Zimbardo

1
Zimbardo Stanford Prison Experiment 1971
2
College students on summer break recruited
through a newspaper ad for a two week experiment
being paid 15/day. The students were given the
California Personality Inventory and
interviewed By the experiment staff. Two dozen
of those judged to be most normal, average, and
healthy on all dimensions assessed were selected
to participate. Most stated a preference to be
in the role of prisoners. Those selected as
guards helped in the final stages of the
construction of the simulated prison in the
basement of the psychology building. The guards
helped select their own military style uniforms
at the army surplus store and met for a general
orientation and to formulate rules for
proper prisoner behavior. Prisoners were
arrested by Palo Alto Police and brought to the
experiment site in handcuffs.
Stanford Prison Experiment Set Up
3
ZimbardoStanford Prison Experiment1971

• Built a mock prison in university basement
• Recruited 21 healthy and well adjusted students
  as volunteers
• Randomly allocated them to the role of prisoner
  or guard
• Found that interpersonal relationships
  deteriorated, became negative / hostile/
  humiliating/ dehumanising

4
The Prison Rebel

• The prisoners were brought to their "prison,"
  stripped, searched, showered, dressed in prison
  outfits, and put in "cells."
• The guards were given guard uniforms, including
  night sticks.

5
Prisoner 8612 Freaks Out

• Prisoner 8612, who had protested so loudly during
  the rebellion, decides that in order to get out,
  he will pretend to be crazy.

6
Prisoner 416 Resists

• Prisoner 416 also decides to resist, this time by
  refusing to eat his food. You will hear him
  describing his experience.

7
Guard "John Wayne" Responds

• One of the guards reacts by punishing the
  prisoners.

8
The Prisoners Turn on Prisoner 416

• Prisoner 416 continues to resist. The guards try
  to enlist the other prisoners to turn on him.

9
The guards steadily increased
their coercive and aggressive tactics,
humiliation, and dehumanization of the prisoners
day by day. The worst abuses by guards came on
the late-shift, when they thought the staff was
asleep and they were not being monitored. Powerf
ul conformity pressures eliminated individual
differences among the prisoners. Never once
did one of the so-called good guards ever contest
an order by a sadistic guard, intervene to stop
or prevent despicable behavior by another guard,
or come to work late or leave early.
Stanford Prison Experiment Results
10
A recently graduated Ph.D. entered in the middle
of the experiment as a part of the staff. She
challenged the experiment leaders based on their
ethical responsibility for the consequences and
well-being of the young men entrusted to our
care as research participants.
Stanford Prison Experiment Results Contd
11
Stanford Prison Experiment Results Contd

• Guards became increasingly aggressive prisoners
  became passive and depressed.
• Four prisoners developed rashes, crying,
  trembling and acute anxiety by 2nd day.
• The most hostile guards became leaders and role
  models for the other guards.
• The experiment was called off after only 6 days.
  Too many normal young men were behaving
  pathologically as powerless prisoners or as
  sadistic, all-powerful guards.

12
Post-Experiment Interviews with Prisoner 416 and
Guard "John Wayne"

• Later, Dr. Zimbardo interviewed the prisoners and
  guards about their experiences. Here prisoner 416
  and the guard who tried to punish him are
  interviewed.

13
Post-Experiment Interview with Prisoner 8612

• Prisoner 8612, who had been released from the
  prison early, became a prison psychologist. Here
  he talks about what he learned.

14
Zimbardo concluded

• The illusion of power had become real.
• Both Prisoners and Guards identified with
  conformed to their allocated social role.
• The situation that people are in determines how
  they behave.
• This implies that people have no free will, that
  people cannot choose NOT to act in accordance
  with their assigned social role.

15
Good people can be induced, seduced, initiated
into behaving in evil (irrational, Stupid,
self-destructive, antisocial) ways by immersion
in total situations. That can transform human
nature in ways that challenge our sense of the
stability and consistency of individual personalit
y, character, and morality. (Nazi
concentration camp guards, cults, genocidal
atrocities Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, Burundi,
others.)
Lesson from the SPE
16
Despite the artificiality of controlled
experimental research such as the SPE, the
research is conducted in a way that captures
essential features of mundane realism, so
the results do have considerable generalizability
power. From another perspective, the SPE does
not tell us anything new about prisons that
sociologists and narratives of prisoners have not
already revealed about the evils of prison life.
What is different is that by virtue of the
experimental protocol, we put selected good
people, randomly assigned to be either guard or
prisoner, and observed the ways in which they
were changed for the worse by their daily
experiences in an evil place.
Lesson from the SPE
17
Stanford Prison ExperimentCriticisms of the
experiment

• Unscientific
• No scientific controls because it was a field
  experiment
• Small sample size of 24, but really just 1 group
  so N1
• Conclusions and observations were subjective
• Participants acted how they were expected to
  behave
• Zimbardo gave guards no rules, said they could
  create fear
• Zimbardo admitted he was not a neutral observer
  but acted like a superintendent who enabled the
  bad behavior

18
Was the SPE Ethical? Yes It followed the
guidelines set by and was approved by the Human
Subjects Research Review Board. There was no
deception. People were informed ahead of time
that their rights would be violated. No People
suffered and others were allowed to inflict pain
and humiliation on their fellows over an extended
period of time.
The Ethics of SPE
19
Fraternity Hazing Deaths Abu
Ghraib Emotional, Physical, Sexual
Abuse Enron, WorldCom, etc. Genocide (Rwanda,
Bosnia, etc.)
Apply the Zimbardo Research Today
20
Stanford Prison ExperimentWhat would you have
done?

• If you were a prisoner, how would you have acted?
• If you were a guard, how would you have acted?
• After the study, how do you think the prisoners
  and guards felt when they saw each other in the
  same civilian clothes again?