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Three months ago, Psychology Today blogger Susan Krauss Whitbourne posted an essay entitled The Rarely Told Story of Zimbardo's Prison Experiment ( here). I eagerly read it in the hope that it would reveal some heretofore relatively unknown truth about this famous experiment. But, in fact, the essay is simply a summary--a well written one--of the experiment that takes at face value Phillip Zimbardo's and his colleagues' conclusions. In the introduction to the essay, Whitbourne states that the experiment is "Depicted in movies, television and of course all introductory psych textbooks..."

It's true that Zimbardo's experiment is one of the two or three most famous experiments in the history of psychology. But it's not true that it's depicted in all introductory psychology textbooks. I'm the author of one such textbook (which is now in it's 6 th edition and is used in many colleges and universities).[1] One of the questions I'm frequently asked about the book by professors who teach from it is, "Why don't you include Zimbardo's prison experiment, like all other textbook authors do?" Here's why.

When I was working on the first edition of the textbook, I read carefully the original report on the experiment by Zimbardo and his colleagues (the same report that Whitbourne summarizes), and I also read a methodological critique of it by Ali Banuazizi and Siamak Movahedi.[2,3] After reading both, and thinking carefully about them, I decided that I could not in good conscience present the experiment with its usual interpretation. I decided to omit it completely (a decision I made also concerning many other research studies that in my mind were poorly conceived and improperly interpreted). In the years since then, I have found no reason to change my mind and some new evidence that validates my original decision.

I'll present briefly here the standard interpretation of Zimbardo's experiment-the interpretation given by Whitbourne, by Zimbardo himself, and by most psychology textbook authors. Then I'll summarize the critique.
The Standard Story
In order to gain insight about the behavior of prisoners and guards in real prisons, Zimbardo and his colleagues constructed a simulated prison in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford University. Then they recruited 21 psychologically healthy male college students and randomly assigned 10 of them to be prisoners and the other 11 to be guards. The prisoners were to be held captive in the simulated prison around the clock for two weeks, and the guards were to serve duty in the prison on eight-hour daily shifts, so there were always at least 3 of them in the prison at any given time. For this, they would be paid $15 a day (a decent amount for students at that time, in 1971).

In order to simulate conditions of real imprisonment, the researchers arranged for the real Palo Alto city police to pick them up at their homes at a designated time, charge them, handcuff and search them, take them to the police station, fingerprint them, place them in a detention cell, and then take them blindfolded to the mock prison at Stanford. Once there, "each prisoner was stripped, sprayed with a delousing preparation (a deodorant spray) and made to stand alone naked for a while in the cell yard. Then each prisoner was given a uniform consisting of a loose smock with an identifying number on the front and back. A chain and lock were placed around one ankle, and their hair was covered with a nylon stocking made into a cap, to simulate having their hair shaved off. Prior to the experiment, the guards were given instructions that I will refer to later as part of the critique. Throughout the experiment, the guards wore reflective sunglasses, so the prisoners couldn't see their eyes.

The results, in brief, were that the guards behaved toward the prisoners in "negative, hostile, affrontive and dehumanizing" ways [2, p 80]. The prisoners behaved alternately in rebellious and passive ways. At one point, on the second day, they ripped off their clothing and identification numbers while shouting curses at the guards. Later, five of the prisoners reacted with such extreme emotions that they were removed from the study before the end of five days. By the end of the sixth day the behavior of the guards and prisoners had spiraled to the point that Zimbardo decided to end the experiment early.

The standard interpretation, somewhat simplified, is this. The conditions of a prison, where one group has power over another and the powerless group are stripped of their individual identities, creates extreme, maladaptive responses that are characteristic of the responses often seen in real prisons. Those in power become abusive, and those subject to that power become immature, passive, and rebellious. These effects do not have to do with differences in original personality (because in the experiment the subjects were randomly assigned to roles), but result from the situation in which people find themselves. In the original paper and in subsequent writings, Zimbardo has repeatedly emphasized his view that this experiment reveals much that is significant in understanding what happens in real prisons.
The Critique
In a nutshell, here's the criticism, somewhat simplified. Twenty-one boys (OK, young men) are asked to play a game of prisoners and guards. It's 1971. There have recently been many news reports about prison riots and the brutality of guards. So, in this game, what are these young men supposed to do? Are they supposed to sit around talking pleasantly with one another about sports, girlfriends, movies, and such? No, of course not. This is a study of prisoners and guards, so their job clearly is to act like prisoners and guards-or, more accurately, to act out their stereotyped views of what prisoners and guards do. Surely, Professor Zimbardo, who is right there watching them (as the Prison Superintendent) would be disappointed if, instead, they had just sat around chatting pleasantly and having tea. Much research has shown that participants in psychological experiments are highly motivated to do what they believe the researchers want them to do. Any characteristics of an experiment that let research participants guess how the experimenters expect or want them to behave are referred to as demand characteristics. In any valid experiment it is essential to eliminate or at least minimize demand characteristics. In this experiment, the demands were everywhere.

In order to assess the degree to which participants in the experiment could guess what Zimbardo expected to happen, Banuazizi and Mohavedi presented some of the details of the experimental procedure to a large sample of college students who had not heard of the experiment and asked them to write down what they thought the researchers wanted to prove and to describe how the guards and prisoners were likely to behave. The great majority guessed the results. In various words, they said that the purpose of the experiment was to prove that normal people placed into the position of prisoner or guard would act like real prisoners and guards, and they predicted that the guards would act in hostile, domineering ways and the prisoners would react in either passive or defiant ways or both.

Subsequent revelations about the experiment-published since the first edition of my textbook-reveal that the guards didn't even have to guess how they were supposed to behave; they were largely told how by Zimbardo and his associates. In his relatively recent book, The Lucifer Effect [4, p 55] Zimbardo describes in the following terms what he told the guards at the outset of the study:

" We cannot physically abuse or torture them," I said. " We can create boredom. We can create a sense of frustration. We can create fear in them, to some degree. We can create a notion of the arbitrariness that governs their lives, which are totally controlled by us, by the system, by you, me, [Warden] Jaffe. They'll have no privacy at all, there will be constant surveillance -- nothing they do will go unobserved. They will have no freedom of action. They will be able to do nothing and say nothing that we don't permit. We're going to take away their individuality in various ways. They're going to be wearing uniforms, and at no time will anybody call them by name; they will have numbers and be called only by their numbers. In general, what all this should create in them is a sense of powerlessness. We have total power in the situation. They have none. ..."[5, see also here,]

Is this not an overt invitation to be abusive in all sorts of psychological ways? And, when the guards did behave in these ways and escalated that behavior, with Zimbardo watching and apparently (by his silence) approving, would that not have confirmed in the subjects' minds that they were behaving as they should? They were doing this all for the sake of an experiment, for the good of science, and apparently they were doing the right thing-so they continued, and did even more of it, until the experiment was stopped. They may also have been motivated by the same ideological passion that motivated Zimbardo to conduct the experiment in the first place--to prove to the world that prison guards are abusive because of the situation they are in, or to prove that prisoners are hurt by such abuse.

What would have happened if Zimbardo had said to the guards, at the outset, that the purpose of the experiment was to prove that it is possible to be both a guard and a decent human being, or in some way implied that the goal was to prove that guards can be kind? I bet the results would have been entirely different. The "situation" would have been the same, but the "demand" would have been different and the results would have been different.

As part of their preparation for the experiment, Zimbardo and his colleagues consulted with an ex convict named Carlo Prescott, an African American who had served 17 years in San Quentin for attempted murder and who had spoken before Congress on issues of prison reform. Many years later, upon reading about the various ways the experiment was being used (misused, according to Prescott) by Zimbardo and others to explain real prison atrocities, Prescott wrote an article for the Stanford Daily entitled "The Lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment" (reprinted here).

In the article, Prescott expressed great regret for his involvement in the study and said that it was he, not the guards in the mock prison, who came up with the ways of psychologically humiliating and harassing the prisoners. Here are his words:

"...ideas such as bags being placed over the heads of prisoners, inmates being bound together with chains and buckets being used in place of toilets in their cells were all experiences of mine at the old "Spanish Jail" section of San Quentin and which I dutifully shared with the Stanford Prison Experiment braintrust months before the experiment started. To allege that all these carefully tested, psychologically solid, upper-middle-class Caucasian "guards" dreamed this up on their own is absurd. How can Zimbardo ... express horror at the behavior of the "guards" when they were merely doing what Zimbardo and others, myself included, encouraged them to do at the outset or frankly established as ground rules? At the time, I had hoped that I would help create a valid, intellectually honest indictment of the prison system. In hindsight, I blew it. I became an unwitting accomplice to a theatrical exercise that conveniently absolves all comers of personal responsibility for their abominable moral choices." [5]

In fairness, I must add that in their original article Zimbardo and his colleagues discussed the possibility that demand characteristics may have played a role in the participants' initial behavior in the mock prison, but they contended that the situation quickly became a new reality for the subjects and then they were responding to the immediate situation. There may be some truth to that, but the degree to which it is true is very much debatable.

My own guess is that the behavior of the guards was largely if not entirely the result of their doing what they were told to do and what they believed they were supposed to do. The behavior of the prisoners in the first day or two, when they were pretending to riot and pretending to plot escapes, was probably also playacting of stereotyped concepts of what prisoners do. But their subsequent wearing down, passivity, and apparently genuine desire to get out of the prison may very well have been a direct response to what the guards were doing to them (coupled, I imagine, with their lack of sleep--the guards were on shifts but they were not).

From this point of view, there is nothing in the results of the study that should surprise us. Once we say that the guards humiliated and oppressed the prisoners because they were told to do that and felt it was important to do it for the sake of science, and once we say that the prisoners initially "rioted" because they felt that this is what they were supposed to do but later really did want out because they were humiliated and oppressed, what is there left to be surprised about? Did Zimbardo and his colleagues really need to do this experiment to "prove" such an obvious result? And does this really tell about the behavior of real guards and prisoners, who are not there for a two-week experiment (for the good of science), but are there because that is how they make their living or because they are being punished for a crime? There is no way to simulate the real experiences of being a guard or a prisoner.

Too often, in our psychological research labs, we trivialize reality. Zimbardo's prison experiment is a good example of that. If I had included Zimbardo's experiment in my textbook, it would have been to make that point.

---------

What do you think? Do you still find value in the famous prison experiment, and if so what is that value? This blog is a forum for discussion, and your comments and questions are valued and treated with respect by me and other readers. As always, I prefer if you post your comments and questions here rather than send them to me by private email. By putting them here, you share with other readers, not just with me. I read all comments and try to respond to all serious questions, if I feel I have something useful to say. Of course, if you have something to say that truly applies only to you and me, then send me an email.

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Addendum, Feb. 18, 2014 -Peter Gray
Just today I happened to find this quotation, from John Mark, who had been one of the guards in Zimbardo's "experiment." It's from the July/Aug, 2011, issue of the Stanford Alumni magazine, and you can find the whole article here. Here's the quote:

"During the day shift, when I worked, no one did anything that was beyond what you'd expect in a situation like that. But Zimbardo went out of his way to create tension. Things like forced sleep deprivation-he was really pushing the envelope. I just didn't like the whole idea of constantly disturbing people and asking them to recite their prisoner numbers in a count. I certainly didn't like when they put a guy in solitary confinement.

"At that time of my life, I was getting high, all day every day. I got high before I went to the experiment; I got high on my breaks and lunch. I got high afterwards. I brought joints with me, and every day I wanted to give them to the prisoners. I looked at their faces and saw how they were getting dispirited and I felt sorry for them.

"I didn't think it was ever meant to go the full two weeks. I think Zimbardo wanted to create a dramatic crescendo, and then end it as quickly as possible. I felt that throughout the experiment, he knew what he wanted and then tried to shape the experiment-by how it was constructed, and how it played out-to fit the conclusion that he had already worked out. He wanted to be able to say that college students, people from middle-class backgrounds-people will turn on each other just because they're given a role and given power.

"Based on my experience, and what I saw and what I felt, I think that was a real stretch. I don't think the actual events match up with the bold headline. I never did, and I haven't changed my opinion."

--------
Notes and References
[1] Peter Gray (1 st edition, 1991; 6 th edition, 2011) Psychology. Worth Publishers. [The7th edition, which will appear soon, has a terrific new co-author, David Bjorklund, who has taken over the full task of revisions.]

[2] Haney, C., Banks, C., & Zimbardo, P. (1973). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison. International Journal of Criminology & Penology, 1(1), 69-97.

[3] Banuazizi, A., & Movahedi, S. (1975). Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison: A methodological analysis. American Psychologist, 30, 152-160.

[4] Zimbardo, P. (2007). The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. Random House.

[5] Prescott, C. (April 28, 2005). The lie of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Stanford Daily, in News section.

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Why Zimbardo's Prison Experiment Isn't in My Textbook

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One of the questions I'm often asked by professors who teach from my introductory psychology textbook is this: "Why don't you include Zimbardo's classic Stanford Prison Experiment in your book, like all other introductory psychology textbook authors do?" Here's why.

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Recent episodes received support from:

The Stanford Prison Experiment, said to have proven that evil environments produce evil behavior, was completely unscientific and unreliable.

by Brian Dunning

Filed under General Science

Skeptoid Podcast #102 |
May 27, 2008
Podcast transcript Download | Subscribe

Listen:
http://skeptoid.com/audio/skeptoid-4102.mp3

It was 1971 when the prisoner, emotionally drained, sleep deprived, chained, and dehumanized in his rough muslin smock was thrown into a tiny dark closet by the cruel guard nicknamed John Wayne, to endure solitary confinement without food or bathroom privileges. You might think this scene was from Hanoi in Vietnam, or at best a military prison in the United States. You'd be close. This brutal activity was funded by the United States Navy, which was interested in learning more about the psychological mechanisms in a prison environment. It took place at Stanford University in California, and the prisoner had done nothing wrong other than to volunteer for a research project. This was the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, conducted by professor of psychology Dr. Philip Zimbardo.

Philip Zimbardo grew up in what he describes as a "South Bronx ghetto", and as a boy watched his close friends engage in acts of violence, abuse drugs, and wind up in jail. He grew fascinated by the question of why good people do bad things, and became convinced from a very young age that bad environments tend to poison the people placed into them. Put a good person into an evil situation, and that person will become evil. He later wrote:

To investigate this I created an experiment. We took women students at New York University and made them anonymous. We put them in hoods, put them in the dark, took away their names, gave them numbers, and put them in small groups. And sure enough, within half an hour those sweet women were giving painful electric shocks to other women within an experimental setting... Any situation that makes you anonymous and gives permission for aggression will bring out the beast in most people. That was the start of my interest in showing how easy it is to get good people to do things they say they would never do.

From his body of work, it is easy to conclude that he was actively interested in justifying a preconceived notion: That good people will become evil if you put them into an evil environment. About a decade after getting his Ph.D. in psychology from Yale, Zimbardo went to Stanford University, where he got tenure and then set about planning the experiment that was to define his career.

24 students were recruited for a two-week experiment for which they would each receive $15 per day. They were randomly assigned to be either prison guards or inmates. The prisoners were surprised to be picked up unexpectedly at their homes by real Palo Alto police officers. They were roughly hustled to their new home, stripped, deloused, and put into rough muslin smocks with no underwear. Zimbardo described it:

The question there was, what happens when you put good people in an evil place? We put good, ordinary college students in a very realistic, prison-like setting in the basement of the psychology department at Stanford. We dehumanized the prisoners, gave them numbers, and took away their identity. We also deindividuated the guards, calling them Mr. Correctional Officer, putting them in khaki uniforms, and giving them silver reflecting sunglasses like in the movie Cool Hand Luke. Essentially, we translated the anonymity of Lord of the Flies into a setting where we could observe exactly what happened from moment to moment.

The results have become legendary. Some of the guards seemed to relish their newfound authority a little too much, becoming sadistic, and working extra hours just for fun. The torment they put on the prisoners was real. Some began showing physical manifestations of stress and psychological trauma, to the point that one third of them had to be removed from the experiment early. In fact, it got so bad that Zimbardo decided to end the experiment after only six days, less than half the planned duration.

Zimbardo's conclusion was clear. Good, ordinary college students willingly became sadistic tormentors, simply because they were given the permission, the means, and the expectation of doing so. The Stanford Prison Experiment, and this well-publicized result, became a permanent fixture in the popular conception of psychology.

The problem is that a lot of the psychology community disagrees with his findings. Some found that any results were rendered meaningless by insufficient controls. Some have problems with his analysis of the results, reaching a different conclusion based on the same data. Some found the sample population invalidated by selection biases, or the size of the sample inadequate for statistically useful results. Some found methodological flaws that tainted the participants' behavior. Let's look at some of these criticisms in closer detail.

First, the issue of selection bias. Selection bias is where you choose your subjects in such a way that they are not truly representative of the general population. In this case, Zimbardo advertised to students to participate in an experiment about "prison life". Clearly, a large segment of the general population would be repulsed by such a concept, and you've got to have questions about anyone attracted to that idea. Thus, all applicants to the Stanford Prison Experiment were preselected for comfort with the idea of "prison life".

Most of the Stanford guards did not exhibit any cruel or unusual behavior, often being friendly and doing favors for the prisoners. The most notorious guard, nicknamed John Wayne, explained that he was simply trying to emulate Strother Martin's character from Cool Hand Luke. Other analysts have found it difficult to support Zimbardo's conclusions, since the allegedly poisonous environment did not affect most participants, and the most notorious participant explained that his motivation came from a completely different source.

Zimbardo himself was also criticized for actively participating in the experiment as one of the characters. He was the prison superintendent. Although he may have restrained himself from having any influence on the experiment, the fact that he put himself in the position of ultimate active authority over the guards' behavior calls this into question. Many designers of such experiments would summarily throw out such a study based on this alone.

Some researchers have also questioned why Zimbardo neglected the effect of individual personalities, instead generally attributing all behavior to the prison environment. How did John Wayne's behavior as a guard compare to his behavior outside the experiment? Was he generally a friendly guy, or might he already have been a royal jerk? We don't know, so there was insufficient data to conclude that his behavior was changed by the experiment.

The statistical validity of the sample of participants, 24 male Stanford students of about the same age, has been called into question as being too small and restrictive to be generally applicable to the population at large.

I have one other issue with Zimbardo's results that I didn't find anyone else raising, and it goes back to my 15-point checklist in Skeptoid #37, How to Spot Pseudoscience. Zimbardo has dedicated much of his career to the promotion of the idea that bad environments drive bad behavior. I tend to be cautious of claims coming from sources dedicated to promoting them. The scientific method starts with a null hypothesis, not with a preconceived notion to justify; and that process invariably produces data that do not support the conclusion, and theories tend to change over time as a result. By my analysis, Zimbardo appears to be cherrypicking his results to justify the same conclusion that he has been promoting throughout his career. This doesn't make him wrong, it just gives me cause for skepticism.

Finally, It's worth mentioning that by today's standards, the Stanford Prison Experiment was unethical and could never be performed in the United States. However, this point is not relevant to the validity of the results, and in any event, it was perfectly legal at the time.

Dr. Zimbardo and the Stanford Experiment came into the news again in 2004, following the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq. American prison guards were accused of cruelty to Iraqi prisoners - the great Naked Human Pyramidgate scandal. A number of soldiers and senior officers were court martialed and imprisoned or demoted. The prosecutors claimed that "a few bad apples" were responsible. The defense disagreed, and called in Dr. Zimbardo as an expert witness to testify that it was the environment that was responsible, not the individuals. "You can't be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel," he famously said. The court disagreed, finding (rightly, as many would say) that individuals must be held accountable for their own actions, and the few bad apples went to jail. Dr. Zimbardo then wrote the book The Lucifer Effect, drawing further parallels between his prison experiment and the Abu Ghraib scandal.

Psychology is complicated, and there will probably never be a perfect theory explaining all human behavior; so people should never assign too much significance to the results of any given experiment like the Stanford Prison Experiment. And, when an experiment receives a large amount of scholarly criticism from mainstream science, as this one did, you have very good reason to look past its portrayal in the popular media and, instead, be skeptical.

By Brian Dunning
Follow @BrianDunning
Please contact us with any corrections or feedback.
Cite this article:
Dunning, B. "What You Didn't Know about the Stanford Prison Experiment." Skeptoid Podcast. Skeptoid Media, 27 May 2008. Web. 5 Jul 2018. <http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4102>

References & Further Reading

Brannigan, A. The Rise and Fall of Social Psychology: The Use and Misuse of the Experimental Method. New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 2004. 37-39.

Brockman, John. "You can't be a sweet cucumber in a vinegar barrel: A talk with Philip Zimbardo." Edge: The Third Culture. Edge Foundation, Inc., 19 Jan. 2005. Web. 24 Apr. 2008. <http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/zimbardo05/zimbardo05_index.html>

Carnahan T., McFarland S. "Revisiting the Stanford prison experiment: Could participant self-selection have led to the cruelty?" Personality and social psychology bulletin. 1 May 2007, Volume 33, Number 5: 603-614.

Haney, C., Banks, C., Zimbardo, P. "Interpersonal dynamics in a simulated prison." International Journal of Criminology & Penology. 1 Feb. 1973, Volume 1, Number 1: 69-97.

Reicher, S., Haslam, S. A. "Rethinking the psychology of tyranny: The BBC prison study." British Journal of Social Psychology. 1 Mar. 2006, Volume 45, Number 1: 1-40.

Zimbardo, P. The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil. New York: Random House, 2008.

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What You Didn't Know about the Stanford Prison Experiment

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Recent episodes received support from: The Stanford Prison Experiment, said to have proven that evil environments produce evil behavior, was completely unscientific and unreliable.

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Shocking "prison" study 40 years later: What happened at Stanford?

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Still-controversial Stanford University study turned college students into "prisoners" and "guards." What happened next?

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Like a real life 'Lord of the Flies', it showed a degeneration and breakdown of the established rules and morals dictating exactly how people should behave towards each other.

The study created more new questions than it answered, about the amorality and darkness that inhabits the human psyche.

As a purely scientific venture, the experiment was a failure, but it generated some results that give an insight into human psychology and social behavior. The ethical implications of this study are still discussed in college and undergraduate psychology classes all across the world.

In the days of the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo abuses, the Stanford Prison Experiment is once again becoming relevant, showing that systematic abuse and denial of human rights is never far away in any prison facility.

This study is so well known that a Hollywood movie about the Stanford Prison Experiment is going to be released in 2009. The experiment has also been the basis of many similar studies, over the years, but these have had much stricter controls and monitoring in place.

Background

In 1971, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo tried to show that prison guards and convicts would tend to slip into predefined roles, behaving in a way that they thought was required, rather than using their own judgment and morals.

Zimbardo was trying to show what happened when all of the individuality and dignity was stripped away from a human, and their life was completely controlled.

He wanted show the dehumanization and loosening of social and moral values that can happen to guards immersed in such a situation.

Method

To conduct the Stanford Prison Experiment, Zimbardo constructed a mock correctional facility in the basement of Stanford University.

Adverts were placed in local newspapers offering $15 per day for participants in this program. Of the 75 responses, the 24 male subjects judged to be most mentally and emotionally stable were selected. Mainly middle class and white, they were divided into two groups randomly, of 12 prisoners and 12 guards.

The group selected to be the guards were outfitted in 'military-style' intimidating uniforms. They were also equipped with wooden batons and mirrored shades, to prevent eye-contact and make the guards appear less human.

In an initiation meeting, Zimbardo, who acted as the warden for the duration of the experiment, informed the guards that the only rule was that no physical punishment was allowed. Other than that, the guards were to run the prison as they saw fit, and would be divided into regular working shifts and patterns.

Prisoners, by contrast, were dressed in cheap smocks and were allowed no underwear. They were to be addressed by, and answer to, identity numbers only. They also had a small chain around one ankle to remind them that they were inmates in a correctional facility. Conditions were tough, with only basic sleeping mattresses and plain food being supplied.

The prisoners were instructed to wait at home "to be called" for the start of the experiment; their homes were raided without any warning, arrested by the real local police department and charged with armed robbery.

The Palo Alto Police had agreed to help with the experiment. As if they were real-life suspects, the prisoners were read their rights and had their mug shots and fingerprints taken. After being stripped, searched and de-loused, they were taken into the cells that would be their homes for the next two weeks.

Zimbardo, acting as a prison warden, would be able to observe and make notes about what happened during the course of the study.

Results

The Stanford Prison Experiment degenerated very quickly and the dark and inhuman side of human nature became apparent very quickly.

The prisoners began to suffer a wide array of humiliations and punishments at the hands of the guards, and many began to show signs of mental and emotional distress.

On the second day of the experiment, the prisoners organized a mass revolt and riot, as a protest about the conditions. Guards worked extra hours and devised a strategy to break up and put down the riot, using fire-extinguishers.

No prompt for this action was given by Zimbardo; the guards used their own initiative to formulate the plan.

Standard prisoner counts and roll-call became a trial of ordeal and ritual humiliation for the prisoners, with forced exercise and physical punishments becoming more and more common. Mattresses were confiscated from the prisoners and they were forced to sleep on cold, hard floors.

Toilet facilities became a privilege, instead of a basic human right, with access to the bathroom being frequently denied; the inmates often had to clean the toilet facilities with their bare hands. Prisoners were often stripped and subjected to sexual humiliation, as a weapon of intimidation.

The experiment showed that one third of the guards began to show an extreme and imbedded streak of sadism, and Zimbardo himself started to become internalized in the experiment. Two of the prisoners had to be removed early because they were showing real signs of emotional distress.

Interestingly, none of the prisoners wanted to quit the experiment early, even when told that they would be denied their participation pay. The prisoners became institutionalized very quickly and adapted to their roles.

A replacement prisoner was introduced and was instructed to go on hunger strike as a protest about the treatment of his fellow inmates, and as an attempt to obtain early release. Surprisingly, his fellow inmates viewed him as a troublemaker rather than a fellow victim trying to help them.

When the inmates were informed that, if the rest of their prisoners gave up their blankets, he would be released from solitary confinement, all but one refused to give up their blanket.

The Stanford Prison Experiment carried on for six days until an outsider, Christina Maslach, a graduate student who would later become Zimbardo's wife, was brought in to interview guards and prisoners and was shocked by the scenes that she was witnessing.

Zimbardo terminated the experiment early and noted that out of over 50 external visitors, this lady was the only one to raise concerns about what was happening.

Conclusions

Zimbardo believed that the experiment showed how the individual personalities of people could be swamped when they were given positions of authority.

Social and ideological factors also determined how both groups behaved, with individuals acting in a way that they thought was required, rather than using their own judgment.

The experiment appeared to show how subjects reacted to the specific needs of the situation rather than referring to their own internal morals or beliefs.

The results of the experiment have been used in many high profile court cases over the years, to try and show that a prison must have clear instructions and guidelines from higher level authorities, or prisoner abuse may occur.

Criticisms

The ethics of the Stanford Prison Experiment have long been called into question, and, certainly, without stricter controls this experiment would not be sanctioned today; it could pose a genuine risk to people disposed towards mental and emotional imbalances.

In fairness to Zimbardo, most of these discussions take place with a lot of hindsight, and he could not have guessed the internalization and institutionalization that would occur during the course of the study.

Other criticisms include the validity of the results. It was a field experiment, rather than a scientific experiment, so there are only observational results and no scientific evaluation.

In addition, it would be very difficult for anybody to replicate the experiment conditions.

The selection of the subjects has been questioned extensively with the wording of the advert stating 'wanted for prison experiments', this may have caused people with more of a pre-disposition towards violence to apply.

In the aftermath of the study, many of the guards and prisoners indicated that they were only acting out roles that they thought were expected of them, so there is no consensus on whether the study really portrayed human nature or not.

Whether the Stanford Prison Experiment relates to real prisons is another matter. Although maltreatment of prisoners undoubtedly takes place all across the world, in most facilities, the guards are carefully screened and undergo a long and extensive training process. Zimbardo screened both prisoners and guards for non-social tendencies in his experiment.

They also have rigid protocols to which they are supposed to stick. In addition, the study studied only male subjects and most western prisons do have a mix of sexes on the guard staff.

Zimbardo also glossed over the fact that not all of the guards showed sadistic tendencies, with some seeking to actively help the prisoners and show sympathy towards them.

Later studies have concluded that abuse in prisons often comes from the top down and that when orders are given these can affect the results. If the guards had been given stricter guidelines from Zimbardo at the beginning then there may have been fewer sadistic tendencies shown by the guards selected for the Stanford Prison Experiment.

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Stanford Prison Experiment - Roles Define Your Behavior

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Like a real life 'Lord of the Flies', it showed a degeneration and breakdown of the established rules and morals dictating exactly how people should behave towards each other. The study created more new questions than it answered, about the amorality and darkness that inhabits the human psyche.

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On the morning of August 17, 1971, nine young men in the Palo Alto area received visits from local police officers. While their neighbors looked on, the men were arrested for violating Penal Codes 211 and 459 (armed robbery and burglary), searched, handcuffed, and led into the rear of a waiting police car. The cars took them to a Palo Alto police station, where the men were booked, fingerprinted, moved to a holding cell, and blindfolded. Finally, they were transported to the Stanford County Prison-also known as the Stanford University psychology department.

They were willing participants in the Stanford Prison Experiment, one of the most controversial studies in the history of social psychology. (It's the subject of a new film of the same name-a drama, not a documentary-starring Billy Crudup, of "Almost Famous," as the lead investigator, Philip Zimbardo. It opens July 17th.) The study subjects, middle-class college students, had answered a questionnaire about their family backgrounds, physical- and mental-health histories, and social behavior, and had been deemed "normal"; a coin flip divided them into prisoners and guards. According to the lore that's grown up around the experiment, the guards, with little to no instruction, began humiliating and psychologically abusing the prisoners within twenty-four hours of the study's start. The prisoners, in turn, became submissive and depersonalized, taking the abuse and saying little in protest. The behavior of all involved was so extreme that the experiment, which was meant to last two weeks, was terminated after six days.

Less than a decade earlier, the Milgram obedience study had shown that ordinary people, if encouraged by an authority figure, were willing to shock their fellow-citizens with what they believed to be painful and potentially lethal levels of electricity. To many, the Stanford experiment underscored those findings, revealing the ease with which regular people, if given too much power, could transform into ruthless oppressors. Today, more than forty-five years later, many look to the study to make sense of events like the behavior of the guards at Abu Ghraib and America's epidemic of police brutality. The Stanford Prison Experiment is cited as evidence of the atavistic impulses that lurk within us all; it's said to show that, with a little nudge, we could all become tyrants.

And yet the lessons of the Stanford Prison Experiment aren't so clear-cut. From the beginning, the study has been haunted by ambiguity. Even as it suggests that ordinary people harbor ugly potentialities, it also testifies to the way our circumstances shape our behavior. Was the study about our individual fallibility, or about broken institutions? Were its findings about prisons, specifically, or about life in general? What did the Stanford Prison Experiment really show?

The appeal of the experiment has a lot to do with its apparently simple setup: prisoners, guards, a fake jail, and some ground rules. But, in reality, the Stanford County Prison was a heavily manipulated environment, and the guards and prisoners acted in ways that were largely predetermined by how their roles were presented. To understand the meaning of the experiment, you have to understand that it wasn't a blank slate; from the start, its goal was to evoke the experience of working and living in a brutal jail.

From the first, the guards' priorities were set by Zimbardo. In a presentation to his Stanford colleagues shortly after the study's conclusion, he described the procedures surrounding each prisoner's arrival: each man was stripped and searched, "deloused," and then given a uniform-a numbered gown, which Zimbardo called a "dress," with a heavy bolted chain near the ankle, loose-fitting rubber sandals, and a cap made from a woman's nylon stocking. "Real male prisoners don't wear dresses," Zimbardo explained, "but real male prisoners, we have learned, do feel humiliated, do feel emasculated, and we thought we could produce the same effects very quickly by putting men in a dress without any underclothes." The stocking caps were in lieu of shaving the prisoner's heads. (The guards wore khaki uniforms and were given whistles, nightsticks, and mirrored sunglasses inspired by a prison guard in the movie "Cool Hand Luke.")

Often, the guards operated without explicit, moment-to-moment instructions. But that didn't mean that they were fully autonomous: Zimbardo himself took part in the experiment, playing the role of the prison superintendent. (The prison's "warden" was also a researcher.) /Occasionally, disputes between prisoner and guards got out of hand, violating an explicit injunction against physical force that both prisoners and guards had read prior to enrolling in the study. When the "superintendent" and "warden" overlooked these incidents, the message to the guards was clear: all is well; keep going as you are. The participants knew that an audience was watching, and so a lack of feedback could be read as tacit approval. And the sense of being watched may also have encouraged them to perform. Dave Eshelman, one of the guards, recalled that he "consciously created" his guard persona. "I was in all kinds of drama productions in high school and college. It was something I was very familiar with: to take on another personality before you step out on the stage," Eshelman said. In fact, he continued, "I was kind of running my own experiment in there, by saying, 'How far can I push these things and how much abuse will these people take before they say, 'Knock it off?' "

Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It's often said that the study participants were ordinary guys-and they were, indeed, determined to be "normal" and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for "a psychological study of prison life." In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase "prison life." They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.

Moreover, even within that self-selected sample, behavioral patterns were far from homogeneous. Much of the study's cachet depends on the idea that the students responded en masse, giving up their individual identities to become submissive "prisoners" and tyrannical "guards." But, in fact, the participants responded to the prison environment in all sorts of ways. While some guard shifts were especially cruel, others remained humane. Many of the supposedly passive prisoners rebelled. Richard Yacco, a prisoner, remembered "resisting what one guard was telling me to do and being willing to go into solitary confinement. As prisoners, we developed solidarity-we realized that we could join together and do passive resistance and cause some problems."

What emerges from these details isn't a perfectly lucid photograph but an ambiguous watercolor. While it's true that some guards and prisoners behaved in alarming ways, it's also the case that their environment was designed to encourage-and, in some cases, to require-those behaviors. Zimbardo himself has always been forthcoming about the details and the nature of his prison experiment: he thoroughly explained the setup in his original study and, in an early write-up, in which the experiment was described in broad strokes only, he pointed out that only "about a third of the guards became tyrannical in their arbitrary use of power." (That's about four people in total.) So how did the myth of the Stanford Prison Experiment-"Lord of the Flies" in the psych lab-come to diverge so profoundly from the reality?

In part, Zimbardo's earliest statements about the experiment are to blame. In October, 1971, soon after the study's completion-and before a single methodologically and analytically rigorous result had been published-Zimbardo was asked to testify before Congress about prison reform. His dramatic testimony, even as it clearly explained how the experiment worked, also allowed listeners to overlook how coercive the environment really was. He described the study as "an attempt to understand just what it means psychologically to be a prisoner or a prison guard." But he also emphasized that the students in the study had been "the cream of the crop of this generation," and said that the guards were given no specific instructions, and left free to make "up their own rules for maintaining law, order, and respect." In explaining the results, he said that the "majority" of participants found themselves "no longer able to clearly differentiate between role-playing and self," and that, in the six days the study took to unfold, "the experience of imprisonment undid, although temporarily, a lifetime of learning; human values were suspended, self-concepts were challenged, and the ugliest, most base, pathological side of human nature surfaced." In describing another, related study and its implications for prison life, he said that "the mere act of assigning labels to people, calling some people prisoners and others guards, is sufficient to elicit pathological behavior."

Zimbardo released video to NBC, which ran a feature on November 26, 1971. An article ran in the Times Magazine in April of 1973. In various ways, these accounts reiterated the claim that relatively small changes in circumstances could turn the best and brightest into monsters or depersonalized serfs. By the time Zimbardo published a formal paper about the study, in a 1973 issue of the International Journal of Crim__i__nology and Penology, a streamlined and unequivocal version of events had become entrenched in the national consciousness-so much so that a 1975 methodological critique fell largely on deaf ears.

Forty years later, Zimbardo still doesn't shy away from popular attention. He served as a consultant on the new film, which follows his original study in detail, relying on direct transcripts from the experimental recordings and taking few dramatic liberties. In many ways, the film is critical of the study: Crudup plays Zimbardo as an overzealous researcher overstepping his bounds, trying to create a very specific outcome among the students he observes. The filmmakers even underscore the flimsiness of the experimental design, inserting characters who point out that Zimbardo is not a disinterested observer. They highlight a real-life conversation in which another psychologist asks Zimbardo whether he has an "independent variable." In describing the study to his Stanford colleagues shortly after it ended, Zimbardo recalled that conversation: "To my surprise, I got really angry at him," he said. "The security of my men and the stability of my prison was at stake, and I have to contend with this bleeding-heart, liberal, academic, effete dingdong whose only concern was for a ridiculous thing like an independent variable. The next thing he'd be asking me about was rehabilitation programs, the dummy! It wasn't until sometime later that I realized how far into the experiment I was at that point."

In a broad sense, the film reaffirms the opinion of John Mark, one of the guards, who, looking back, has said that Zimbardo's interpretation of events was too shaped by his expectations to be meaningful: "He wanted to be able to say that college students, people from middle-class backgrounds ... will turn on each other just because they're given a role and given power. Based on my experience, and what I saw and what I felt, I think that was a real stretch."

If the Stanford Prison Experiment had simulated a less brutal environment, would the prisoners and guards have acted differently? In December, 2001, two psychologists, Stephen Reicher and Alexander Haslam, tried to find out. They worked with the documentaries unit of the BBC to partially recreate Zimbardo's setup over the course of an eight-day experiment. Their guards also had uniforms, and were given latitude to dole out rewards and punishments; their prisoners were placed in three-person cells that followed the layout of the Stanford County Jail almost exactly. The main difference was that, in this prison, the preset expectations were gone. The guards were asked to come up with rules prior to the prisoners' arrival, and were told only to make the prison run smoothly. (The BBC Prison Study, as it came to be called, differed from the Stanford experiment in a few other ways, including prisoner dress; for a while, moreover, the prisoners were told that they could become guards through good behavior, although, on the third day, that offer was revoked, and the roles were made permanent.)

Within the first few days of the BBC study, it became clear that the guards weren't cohering as a group. "Several guards were wary of assuming and exerting their authority," the researchers wrote. The prisoners, on the other hand, developed a collective identity. In a change from the Stanford study, the psychologists asked each participant to complete a daily survey that measured the degree to which he felt solidarity with his group; it showed that, as the guards grew further apart, the prisoners were growing closer together. On the fourth day, three cellmates decided to test their luck. At lunchtime, one threw his plate down and demanded better food, another asked to smoke, and the third asked for medical attention for a blister on his foot. The guards became disorganized; one even offered the smoker a cigarette. Reicher and Haslam reported that, after the prisoners returned to their cells, they "literally danced with joy." ("That was fucking sweet," one prisoner remarked.) Soon, more prisoners began to challenge the guards. They acted out during roll call, complained about the food, and talked back. At the end of the sixth day, the three insubordinate cellmates broke out and occupied the guards' quarters. "At this point," the researchers wrote, "the guards' regime was seen by all to be unworkable and at an end."

Taken together, these two studies don't suggest that we all have an innate capacity for tyranny or victimhood. Instead, they suggest that our behavior largely conforms to our preconceived expectations. All else being equal, we act as we think we're expected to act-especially if that expectation comes from above. Suggest, as the Stanford setup did, that we should behave in stereotypical tough-guard fashion, and we strive to fit that role. Tell us, as the BBC experimenters did, that we shouldn't give up hope of social mobility, and we act accordingly.

This understanding might seem to diminish the power of the Stanford Prison Experiment. But, in fact, it sharpens and clarifies the study's meaning. Last weekend brought the tragic news of Kalief Browder's suicide. At sixteen, Browder was arrested, in the Bronx, for allegedly stealing a backpack; after the arrest, he was imprisoned at Rikers for three years without trial. (Ultimately, the case against him was dismissed.) While at Rikers, Browder was the object of violence from both prisoners and guards, some of which was captured on video. It's possible to think that prisons are the way they are because human nature tends toward the pathological. But the Stanford Prison Experiment suggests that extreme behavior flows from extreme institutions. Prisons aren't blank slates. Guards do indeed self-select into their jobs, as Zimbardo's students self-selected into a study of prison life. Like Zimbardo's men, they are bombarded with expectations from the first and shaped by preëxisting norms and patterns of behavior. The lesson of Stanford isn't that any random human being is capable of descending into sadism and tyranny. It's that certain institutions and environments demand those behaviors-and, perhaps, can change them.

Maria Konnikova is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, where she writes about psychology and science.
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The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment

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On the morning of August 17, 1971, nine young men in the Palo Alto area received visits from local police officers. While their neighbors looked on, the men were arrested for violating Penal Codes 211 and 459 (armed robbery and burglary), searched, handcuffed, and led into the rear of a waiting police car.

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By Saul McLeod, updated 2018

Purpose of the Study

Zimbardo and his colleagues (1973) were interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards (i.e., dispositional) or had more to do with the prison environment (i.e., situational).

For example, prisoner and guards may have personalities which make conflict inevitable, with prisoners lacking respect for law and order and guards being domineering and aggressive.

Alternatively, prisoners and guards may behave in a hostile manner due to the rigid power structure of the social environment in prisons. Zimbardo predicted the situation made people act the way they do rather than their disposition (personality).

To study the roles people play in prison situations, Zimbardo converted a basement of the Stanford University psychology building into a mock prison.

He advertised asking for volunteers to participate in a study of the psychological effects of prison life.

The 75 applicants who answered the ad were given diagnostic interviews and personality tests to eliminate candidates with psychological problems, medical disabilities, or a history of crime or drug abuse.

24 men judged to be the most physically & mentally stable, the most mature, & the least involved in antisocial behaviors were chosen to participate. The participants did not know each other prior to the study and were paid $15 per day to take part in the experiment.

Participants were randomly assigned to either the role of prisoner or guard in a simulated prison environment. There were two reserves, and one dropped out, finally leaving ten prisoners and 11 guards.

Prisoners were treated like every other criminal, being arrested at their own homes, without warning, and taken to the local police station. They were fingerprinted, photographed and 'booked.'

Then they were blindfolded and driven to the psychology department of Stanford University, where Zimbardo had had the basement set out as a prison, with barred doors and windows, bare walls and small cells. Here the deindividuation process began.

When the prisoners arrived at the prison they were stripped naked, deloused, had all their personal possessions removed and locked away, and were given prison clothes and bedding. They were issued a uniform, and referred to by their number only.

The use of ID numbers was a way to make prisoners feel anonymous. Each prisoner had to be called only by his ID number and could only refer to himself and the other prisoners by number.

Their clothes comprised a smock with their number written on it, but no underclothes. They also had a tight nylon cap to cover their hair, and a locked chain around one ankle.

All guards were dressed in identical uniforms of khaki, and they carried a whistle around their neck and a billy club borrowed from the police. Guards also wore special sunglasses, to make eye contact with prisoners impossible.

Three guards worked shifts of eight hours each (the other guards remained on call). Guards were instructed to do whatever they thought was necessary to maintain law and order in the prison and to command the respect of the prisoners. No physical violence was permitted.

Zimbardo observed the behavior of the prisoners and guards (as a researcher), and also acted as a prison warden.

Within a very short time both guards and prisoners were settling into their new roles, with the guards adopting theirs quickly and easily.

Asserting Authority

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Within hours of beginning the experiment some guards began to harass prisoners. At 2:30 A.M. prisoners were awakened from sleep by blasting whistles for the first of many "counts."

The counts served as a way to familiarizing the prisoners with their numbers. More importantly, they provided a regular occasion for the guards to exercise control over the prisoners.

The prisoners soon adopted prisoner-like behavior too. They talked about prison issues a great deal of the time. They 'told tales' on each other to the guards.

They started taking the prison rules very seriously, as though they were there for the prisoners' benefit and infringement would spell disaster for all of them. Some even began siding with the guards against prisoners who did not obey the rules.

Physical Punishment

The prisoners were taunted with insults and petty orders, they were given pointless and boring tasks to accomplish, and they were generally dehumanized.

Push-ups were a common form of physical punishment imposed by the guards. One of the guards stepped on the prisoners' backs while they did push-ups, or made other prisoners sit on the backs of fellow prisoners doing their push-ups.

Asserting Independence

Because the first day passed without incident, the guards were surprised and totally unprepared for the rebellion which broke out on the morning of the second day.

During the second day of the experiment, the prisoners removed their stocking caps, ripped off their numbers, and barricaded themselves inside the cells by putting their beds against the door.

The guards called in reinforcements. The three guards who were waiting on stand-by duty came in and the night shift guards voluntarily remained on duty.

Putting Down the Rebellion

The guards retaliated by using a fire extinguisher which shot a stream of skin-chilling carbon dioxide, and they forced the prisoners away from the doors. Next, the guards broke into each cell, stripped the prisoners naked and took the beds out.

The ringleaders of the prisoner rebellion were placed into solitary confinement. After this, the guards generally began to harass and intimidate the prisoners.

Special Privileges

One of the three cells was designated as a "privilege cell." The three prisoners least involved in the rebellion were given special privileges. The guards gave them back their uniforms and beds and allowed them to wash their hair and brush their teeth.

Privileged prisoners also got to eat special food in the presence of the other prisoners who had temporarily lost the privilege of eating. The effect was to break the solidarity among prisoners.

Consequences of the Rebellion

Over the next few days, the relationships between the guards and the prisoners changed, with a change in one leading to a change in the other. Remember that the guards were firmly in control and the prisoners were totally dependent on them.

As the prisoners became more dependent, the guards became more derisive towards them. They held the prisoners in contempt and let the prisoners know it. As the guards' contempt for them grew, the prisoners became more submissive.

As the prisoners became more submissive, the guards became more aggressive and assertive. They demanded ever greater obedience from the prisoners. The prisoners were dependent on the guards for everything so tried to find ways to please the guards, such as telling tales on fellow prisoners.

Prisoner #8612

Less than 36 hours into the experiment, Prisoner #8612 began suffering from acute emotional disturbance, disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying, and rage.

After a meeting with the guards where they told him he was weak, but offered him "informant" status, #8612 returned to the other prisoners and said "You can't leave. You can't quit."

Soon #8612 "began to act 'crazy,' to scream, to curse, to go into a rage that seemed out of control." It wasn't until this point that the psychologists realized they had to let him out.

A Visit from Parents

The next day, the guards held a visiting hour for parents and friends. They were worried that when the parents saw the state of the jail, they might insist on taking their sons home. Guards washed the prisoners, had them clean and polish their cells, fed them a big dinner and played music on the intercom.

After the visit, rumor spread of a mass escape plan. Afraid that they would lose the prisoners, the guards and experimenters tried to enlist the help and facilities of the Palo Alto police department.

The guards again escalated the level of harassment, forcing them to do menial, repetitive work such as cleaning toilets with their bare hands.

Catholic Priest

Zimbardo invited a Catholic priest who had been a prison chaplain to evaluate how realistic our prison situation was. Half of the prisoners introduced themselves by their number rather than name.

The chaplain interviewed each prisoner individually. The priest told them the only way they would get out was with the help of a lawyer.

Prisoner #819

Eventually while talking to the priest, #819 broke down and began to cry hysterically, just two previously released prisoners had. The psychologists removed the chain from his foot, the cap off his head, and told him to go and rest in a room that was adjacent to the prison yard. They told him they would get him some food and then take him to see a doctor.

While this was going on, one of the guards lined up the other prisoners and had them chant aloud:

"Prisoner #819 is a bad prisoner. Because of what Prisoner #819 did, my cell is a mess, Mr. Correctional Officer."

The psychologists realized #819 could hear the chanting and went back into the room where they found him sobbing uncontrollably. The psychologists tried to get him to agree to leave the experiment, but he said he could not leave because the others had labeled him a bad prisoner.

Back to Reality

At that point, Zimbardo said, "Listen, you are not #819. You are [his name], and my name is Dr. Zimbardo. I am a psychologist, not a prison superintendent, and this is not a real prison. This is just an experiment, and those are students, not prisoners, just like you. Let's go."

He stopped crying suddenly, looked up and replied, "Okay, let's go," as if nothing had been wrong.

An End to the Experiment

Zimbardo (1973) had intended that the experiment should run for a fortnight, but on the sixth day it was terminated. Christina Maslach, a recent Stanford Ph.D. brought in to conduct interviews with the guards and prisoners, strongly objected when she saw the prisoners being abused by the guards.

Filled with outrage, she said, "It's terrible what you are doing to these boys!" Out of 50 or more outsiders who had seen our prison, she was the only one who ever questioned its morality.

Zimbardo (2008) later noted, "It wasn't until much later that I realized how far into my prison role I was at that point -- that I was thinking like a prison superintendent rather than a research psychologist."

Conclusion

People will readily conform to the social roles they are expected to play, especially if the roles are as strongly stereotyped as those of the prison guards.

The "prison" environment was an important factor in creating the guards' brutal behavior (none of the participants who acted as guards showed sadistic tendencies before the study).

Therefore, the findings support the situational explanation of behavior rather than the dispositional one.

Zimbardo proposed that two processes can explain the prisoner's 'final submission.'

Deindividuation may explain the behavior of the participants; especially the guards. This is a state when you become so immersed in the norms of the group that you lose your sense of identity and personal responsibility.

The guards may have been so sadistic because they did not feel what happened was down to them personally - it was a group norm. The also may have lost their sense of personal identity because of the uniform they wore.

Also, learned helplessness could explain the prisoner's submission to the guards. The prisoners learned that whatever they did had little effect on what happened to them. In the mock prison the unpredictable decisions of the guards led the prisoners to give up responding.

After the prison experiment was terminated, Zimbardo interviewed the participants. Here's an excerpt:

'Most of the participants said they had felt involved and committed. The research had felt "real" to them. One guard said, "I was surprised at myself. I made them call each other names and clean the toilets out with their bare hands. I practically considered the prisoners cattle and I kept thinking I had to watch out for them in case they tried something."

Another guard said "Acting authoritatively can be fun. Power can be a great pleasure." And another: "... during the inspection I went to Cell Two to mess up a bed which a prisoner had just made and he grabbed me, screaming that he had just made it and that he was not going to let me mess it up. He grabbed me by the throat and although he was laughing I was pretty scared. I lashed out with my stick and hit him on the chin although not very hard, and when I freed myself I became angry."'

Most of the guards found it difficult to believe that they had behaved in the brutalizing ways that they had. Many said they hadn't known this side of them existed or that they were capable of such things.

The prisoners, too, couldn't believe that they had responded in the submissive, cowering, dependent way they had. Several claimed to be assertive types normally.

When asked about the guards, they described the usual three stereotypes that can be found in any prison: some guards were good, some were tough but fair, and some were cruel.

Critical Evaluation

Demand characteristics could explain the findings of the study. Most of the guards later claimed they were simply acting.

Because the guards and prisoners were playing a role, their behavior may not be influenced by the same factors which affect behavior in real life.

This means the study's findings cannot be reasonably generalized to real life, such as prison settings. I.e, the study has low ecological validity.

However, there is considerable evidence that the participants did react to the situation as though it was real. For example, 90% of the prisoners' private conversations, which were monitored by the researchers, were on the prison conditions, and only 10% of the time were their conversations about life outside of the prison.

The guards, too, rarely exchanged personal information during their relaxation breaks - they either talked about 'problem prisoners,' other prison topics, or did not talk at all. The guards were always on time and even worked overtime for no extra pay.

When the prisoners were introduced to a priest, they referred to themselves by their prison number, rather than their first name. Some even asked him to get a lawyer to help get them out.

The study may also lack population validity as the sample comprised US male students. The study's findings cannot be applied to female prisons or those from other countries. For example, America is an individualist culture (were people are generally less conforming) and the results may be different in collectivist cultures (such as Asian countries).

A strength of the study is that it has altered the way US prisons are run. For example, juveniles accused of federal crimes are no longer housed before trial with adult prisoners (due to the risk of violence against them).

Another strength of the study is that the harmful treatment of participant led to the formal recognition of ethical guidelines by the American Psychological Association. Studies must now undergo an extensive review by an institutional review board (US) or ethics committee (UK) before they are implemented.

A review of research plans by a panel is required by most institutions such as universities, hospitals, and government agencies. These boards review whether the potential benefits of the research are justifiable in the light of the possible risk of physical or psychological harm.

These boards may request researchers make changes to the study's design or procedure, or in extreme cases deny approval of the study altogether.

Ethical Issues

The study has received many ethical criticisms, including lack of fully informed consent by participants as Zimbardo himself did not know what would happen in the experiment (it was unpredictable).

Also, the prisoners did not consent to being 'arrested' at home. The prisoners were not told partly because final approval from the police wasn't given until minutes before the participants decided to participate, and partly because the researchers wanted the arrests to come as a surprise.

However, this was a breach of the ethics of Zimbardo's own contract that all of the participants had signed.

Participants playing the role of prisoners were not protected from psychological harm, experiencing incidents of humiliation and distress. For example, one prisoner had to be released after 36 hours because of uncontrollable bursts of screaming, crying and anger.

However, in Zimbardo's defense, the emotional distress experienced by the prisoners could not have been predicted from the outset. Approval for the study was given by the Office of Naval Research, the Psychology Department and the University Committee of Human Experimentation.

This Committee also did not anticipate the prisoners' extreme reactions that were to follow. Alternative methodologies were looked at which would cause less distress to the participants but at the same time give the desired information, but nothing suitable could be found.

Extensive group and individual debriefing sessions were held, and all participants returned post-experimental questionnaires several weeks, then several months later, then at yearly intervals. Zimbardo concluded there were no lasting negative effects.

Zimbardo also strongly argues that the benefits gained about our understanding of human behavior and how we can improve society should out balance the distress caused by the study.

However, it has been suggested that the US Navy was not so much interested in making prisons more human and were, in fact, more interested in using the study to train people in the armed services to cope with the stresses of captivity.

Discussion Questions

1. What are the effects of living in an environment with no clocks, no view of the outside world, and minimal sensory stimulation?

2. Consider the psychological consequences of stripping, delousing, and shaving the heads of prisoners or members of the military. What transformations take place when people go through an experience like this?

3. After the study, how do you think the prisoners and guards felt?

4. If you were the experimenter in charge, would you have done this study? Would you have terminated it earlier? Would you have conducted a follow-up study?

References

Haney, C., Banks, W. C., & Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). A study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison. Naval Research Review, 30, 4-17.

How to reference this article:

McLeod, S. A. (2018, Sept 16). Zimbardo - Stanford prison experiment. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/zimbardo.html

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Stanford Prison Experiment | Simply Psychology

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The Stanford prison experiment was an attempt to investigate the psychological effects of perceived power, focusing on the struggle between prisoners and prison officers. It was conducted at Stanford University between August 14-20, 1971, by a research group led by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo using ...

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The Stanford prison experiment ( SPE) was a psychological experiment conducted in the summer of 1971. It was 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 led the research team who administered the study.

Those volunteers selected to be "guards" were given uniforms specifically to de-individuate them, and they were instructed to prevent prisoners from escaping. The experiment officially started when "prisoners" were arrested by real Palo Alto police. Over the following five days, psychological abuse of the prisoners by the "guards" became increasingly brutal. After psychologist Christina Maslach visited to evaluate the conditions, she was upset to see how study participants were behaving and she confronted Zimbardo. He ended the experiment on the sixth day.

SPE has been referenced and critiqued as one of the most unethical psychology experiments in history. The harm inflicted on the participants prompted universities worldwide to improve their ethics requirements for human subjects of experiments to prevent them from being similarly harmed. Other researchers have found it difficult to reproduce the study, especially given those constraints. Critics have described the study as unscientific and fraudulent.

The official website of the SPE describes the experiment goal as follows:

We wanted to see what the psychological effects were of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. To do this, we decided to set up a simulated prison and then carefully note the effects of this institution on the behavior of all those within its walls.

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

Zimbardo's primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. "I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects," Zimbardo told the Toronto symposium in the summer of 1996.

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

Criticism of the SPE has continued long after the experiment ended. Many researchers have critiqued Philip Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment for its methodology, whether it meets the criteria to be a scientific experiment, and whether the guard orientation created a demand bias.

Prior to publishing in American Psychologist and other peer-reviewed journals, the researchers reported the findings in Naval Research Reviews, International Journal of Criminology and Penalogy (IJCP), and the New York Times Magazine. 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. This action taken by Zimbardo broke the tradition of scientific dissemination by publishing in other journals before publishing in a scientific peer-reviewed journal.

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 Penalogy 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.

After receiving approval from the university to conduct the experiment, study participants were recruited using an ad in the "help wanted" section of the Palo Alto Times and The Stanford Daily newspapers in August 1972:

Male college students needed for psychological study of prison life. $15 per day for 1-2 weeks, beginning Aug. 14. For further information and applications, come to Room 248, Jordan Hall, Stanford U.

Seventy-five men applied, and, after screening assessments and interviews, 24 were selected to participate in a two-week prison simulation. The applicants were predominantly white, middle-class, and appeared to be psychologically stable and healthy. The group of subjects was intentionally selected to exclude those with criminal backgrounds, psychological impairments, or medical problems.

Critics of the study have argued that selection bias may have played a role in the results due to the ad describing a need for prisoners and guards rather than a social psychology study. In 2008, Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland argued that those who applied to participate in the SPE already had traits associated with abusiveness. Aggression, right-wing authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, social dominance orientation, and narcissism would be high in those who volunteered for a prison experiment. Further, low dispositional empathy and altruism would also be indicators of someone who would volunteer.

On a random basis, half of the subjects were assigned the role of guard (nine plus three potential substitutes), and half were assigned to the role of prisoner (also nine plus three potential substitutes). They agreed to participate for a 7- to 14-day period for $15 per day (roughly equivalent to $108 in 2022).

The day before the experiment began, small mock prison cells were set up to hold three prisoners each. 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.

The experiment was conducted in a 35 ft (11 m) section of the basement of Jordan Hall, Stanford's psychology building. The prison had two fabricated walls: one at the entrance and one at the cell wall to block observation. Each cell (7 ft × 10 ft or 2.1 m × 3.0 m) was unlit, was intended to house 3 prisoners and had a cot (with mattress, sheet, and pillow) for each prisoner. Prisoners were confined and were to stay in their cells and the yard all day and night until the study was finished. In contrast, the guards were to stay in a different environment, separate from the prisoners. The guards were given access to special areas for rest and relaxation. The guards were told to work in teams of three for eight-hour shifts. The guards were not required to stay on-site after their shift.

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.

The researchers held 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.

Zimbardo has explained that guard orientations in the prison system instructed the guards to exert power over the prisoners. Further, Zimbardo asserts that his fellow researcher explicitly instructed the guards to not physically inflict harm on the prisoners, but at the same time make the prisoners feel that they were in an actual prison.

Asking a person role-playing a guard in a prison simulation to be "firm" and "in the action" is mild compared to the pressure exerted by actual wardens and superior officers in real-life prison and military settings, where guards failing to participate fully can face disciplinary hearings, demotion, or dismissal.

In 1975, Ali Banuazizi and Siamak Movahedi argued that the behavior of the participants in the SPE was a result of demand characteristics and not the prison environment, that there is no single definition of prisoner behavior, and that participants were simply acting in the role in which they had been cast.

In 2018, Thibault Le Texier, a French researcher, in his book, Histoire d'un Mensonge ('The History of a Lie'), questions the scientific validity and merit of the SPE. He further discussed his critiques in an article published by the APA in 2019. Le Texier asserts his arguments using testimonies of those participants who were assigned as guards. In Le Texier's opinion, the sadism and submission displayed in the SPE was directly caused by Zimbardo's instructions to the guards and the guards' desire to please the researchers.

In 2020, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman claimed the experiment to be dubious. He states that the guards were urged to act aggressively towards the prisoners. In his book Humankind: A Hopeful History, he is of the opinion that in similar experiments researchers set up the experiments to create hostility between groups and then interpret the finding to suit their needs.

David Eshelman, aka John Wayne, acknowledges that his theater background lent itself well to his role as guard, that he purposely thought of new ways to demean the prisoners - on one shift, Eshelman instructed the prisoners to simulate sodomy. Zimbardo has responded to this argument by stating that other guards acted similarly or engaged with Eshelman in the treatment of prisoners. While it is possible that one guard adopted his behavior from a movie (Eshelman identified with the warden in Cool Hand Luke), others did not. And, more importantly, guards on a different shift than Eshelman, exacted similar acts of emotional and mental brutality. Zimbardo further argues that the behaviors of the participant guards were not unlike those of real-world prison atrocities or the actions taken by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison. Most of the guards have stated since the SPE that they were intentionally acting.

The Stanford prison experiment § BBC prison study has pointed to the importance of leadership, of the form displayed by Zimbardo when briefing guards in the Stanford experiment, in the emergence of tyranny.

In 2005, an article was published by Carlo Prescott in The Stanford Daily, explaining that the antagonistic tactics used by the guards were ones that he experienced during his time spent in San Quentin. He shared each one in detail with the researchers prior to the experiment. In Prescott's opinion, the participants in the experiment, having no experience as a prison guard, could not have acted in the ways they did unless they had been told of the explicit details of the actions they took.

The small mock prison cells were set up, and the participants who had been assigned a guard role attended an orientation where they were briefed and given uniforms.

The participants who had been assigned a prisoner role were mock-arrested by the local Palo Alto police at their homes or assigned sites. The participants were intentionally not informed that they would be arrested, as the researchers wanted it to come as a surprise. This was a breach of the ethics of Zimbardo's own contract that all of the participants had signed. The arrest involved charging them with armed robbery and burglary, Penal Codes 211 and 459 respectively. The Palo Alto police department assisted Zimbardo's team with the simulated arrests and conducted full booking procedures on the prisoners at the Palo Alto City police headquarters, which included warning of Miranda rights, fingerprinting and taking mug shots. All of these actions were video-documented by a local San Francisco TV station reporter travelling around in Zimbardo's car. Meanwhile, three guards prepped for the arrival of the inmates. The prisoners were then transported to the mock prison from the police station, sirens wailing. In the "Stanford County Jail" they were systematically strip searched and given their new identities (Inmate identification number) and uniform.

Prisoners wore uncomfortable, ill-fitting smocks without any underwear and stocking caps, as well as a chain around one ankle. Guards were instructed to call prisoners by their assigned numbers, sewn on their uniforms, instead of by name, thereby dehumanizing prisoners. The prisoners were then greeted by the warden, who conveyed the seriousness of their offence and their new status as prisoners. With the rules of the prison presented to them, the inmates retired to their cells for the rest of the first day of the experiment.

Guards referred to prisoners by their identification and confined them to their small cells. At 2:30 am the prisoners rebelled against guards' wake up calls of whistles and clanging of batons. Prisoners refused to leave their cells to eat in the yard, ripped off their inmate number tags, took off their stocking caps and insulted the guards.

Parole hearing[clarification needed ]

In response, guards sprayed fire extinguishers at the prisoners to reassert control. The three back-up guards were called in to help regain control of the prison. Guards removed all of the prisoners' clothes, removed mattresses and sentenced the main instigators to time in The Hole. They attempted to dissuade any further rebellion using psychological warfare. One of the guards said to the other that, "these are dangerous prisoners."

In order to restrict further acts of disobedience, the guards separated and rewarded prisoners who had minor roles in the rebellion. The three spent time in the "good" cell where they received clothing, beds, and food denied to the rest of the jail population. After an estimated 12 hours, the three returned to their old cells that lacked beds.

Guards were allowed to abuse their power to humiliate the inmates. They had the prisoners count off and do pushups arbitrarily, restricted access to the bathrooms, and forced them to relieve themselves in a bucket in their cells.

The first prisoner to leave the experiment was Douglas Korpi, prisoner 8612. After 36 hours, he had an apparent mental breakdown in which he yelled, "Jesus Christ, I'm burning up inside" and "I can't stand another night! I just can't take it anymore!" Upon seeing his suffering, research assistant Craig Haney released Korpi.

However, in a 2017 interview, Korpi stated that his breakdown had been fake, and that he did it only so that he could leave and return to studying for his Graduate Record Exam; he had originally thought that he could study while "imprisoned", but the "prison staff" would not allow him. Further, Korpi expressed regret that he had not filed a false imprisonment charge at the time.

Zimbardo responded to this criticism in 2018. First, while this experiment has been criticized overall for its ethics, Zimbardo stated that he needed to treat the breakdown as real and release the prisoner. Further, Zimbardo believes Korpi's 2017 interview was a lie: in 1992, in a documentary film about the study, Quiet Rage, Korpi asserted that the prison experiment had deeply affected him, and that experience led Korpi to later become a prison psychologist.

Witnessing that guards divide prisoners based on their good or rebellious behavior, the inmates started to distance themselves from one another. Rioters believed that other prisoners were snitches and vice versa. Other prisoners saw the rebels as a threat to the status quo since they wanted to have their sleeping cots and clothes again.

"Prisoner 819" began showing symptoms of distress: he began crying in his cell. A priest was brought in to speak with him, but the young man declined to talk and instead asked for a medical doctor. After hearing him cry, Zimbardo reassured him of his actual identity and removed the prisoner. When "Prisoner 819" was leaving, the guards cajoled the remaining inmates to loudly and repeatedly decry that "819 did a bad thing."

The day was scheduled for visitations by friends and family of the inmates in order to simulate the prison experience.

Zimbardo and the guards made visitors wait for long periods of time to see their loved ones. Only two visitors could see any one prisoner and only for just ten minutes while a guard watched. Parents grew concerned about their sons' wellbeing and whether they had enough to eat. Some parents left with plans to contact lawyers to gain early release of their children.

On the same day, Zimbardo's colleague Gordon H. Bower arrived to check on the experiment and questioned Zimbardo about what the independent variable of the research was. Christina Maslach also visited the prison that night and was distressed after observing the guards abusing the prisoners, forcing them to wear bags over their heads. She challenged Zimbardo about his lack of caring oversight and the immorality of the study. Finally, she made evident that Zimbardo had been changed by his role as Superintendent into someone she did not recognize and did not like. Her direct challenges prompted Zimbardo to end the SPE the next day.

David Jaffe, Craig Haney and Zimbardo

Due to Maslach's objections, the parents' concerns, and the increasing brutality exhibited by guards in the experiment, Zimbardo ended the study on day 6. Zimbardo gathered the participants (guards, prisoners, and researchers) to let them know that the experiment was over, and he arranged to pay them the full fee for 14 days, which was $210 (equivalent to $1490 in 2022). Zimbardo then met for several hours of informed debriefing first with all of the prisoners, then the guards, and finally everyone came together to share their experiences. Next, all participants were asked to complete a personal retrospective to be mailed to him subsequently. Finally, all participants were invited to return a week later to share their opinions and emotions.

Later, the physical components of the Stanford County Jail were taken down and out of the basement of Jordan Hall as the cells returned to their usual function as grad student offices. Zimbardo and his graduate student research team, Craig Haney and Curtis Banks, began compiling the multiple sources of data that would be the basis for several articles they soon wrote, both about their experiment and for Zimbardo's later expanded and detailed review of the SPE in The Lucifer Effect (2007).

According to Zimbardo's interpretation of the SPE, it demonstrated that the simulated-prison situation, rather than individual personality traits, caused the participants' behavior. Using this situational attribution, the results are compatible with those of the Milgram experiment, where participants complied with orders to administer seemingly dangerous and potentially lethal electric shocks to a shill. Others have posited that the guards assumed leadership roles due to encouragement from researchers rather than conforming to the situation.

Conclusions and observations drawn by the experimenters were largely subjective and anecdotal, and the experiment is practically impossible for other researchers to accurately reproduce. In 1973, Erich Fromm argued, as only a third of the guards displayed sadistic behaviors, SPE is more accurately an example of how a situation cannot influence a person's behavior. He states that there were generalizations in the experiment's results and argued that the personality of an individual does affect behavior when imprisoned. This ran counter to the study's conclusion that the prison situation itself controls the individual's behavior. Fromm also argued that the methods employed to screen participants could not determine the amount of sadism in the subjects.

The experiment has also been used to illustrate cognitive dissonance theory and the power of authority.

Participants' behavior may have been shaped by knowing that they were watched ( Hawthorne effect). Instead of being restrained by fear of an observer, guards may have behaved more aggressively when supervisors observing them did not step in to restrain them.

Many have argued that the validity and merit of the research findings were significantly affected by the Demand characteristics § Notes and selection bias resulting from the Recruitment and selection § Notes.

Psychologists Alex Haslam and Steve Reicher conducted the BBC Prison Study in 2002 to examine Zimbardo's themes of tyranny and resistance, and they published the results in 2006. It was a partial replication of the SPE conducted with the assistance of the BBC, which broadcast a documentary series about the SPE called The Experiment.

Their results and conclusions differed from Zimbardo's and led to a number of publications on tyranny, stress, and leadership. The results were published in leading academic journals such as British Journal of Social Psychology, Journal of Applied Psychology, Social Psychology Quarterly, and Personality and Social Psychology Review. The BBC Prison Study has now been taught as a core study on the UK A-level Psychology OCR syllabus.

One positive result of the study is that it has altered the way US prisons are run. For example, juveniles accused of federal crimes are no longer housed before trial with adult prisoners, due to the risk of violence against them.

When acts of prisoner torture and abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were publicized in March 2004, Zimbardo was struck by the similarity with his own experiment. He was dismayed by official military and government representatives shifting the blame for the torture and abuses in the Abu Ghraib American military prison onto "a few bad apples", rather than acknowledging the possibly systemic problems of a formally established military incarceration system. Zimbardo was then quoted saying "I argue that we all have the capacity for love and evil-to be Mother Theresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It's the situation that brings that out".

Eventually, Zimbardo became involved with the defense team of lawyers representing one of the Abu Ghraib prison guards, Staff Sergeant Ivan "Chip" Frederick. Zimbardo was granted full access to all investigation and background reports, and he testified as an expert witness in Frederick's court martial. The trial resulted in an eight-year prison sentence for Frederick in 2004.

Zimbardo drew from his participation in the Frederick case to write the book The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, which deals with the similarities between his own Stanford prison experiment and the Abu Ghraib abuses.

Italian filmmaker Carlo Tuzii was the first director to film a story based on the experiment when, in 1977, he directed the television film La gabbia ('The cage'), for Rai 1. Tuzii's original story called for a group of twenty young people from various social backgrounds, who were randomly divided into "guards" and "prisoners" and instructed to spend one month on opposite sides of an enormously high gate, with barbed wire on top, built in the middle of a large park. Before principal photography started, however, some concerns from RAI executives forced Tuzii and the screenwriters to alter the script into a very similar story to the actual Stanford experiment, including the outcome. Miguel Bosé starred as lead prisoner Carlo; progressive pop band Pooh scored the film and had a hit in Italy with a 7-inch edit of the theme tune.

The 2001 German-language film Das Experiment starring Moritz Bleibtreu is based on the experiment. It was remade in 2010 in English as The Experiment and was directed by Paul T. Scheuring and starred Adrien Brody, Forest Whitaker, Cam Gigandet, Clifton Collins, Jr., and Maggie Grace.

The 2015 film The Stanford Prison Experiment is based on the experiment.

The YouTube series , hosted by Michael Stevens, features an episode discussing the experiment.

In Season 3, Episode 2 of the television series Veronica Mars, entitled " My Big Fat Greek Rush Week", a similar experiment is featured.

In The Overstory by Richard Powers, the fictional character Douglas Pavlicek is a prisoner in the experiment, an experience which shapes later decisions.

In Season 15, Episode 10 of television show American Dad, "American Data", Roger recruits Steve, Toshi, Snot and Barry into a similar experiment.

Some of the guards' behavior allegedly led to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. Ethical concerns surrounding the experiment often draw comparisons to the Milgram experiment, conducted ten years earlier in 1961 at Yale University, where Stanley Milgram studied obedience to authority. With the treatment that the guards were giving to the prisoners, the guards would become so deeply absorbed into their role as a guard that they would emotionally, physically and mentally humiliate the prisoners:

Each prisoner was systematically searched and stripped naked. He was then deloused with a spray, to convey our belief that he may have germs or lice... Real male prisoners don't wear dresses, but real male prisoners do feel humiliated and do feel emasculated. Our goal was to produce similar effects quickly by putting men in a dress without any underclothes. Indeed, as soon as some of our prisoners were put in these uniforms they began to walk and to sit differently, and to hold themselves differently - more like a woman than like a man.

Since the time of the SPE, ethical guidelines for experiments involving human subjects have become more strict. The Stanford prison experiment led to 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. These guidelines involve the consideration of whether the potential benefit to science outweighs the possible risk for physical and psychological harm.

A post-experimental debriefing is now considered an important ethical consideration to ensure that participants are not harmed in any way by their experience in an experiment. Though the researchers did conduct debriefing sessions, they were several years after the SPE. By that time, numerous details were forgotten; nonetheless, Zimbardo has concluded from his follow-up research that participants experienced no lasting negative effects. The American Psychological Association specifies that the debriefing process should occur as soon as possible to assess any psychological harm that may have been done and to rehabilitate participants if necessary. If there is an unavoidable delay in debriefing, the researcher is obligated to take steps to minimize harm.

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 vividly demonstrating 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 in the study have gone on record to confirm the events.

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 had little influence on both experiments despite the test before the prison experiment.

Both the Milgram and Zimbardo studies clearly show 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 behavior are altered to match the group stereotypes and shows that we conform to others passively, even if the subject at hand is malevolent. It is clear that people's desire to be a good subject is much more prevalent than to be a subject that does good.

1. ^ "Intro to psychology textbooks gloss over criticisms of Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment". September 7, 2014.

2. ^ Le Texier, Thibault (October 2019). "Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment". The American Psychologist. 74 (7): 823-839. doi:10.1037/amp0000401. PMID 31380664.

3. ^ "The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud". June 13, 2018.

4. ^ "The Stanford Prison Experiment: Still powerful after all these years (1/97)". News.stanford.edu. August 12, 1996. Archived from the original on November 18, 2011. In the prison-conscious autumn of 1971, when George Jackson was killed at San Quentin and Attica erupted in even more deadly rebellion and retribution, the Stanford Prison Experiment made news in a big way. It offered the world a videotaped demonstration of how ordinary people, middle-class college students, and adult film stars can do things they would have never believed they were capable of doing. It seemed to say, as Hannah Arendt said of Adolf Eichmann, that normal people can take ghastly actions.

5. ^ Haney, C.; Banks, C.; Zimbardo, P. (1973). "Interpersonal Dynamics in a simulated prison". International Journal of Criminology and Penology. 1 (1): 69-77. doi:10.21236/AD0751041. S2CID . PsycNET 1974-32677-001 NCJ 64810.

6. ^ @david_m_amodio (June 13, 2018). "Btw, the effects of the SPE fraud are far more devastating than any Stapel finding; it's given leaders cover for hu..." (Tweet) - via Twitter.

7. ^ Zimbardo, P., Hardwick, D. (2021). Zimbardo My Life Revealed. Giunti Psychometrics

8. Carnahan, Thomas; McFarland, Sam (April 17, 2007). "Revisiting the Stanford prison experiment: could participant self-selection have led to the cruelty?" (PDF). Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 33 (5): 603-14. doi:10.1177/0146167206292689. ISSN 0146-1672. PMID 17440210. S2CID 15946975.

9. ^ "A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment" (PDF). Stanford University. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 6, 2015.

10. ^ Masterson, Andrew (July 9, 2018). "New evidence shows Stanford Prison Experiment conclusions "untenable"". Cosmos. Archival recordings show one of the world's most famous psychology experiments was poorly designed - and its use to justify brutality baseless.

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12. ^ Gray, P. (2013). "Why Zimbardo's prison experiment isn't in my textbook: Results of the famous Stanford prison experiment have a trivial explanation". Psychology Today.

13. Le Texier, Thibault (2018). Histoire d'un mensonge: enquête sur l'expérience de Stanford [The History of a Lie] (in French). Paris: Zones. ISBN 978-2-35522-120-0. OCLC 1034777209.

14. ^ Le Texier, Thibault (2019). "Debunking the Stanford Prison Experiment". American Psychologist. American Psychological Association. 74 (7): 823-839. doi:10.1037/amp0000401. ISSN 1935-990X. PMID 31380664. PsycNET 2019-45337-001.

15. "'John Wayne' (name withheld) Interview: 'The Science of Evil'". ^ Primetime: Basic Instincts. KATU. January 3, 2007

16. ^ "Zimbardo - Stanford Prison Experiment". www.simplypsychology.org. Zimbardo (1973) was interested in finding out whether the brutality reported among guards in American prisons was due to the sadistic personalities of the guards (i.e., dispositional) or had more to do with the prison environment (i.e., situational).

17. John Sutherland (October 31, 2005). "The ideas interview: Alex Haslam". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077.

18. Reicher, Steve; Haslam, Alex. "Learning from the Experiment". The Psychologist (Interview). Interviewed by Briggs, Pam. Archived from the original on February 21, 2009.

19. ^ Konnikova, Konnikova (June 12, 2015). "The Real Lesson of the Stanford Prison Experiment". The New Yorker. Occasionally, disputes between prisoner and guards got out of hand, violating an explicit injunction against physical force that both prisoners and guards had read prior to enrolling in the study. When the "superintendent" and "warden" overlooked these incidents, the message to the guards was clear: all is well; keep going as you are. The participants knew that an audience was watching, and so a lack of feedback could be read as tacit approval. And the sense of being watched may also have encouraged them to perform.

20. ^ Haslam, S. Alexander; Reicher, Stephen D.; Van Bavel, Jay J. (October 2019). "Rethinking the nature of cruelty: The role of identity leadership in the Stanford Prison Experiment". American Psychologist. 74 (7): 809-822. doi:10.1037/amp0000443. hdl:10023/18565. ISSN 1935-990X. PMID 31380665. S2CID 199436917.

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22. ^ July 17, Samantha Highfill Updated; EDT, 2015 at 12:00 PM. "Billy Crudup turns college students into prison guards in 'The Stanford Prison Experiment'". EW.com.

23. ^ Rich, Nathaniel (May 11, 2018). "The Novel That Asks, 'What Went Wrong With Mankind?'". The Atlantic.

24. ^ "Title 45, Part 46, Protection of Human Subjects", US Department of Health & Human Services Code of Federal Regulations, US Department of Health & Human Services

25. ^ The Belmont Report, Office of the Secretary, Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research, The National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects for Biomedical and Behavioral Research, April 18, 1979

26. ^ "Lesson Plan: The Story of the Third Wave (The Wave, Die Welle)". lessonplanmovie.com.

27. ^ Haslam, S. Alexander; Reicher, Stephen. D. (November 20, 2012). "Contesting the "Nature" Of Conformity: What Milgram and Zimbardo's Studies Really Show". PLOS Biology. 10 (11): e1001426. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001426. ISSN 1544-9173. PMC . PMID 23185132.

28. ^ Carnahan, Thomas; McFarland, Sam (May 2007). "Revisiting the Stanford Prison Experiment: Could Participant Self-Selection Have Led to the Cruelty?". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 33 (5): 603-614. doi:10.1177/0146167206292689. ISSN 0146-1672. PMID 17440210. S2CID 15946975.

Haney, C.; Banks, W. C.; Zimbardo, P. G. (1973). "A study of prisoners and guards in a simulated prison". Naval Research Review. 30: 4-17.

Haslam, S. A.; Reicher, S. D. (2003). "Beyond Stanford: questioning a role-based explanation of tyranny". Dialogue (Bulletin of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology). 18: 22-25.

Haslam, S. A.; Reicher, S. D. (2006). "Stressing the group: social identity and the unfolding dynamics of responses to stress". Journal of Applied Psychology. 91 (5): 1037-1052. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.91.5.1037. PMID 16953766. S2CID 14058651.

Haslam, S. A.; Reicher, S. D. (2012). "When prisoners take over the prison: A social psychology of resistance". Personality and Social Psychology Review. 16 (2): 154-179. doi:10.1177/1088868311419864. PMID 21885855. S2CID 30021002.

Musen, K. & Zimbardo, P. G. (1991). Quiet rage: The Stanford prison study. Video recording. Stanford, CA: Psychology Dept., Stanford University.

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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.

[1] - Vox article detailing how the study is a sham

Stanford Prison Experiment, a website with info on the experiment and its impact

Interviews with guards, prisoners, and researchers in July/August 2011 Stanford Magazine

Zimbardo, P. (2007). From Heavens to Hells to Heroes Archived December 10, 2008, at the Wayback Machine. 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

Philip G. Zimbardo Papers (Stanford University Archives)

Photographs at cbsnews.com

Abu Ghraib and the experiment:

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The Stanford prison experiment ( SPE) was a psychological experiment conducted in the summer of 1971. It was 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 led the research team who administered the study.