Stanford prison experiment

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The Stanford Prison Experiment was a landmark psychological study of the human response to captivity, in particular, to the real world circumstances of prison life. It was conducted in 1971 by a team of researchers led by Philip Zimbardo of Stanford University. Volunteers played the roles of guard and prisoner, and lived in a mock prison. However, the experiment quickly got out of hand, and was ended early.

Goals and methods

File:Zimbardo-meeting.jpg
Zimbardo (standing, center) at the orientation meeting

The study was funded by the US Navy to explain conflict in its and the Marine Corp's prison systems. 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 in that situation.

Subjects were recruited via a newspaper ad and offered $15 a day to participate in a two-week "prison simulation." Of the 70 respondents, Zimbardo and his team selected 24 whom they deemed to be the most psychologically stable and healthy. These subjects were predominantly white, middle-class young males.

The group was divided in half at random into an equal group of "prisoners" and "guards". Interestingly, prisoners later said they thought the guards had been chosen for their larger physical size, but in reality they had been picked by a fair coin toss and there was no objective difference in stature between the two groups.

The prison itself would be run out of the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department, which been 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.

File:Spe-lineup.jpg
Image showing dress of prisoners and guards

Guards were given wooden batons and a khaki, military-style uniform they had chosen themselves at a local army-navy store. They were also given mirrorshade sunglasses to prevent eye contact (Zimbardo said he got the idea from the movie Cool Hand Luke). 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 mauslin smocks (without underwear) and rubber thong sandals, which Zimbardo said would force them to adopt "unfamiliar body postures" and discomfort in the interest of their disorientation. Instead of names, they were assigned numbers which were sewn onto their uniforms, and tight-fitting nylon pantyhose caps to simulate shaven heads similar to those of military basic training. In addition, they would have to wear 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. They were told it was their responsibility to run the prison, which they could do in any way they wished.

The subjects who had been chosen to play the part of prisoners were told simply to wait in their homes to be "called on" 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 were cooperating in this part of the experiment.

The prisoners were put through a full booking procedure by the police, including fingerprinting and having their mug shots taken, and were informed of their Miranda rights. They were transported to the mock prison where they were strip-searched, "deloused" and given their new identities.

Results

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Guards force prisoners to do push-ups, while another (standing) is made to sing

The experiment very quickly got out of hand. Prisoners suffered — and accepted — sadistic and humiliating treatment at the hands of the guards, and by the end many showed severe emotional disturbance.

Zimbardo himself cited his own increasing absorption in the experiment, in which he actively participated and guided. At one point shortly before it was terminated, he attempted to move the entire experiment to a real, unused cell block at the local police department because it was more "secure" (the police department refused him citing insurance concerns).

As the experiment proceeded, several of the guards became progressively more sadistic — particularly at night when they thought the cameras were off. Experimenters said approximately one-third had exhibited "genuine" sadistic tendencies. Most of the guards were upset when it was cut off early.

After only 6 days of the planned two weeks, the experiment was shut down for fear that one of the prisoners would be seriously hurt.

File:Spe-deloused.jpg
Prisoner 416

After a relatively uneventful first day, a riot broke out on day two. Guards volunteered extra hours and worked together to break up the revolt, without supervision from the research staff. After this point, the guards tried to divide the prisoners and pit them against each other by setting up a "good" cell block and a "bad" cell block, to make the prisoners think that there were "informers" amidst their ranks. The efforts were largely effective, and there were no further large-scale rebellions. According to Zimbardo's former convict consultants, the tactic was similar to those used successfully in real US prisons.

Prisoner "counts", which had initially been devised to help prisoners get acquainted with their identity numbers, devolved into hours-long ordeals, in which guards tormented the prisoners and imposed physical punishments including long bouts of forced exercise.

The prison quickly became unsanitary and inhospitable. Bathroom privileges became a right which could be, and frequently was, denied. Some prisoners were made to clean toilets using their bare hands. Mattresses were removed from the "bad" cell, and prisoners were forced to sleep on the concrete floor without clothing. Food was also frequently denied as a means of punishment. Prisoners endured forced nudity and even homosexual acts of humiliation.

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Zimbardo said prisoners reacted in one of three ways: either by actively resisting, by breaking down as in the above image, or by becoming zealously obedient "model prisoners".

Prisoners began to show severe acute emotional disturbance. One prisoner developed a psychosomatic rash all over his body upon finding out that his "parole" had been turned down. Zimbardo had first turned him down because he thought he was merely trying to "con" his way out of the prison by faking illness. Uncontrollable crying and disorganized thinking were common among the prisoners. Two others also had to be replaced due to disturbance.

One point that Zimbardo used to argue that the participants internalized their roles, was that when offered "parole" in exchange for forfeiture of all of their pay, most prisoners accepted the deal. Then, when their parole was nonetheless "rejected", none left the experiment. Zimbardo argues that there was no reason for them to continue participating if they would have given up the material compensation in order to leave.

In one turn of events near the end of the experiment, the guards, coordinating with the research staff including Zimbardo, restrained and blindfolded all of the prisoners and hid them on another floor of the Psychology Department purely on the basis of a rumor that an outside party would try to break and free the "prison" from the outside (which never materialized).

Guards continued to step up harassment of the prisoners. One prisoner on a hunger strike was forced into "solitary confinement" (which was basically a small closet) for three hours before experimenters intervened.

Finally, Zimbardo decided to terminate the experiment early. He had partially been convinced by another researcher who had not been familiar with the experiment until that point and was stunned to see the conditions.

Conclusions

File:Spe-johnwayne.jpg
A guard, at left, jeers prisoners from the hallway. The guards tended to either be "good guards" who would do favors for the prisoners, "tough but fair" guards, or cruel sadists like the one above.

The experiment's result have 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 to entail that the situation caused the subjects' behavior rather than anything inherent in their individual personalities. In this way it is compatible with the results of the also-famous (or infamous) Milgram experiment, in which ordinary people fulfilled orders to administer what appeared to be fatal 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

Despite its apparently dramatic effects, the experiment was widely critized as being unethical and bordering on unscientific. Critics including Erich Fromm challenged how readily the results of the experiment could be generalized.

Being a field experiment, keeping traditional scientific controls was impossible. Zimbardo was not merely a neutral observer but influenced the direction the experiment went 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.

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One of the most abused prisoners, no. 416 and the guard known as "John Wayne" confront each other in an "encounter session" two months later

Some argued that participants based their behavior on how they were expected to behave, or modelled it after stereotypes they already had about how prisoners and guards behaved. In other words, the subjects were merely engaging in role playing. In response Zimbardo claimed that if there was role-playing initially, subjects internalized these roles as the experiment continued.

It was also criticized on a basis of ecological validity. Many of the conditions imposed in the experiment were arbitary and may not have correlated with actual prison conditions, including blindfolding incoming "prisoners", making them wear women's clothing, not allowing them to wear underwear, not allowing them to look out windows and not allowing them to use their names. Zimbardo argued that prison is a confusing and dehumanizing experience and it was necessary to enact these procedures to put the "prisoners" in the proper frame of mind. However, it is difficult to know exactly how effectively similar enough these methods were, and they 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", but others 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 place over a relatively short period of time.

Comparisons to the Abu Ghraib abuse

The human rights abuses that occurred at the Abu Ghraib prison under the authority of the American armed forces in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq war may be a recent example of what happened in the experiment in real life. Soldiers were thrust into the role of prison guards and began to sadistically torment prisoners there and at other detention sites in Afghanistan and Iraq. Many of the specific acts of humiliation were similar to those that occurred in the Stanford Prison Experiment, according to Zimbardo[1]. The comparison was widely discussed in the media.

This theory has been challenged by allegations by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker that these soldiers were in fact acting under direct orders of their superiors as part of a top secret Pentagon intelligence gathering program authorized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld[2]. It has also been challenged by William Saletan of Slate in this article.

References

  • Zimbardo, P. G. (1971). The power and pathology of imprisonment. Congressional Record. (Serial No. 15, October 25, 1971). 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.
  • 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.
  • Musen, K. & Zimbardo, P. G. (1991). Quiet rage: The Stanford prison study. Videorecording. Stanford, CA: Psychology Dept., Stanford University.

Abu Ghraib and the experiment: