (2006). Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC Prison Study. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 1–40.
- Zimbardo, P. G. (1971). The power and pathology of imprisonment. Congressional Record. (Serial No. 15, 1971-10-25). Hearings before Subcommittee No. 3, of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session on Corrections, Part II, Prisons, Prison Reform and Prisoner's Rights: California. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
- Zimbardo, P. G (2007) [1] "Understanding How Good People Turn Evil". Interview transcript. "Democracy Now!", March 30, 2007. Accessed March 31, 2007
External links
- Official Site
- Homepage of Philip Zimbardo
- Summary of the experiment
- Zimbardo, P. (2007). From Heavens to Hells to Heroes. In-Mind Magazine.
- Fromm's criticism of the experiment
- The Experiment (IMDB) — German movie (Das Experiment) from 2001 inspired by the Stanford Experiment
- The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment — Criticism from Carlo Prescott, ex-con and consultant/assistant for the experiment
- The Artificial Prison of the Human Mind Article with Comments.
- Philip Zimbardo on Democracy Now! March 30 2007
- Philip Zimbardo on The Daily Show, March, 2007
Abu Ghraib and the experiment:
- BBC News: Is it in anyone to abuse a captive?
- BBC News: Why everyone's not a torturer
- Ronald Hilton: US soldiers' bad behavior and Stanford Prison Experiment
- Slate.com: Situationist Ethics: The Stanford Prison Experiment doesn't explain Abu Ghraib, by William Saletan
- IMDB: Untitled Stanford Prison Experiment Project
- : Youtube video for Stanford Prison Experiment
- VIDEO: Talk to MIT re: new book: The Lucifer Effect