Stanford prison experiment

The Stanford prison experiment (SPE), also referred to as the Zimbardo prison experiment (ZPE), was a controversial psychological experiment performed in August 1971 at Stanford University. It was designed to be a two-week simulation of a prison environment that examined the effects of situational variables on participants' reactions and behaviors. Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo managed the research team who administered the study. Zimbardo ended the experiment early after realizing the guard participants' abuse of the prisoners had gone too far.

Participants were recruited from the local community through an advertisement in the newspapers offering per day to male students who wanted to participate in a "psychological study of prison life". Twenty-four participants were chosen after assessments of psychological stability and then assigned randomly to the role of prisoners or prison guards. Critics have questioned the validity of these methods.

The experiment has been referenced and critiqued as an example of an unethical psychological experiment, and the harm inflicted on the participants in this and other experiments during the post-World War II era prompted American universities to improve their ethical requirements and institutional review for human experiment subjects in order to prevent them from being similarly harmed. Other researchers have found it difficult to reproduce the study, especially given those constraints.

Certain critics have described the study as unscientific and fraudulent. In particular, Thibault Le Texier has established that the guards were asked directly to behave in certain ways in order to confirm Zimbardo's conclusions, which were largely written in advance of the experiment. Zimbardo claimed that Le Texier's article was mostly ad hominem and ignored available data that contradicts his counterarguments, but the original participants, who were interviewed for the National Geographic documentary The Stanford Prison Experiment: Unlocking the Truth, have largely confirmed many of Le Texier's claims.

Funding and methodology

Philip Zimbardo's official website described the experiment goal as follows:

A 1996 article from the Stanford News Service described the experiment goal in a more detailed way:

The study was funded by the US Office of Naval Research to understand antisocial behavior. The United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps wanted to investigate conflict between military guards and prisoners.

Publishing

Before publishing in American Psychologist and other peer-reviewed journals, the researchers reported the findings in Naval Research Reviews, International Journal of Criminology and Penology (IJCP), David Amodio, psychology instructor at both New York University and the University of Amsterdam, dismissed Zimbardo's study, stating that releasing the article to an "obscure journal" demonstrated that Zimbardo was unable to convince fellow psychologists of the validity and reliability of his study. By publishing in other journals before publishing in a scientific peer-reviewed journal, Zimbardo violated the tradition of scientific dissemination.

Zimbardo has stated that the grant agreement with the Office of Naval Research included a requirement to publish data in their journal, Naval Research Reviews. He states that the International Journal of Criminology and Penology invited Zimbardo to write about his study in their journal, and he then wrote an article with the New York Times Magazine to share the findings with a broad audience. He states that the article still needed to pass through the very strict requirements of the American Psychologist, the official journal of the American Psychological Association, in order to be published. After publishing the article in the American Psychologist, the findings were also reported in other peer-reviewed journals and books.

Prison environment

thumb|Prisoners in bed in cell|alt=Photo taken through iron bars. Behind the bars, three people are lying on beds side by side, wearing identical white smocks with numbers on the chest.

The day before the experiment began, offices in the psychology department were repurposed into small mock prison cells, each arranged to hold three prisoners. There was a small corridor for the prison yard, a closet for solitary confinement, and a bigger room across from the prisoners for the guards and warden. Prisoners were confined and were to stay in their cells and the yard all day and night until the study was finished.

Digitized recordings available on the official SPE website were widely discussed in 2017, particularly one where warden David Jaffe tried to influence the behavior of one of the guards by encouraging him to participate more and be more "tough" for the benefit of the experiment.

Orientation

The researchers had an orientation session for the guards the day before the experiment began, during which the guards were instructed not to harm the prisoners physically or withhold food or drink, but to maintain law and order. The researchers provided the guards with wooden batons to establish their status, deindividuating clothing similar to that of an actual prison guard (khaki shirt and pants from a local military surplus store), and mirrored sunglasses to prevent eye contact and create anonymity. With no control, prisoners learned they had little effect on what happened to them, ultimately causing them to stop responding and give up.

The experiment was perceived by many to involve questionable ethics, the most serious concern being that it was continued even after participants expressed their desire to withdraw. Despite the fact that participants were told they had the right to leave at any time, the researchers did not allow this. The Stanford prison experiment resulted in the implementation of rules to preclude any harmful treatment of participants. Before they are implemented, human studies must now be reviewed by an institutional review board (US) or ethics committee (UK) and found to be in accordance with ethical guidelines set by the American Psychological Association or British Psychological Society.

Similar studies

In 1967, The Third Wave experiment involved the use of authoritarian dynamics similar to Nazi Party methods of mass control in a classroom setting by high school teacher Ron Jones in Palo Alto, California with the goal of demonstrating vividly to the class how the German public in World War II could have acted in the way it did. Although the veracity of Jones' accounts has been questioned, several participants with the study have gone on record to confirm the events.The project was adapted into a book, an American film, The Wave, in 1981, and a critically acclaimed German film, Die Welle, in 2008.

In both experiments, participants found it difficult to leave the study due to the roles they were assigned. Both studies examine human nature and the effects of authority. Personalities of the subjects were thought to have little influence on both experiments despite the test before the prison experiment.

Both the Milgram and Zimbardo studies concluded that participants conform to social pressures. Conformity is strengthened by allowing some participants to feel more or less powerful than others. In both experiments, the people's behaviors altered to match the group stereotypes, demonstrating a tendency to conform to others passively, even if a particular subject is malevolent.

A 2007 study on prison-life examined the potential relationship between participant self-selection and the disposition toward aggressive behaviors. They found that when responding to an advertisement, participants "were significantly higher on measures of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance than those who responded to a parallel ad that omitted the words 'of prison life,' and they were significantly lower in dispositional empathy and altruism".

Footnotes

References

Musen, K. & Zimbardo, P. G. (1991). Quiet rage: The Stanford prison study. Video recording. Stanford, CA: Psychology Dept., Stanford University.
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 United States House Committee on the Judiciary, Ninety-Second Congress, First Session on Corrections, Part II, Prisons, Prison Reform and Prisoner's Rights: California. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.
Zimbardo, P. G. (2007). "Understanding How Good People Turn Evil." Interview transcript. Democracy Now!, March 30, 2007. Accessed January 17, 2015.

External links

The official website for Stanford Prison Experiment, with extensive information on and materials used in the study, further reading and resources, and media links
Philip G. Zimbardo Papers (Stanford University Archives)
Interviews with guards, prisoners, and researchers in July/August 2011 Stanford Magazine
Zimbardo, P. (2007). From Heavens to Hells to Heroes . In-Mind Magazine.
The official website of the BBC Prison Study
"The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment", The Stanford Daily (April 28, 2005), p. 4  – Criticism by Carlo Prescott, ex-con and consultant/assistant for the experiment
BBC news article – 40 years on, with video of Philip Zimbardo
Photographs at cbsnews.com
[https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/6/14/17464516/stanford-prison-experiment-audio#:~:text=In%20the%20experiment%2C%20Stanford%20professor%20Philip%20Zimbardo%20assigned,are%20given%20power%20and%20others%20are%20denied%20it.] – Vox article detailing how the study is a sham

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