Dr Zimbardo and colleagues recruited, selected, and paid a group of male Stanford students to participate in a planned 14-day prison simulation. A toss of the coin determined whether each participant would be a guard or a prisoner. The objective was to find out whether an institution could temporarily shatter one’s identity and influence one’s personality and ability to adapt to prison life.
©ViewApart/ShutterstockBy the end of Day 1, it became apparent that the guards were breaking their own rules for physical restraint. Yet, the experiment (if it can be called that), was not stopped. The emotional and physical brutality escalated. Like The Lord of the Flies, some guards were more aggressive than others, and some prisoners more compliant.The researchers claimed to be surprised by this phenomenon. However, they not only allowed it to continue, but they seem to have encouraged the guards. Later, they claimed that no one suffered long-term after-effects. I wonder about that.
You wouldn’t think Stanford University and prison would go together, would you? Stanford attracts intelligent and wealthy students, many of whom might be considered nerds. If any place could maintain the veneer of civilization under trying conditions, wouldn’t it be Stanford? My son attended Stanford from 1996 to 2000. He and I attended a lecture given by Dr Zimbardo. I shuddered then, wondering how my son would have fared in such an experiment. (Fortunately, inspired by some of his history professors, he became a Rabbi, though not without experiencing some traumatic fraternity events.).
The experiment ended after 6 days, prodded by Dr Zimbardo’s colleague, girlfriend, and former student, who later became his wife. After viewing some of the action, she confronted Dr Zimbardo about potential harm to the students engaged in the experiment. Soon after that confrontation, Dr Zimbardo witnessed some of the guards demanding that inmates mimic a sexual assault upon one another. Dr Zimbardo then decided to stop the experiment early. Surely, Freud would not have been surprised at this eruption of what he felt were our essential drives, aggression and sex.
- See more at: http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/blogs/couch-crisis/prison-experiment-and-abuses-authority#sthash.a2yTNs0I.dpuf
Courtesy of http://www.medpagetoday.com/EmergencyMedicine/EmergencyMedicine/53457?isalert=1&uun=g906366d4507R5793688u&xid=NL_breakingnews_2015-09-09
The experiment is a classic study on the psychology of imprisonment and is a topic covered in most introductory psychology textbooks.
ReplyDeleteTwenty-four male students were selected, from an initial pool of seventy-five, to adopt randomly assigned roles of prisoner and guard, in a mock prison, situated in the basement of the Stanford Psychology Department building, for a period of between seven and fourteen days. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners quit the experiment early, and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days, to an extent because of the objections of Christina Maslach. Certain portions of the experiment were filmed, and excerpts of footage are publicly available....
Prisoner No. 416, a newly admitted stand-by prisoner, expressed concern over the treatment of the other prisoners. The guards responded with more abuse. When he refused to eat his sausages, saying he was on a hunger strike, guards confined him to "solitary confinement", a dark closet: "the guards then instructed the other prisoners to repeatedly punch on the door while shouting at 416." The guards stated that he would be released from solitary confinement only if the prisoners gave up their blankets and slept on their bare mattresses, which all but one refused to do.(continued)
(continued) Zimbardo aborted the experiment early when Christina Maslach, a graduate student in psychology whom he was dating (and later married), objected to the conditions of the prison after she was introduced to the experiment to conduct interviews. Zimbardo noted that, of more than fifty people who had observed the experiment, Maslach was the only one who questioned its morality. After only six days of a planned two weeks' duration, the Stanford prison experiment was discontinued...
ReplyDeleteThe guards and prisoners adapted to their roles more than Zimbardo expected, stepping beyond predicted boundaries, leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations. One-third of the guards were judged to have exhibited "genuine sadistic tendencies", while many prisoners were emotionally traumatized, as five of them had to be removed from the experiment early. After Maslach confronted Zimbardo and forced him to realize that he had been passively allowing unethical acts to be performed under his supervision, Zimbardo concluded that both prisoners and guards had become grossly absorbed in their roles and realized that he had likewise become as grossly absorbed in his own, and he terminated the experiment. Ethical concerns surrounding the experiment often draw comparisons to a similar experiment, which was conducted ten years earlier in 1961 at Yale University by Stanley Milgram...
Also, researchers from Western Kentucky University argued that selection bias may have played a role in the results. The researchers recruited students for a study using an advertisement similar to the one used in the Stanford Prison Experiment, with some ads saying "a psychological study" (the control group), and some with the words "prison life" as originally worded in Dr. Zimbardo's Stanford Prison Experiment. It was found that students who responded to the classified advertisement for the "prison study" were higher in traits such as social dominance, aggression, authoritarianism, etc. and were lower in traits related to empathy and altruism when statistically compared to the control group participants.
The study has been criticized for demand characteristics by psychologist Peter Gray. He argues that participants in psychological experiments are more likely to do what they believe the researchers want them to do. The guards were essentially told to be cruel. However, it was precisely this willingness to comply with the experiment's questionable practices that showed how little was needed for the students to engage in such practices.
Skeptical author Brian Dunning states: Most of the Stanford guards did not exhibit any cruel or unusual behavior, often being friendly and doing favors for the prisoners...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...(and the fact that) Zimbardo has dedicated much of his career to the promotion of the idea that bad environments drive bad behavior.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
The official Stanford Prison Experiment website http://www.prisonexp.org/
ReplyDeleteThe study shows that before the volunteer prisoners started showing signs of distress, they did not take the guards and their authority seriously. The prisoners mocked the guards, trying to regain their individuality. This, however, was short-lived. The prisoners soon realized that the attitude of the guards was very serious and that they demanded obedience. This began a long string of confrontational quarrels between the guards and prisoners. The guards used physical punishment and exercises, such as pushups, in order to show their authority to the prisoners.
ReplyDeleteIn the morning of only the second day, a rebellion broke out among the volunteer prisoners. They ripped off their uniforms and locked themselves in their cells by pushing their beds up against the door. In response to this, the guards became very angry and called for backup. This surprised Zimbardo as well as the rest of the psychologists because they had not thought it would be taken this far. Guards who were not on duty were called in and the guards who were assigned to only the night shift stayed with the guards who came in all the way through their shift the next morning. The tactic the guards came up with was to fight back in order to discipline the unruly prisoners and make them obey. In response to the prisoners barricading themselves in their cells, the guards used fire extinguishers on them to get them away from the entrances.
Once the guards were able to get into the cells, they stripped the inmates naked, tore apart the beds and the cell, and put the prisoners who had started the rebellion in solitary confinement. As all nine guards could not be on duty at once, they began rewarding the prisoners for good behavior. The prisoners who had not been involved in starting the riot were allowed to lie in their beds, wash themselves and brush their teeth and eat while those who had started the riot were not allowed to. The guards continued to use tormenting tactics to divide the prisoners and forestall further organized resistance. In the case of one prisoner, who was a smoker, the guards were able to control his behavior because they decided when and if he was allowed to smoke.(continued)
(continued) Less than two full days into the experiment, one inmate began suffering from depression, uncontrolled rage, crying and other mental dysfunctions. The prisoner was eventually released after screaming and acting unstable in front of the other inmates. This prisoner was replaced with one of the alternates.
ReplyDeleteOn the third day, the study allowed visiting hours for friends and family. The visitation was closely monitored and timed with many rules and restrictions.
The next event that added to the prison experiment "drama" was a rumored escape plan that the prisoners were planning on carrying out directly after visiting hours. The prisoner was going to have some of his friends round up, break into the prison and free all of the prisoners. After one of the guards overheard this plan, an informant was placed in among the prisoners and the escape never happened. The prisoners who had been thought to have organized the escape were disciplined and harassed with more pushups and toilet cleaning.
At some point, even the prisoners who were thought of as role models, those who obeyed all of the guards' commands were being punished. Going to the bathroom was considered a privilege rather than a necessity, and those who acted out against the guards were made to urinate and defecate in a bucket in their cell.
By the end of the experiment, there was no unification among prisoners as well as guards. The guards also had won complete control over all of their prisoners and were using their authority to its greatest extent. One prisoner had even gone as far as to go on a hunger strike. When he refused to eat, the guards put him into solitary confinement for three hours (even though their own rules stated the limit that a prisoner could be in solitary confinement was only one hour). Instead of the other prisoners looking at this inmate as a hero and following along in his strike, they chanted together that he was a bad prisoner and a troublemaker. Prisoners and guards had rapidly adapted to their roles, stepping beyond the boundaries of what had been predicted and leading to dangerous and psychologically damaging situations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Zimbardo
Several young men dressed in khaki uniforms and wearing reflector sunglasses that hid their eyes were herding a larger group of men down a hallway. The latter were dressed in shapeless smocks that exposed their pale legs and the chains that bound one ankle of each man to another. Paper bag blindfolds covered their heads.
ReplyDeleteChristina Maslach's stomach reacted first. She felt queasy and instinctively turned her head away. Her peers, other academic psychologists, noticed her flinch. "What's the matter?" they teased.
On that fateful Thursday night a quarter-century ago, Maslach would take actions that made her a heroine in some circles as "the one who stopped the Stanford Prison Experiment." Even her now-husband, Stanford psychology Professor Philip Zimbardo, referred to the UC-Berkeley psychologist as a hero when he spoke to a group of undergraduates in his introductory psychology class last spring. But Maslach, her professional and personal lives reshaped by that night, rejects the label.
Speaking at a symposium of the American Psychological Association last summer, she urged other social science researchers to consider the circumstances of her alleged heroics:
She had walked into the experiment late and therefore was more likely to be startled than those who had been planning it for months and observing it for five days, she said.
She was involved in a romantic relationship with Zimbardo, the experiment's principal investigator, and not working for him as a graduate student or colleague.
Yet she had difficulty resisting the group pressure to be enthusiastic about what was going on in the name of science.
"At that point, I felt there was something wrong with me, thinking here I am, I'm supposed to be a psychologist, I'm supposed to understand, and I was having a hard time watching what was happening to these kids." ...(continued)
(continued) There, she had a pleasant conversation with a "charming, funny, smart" young man waiting to start his guard shift. Other researchers had told her there was a particularly sadistic guard, whom both prisoners and other guards had nicknamed John Wayne. Later, when she looked at the monitor of the prison yard again, she asked someone to point out John Wayne and was shocked to discover it was the young man she had talked with earlier.
ReplyDelete"This man had been transformed. He was talking in a different accent a Southern accent, which I hadn't recalled at all. He moved differently, and the way he talked was different, not just in the accent, but in the way he was interacting with the prisoners. It was like [seeing] Jekyll and Hyde. . . . It really took my breath away."
Several prisoners engaged in a debate with John Wayne, she said, in which they accused him of enjoying his job. He said that he wasn't really like that, he was just playing a role. One prisoner challenged this, Maslach said, noting that the guard had tripped him earlier when he was taking him down the hall to the bathroom. No researchers were around to see the act, the prisoner said, which indicated to him that the act reflected the guard's true disposition. John Wayne disagreed, saying that if he let up, the role wouldn't remain powerful.
Later that evening, Maslach said, she suddenly got sick to her stomach while watching guards taking the prisoners with paper bags over their heads to the bathroom before their bedtime. Her fellow researchers teased her about it.
After leaving the prison with Zimbardo, she said, he asked her what she thought of it. "I think he expected some sort of great intellectual discussion about what was going on. Instead, I started to have this incredible emotional outburst. I started to scream, I started to yell, 'I think it is terrible what you are doing to those boys!' I cried. We had a fight you wouldn't believe, and I was beginning to think, wait a minute, I don't know this guy. I really don't, and I'm getting involved with him?" (continued)
(continued)
ReplyDeleteZimbardo was shocked by her reaction and upset, she said, but eventually that night, "he acknowledged what I was saying and realized what had happened to him and to other people in the study. At that point he decided to call the experiment to a halt."
Says Zimbardo: "She challenged us to examine the madness she observed, that we had created and had to take responsibility for." ...
Zimbardo still has mixed emotions about the ethics of his experiment. His experiment has been criticized by some social scientists, as was the obedience experiment of his high school classmate Stanley Milgram, for its treatment of human research subjects.
In Milgram's 1965 experiment, the subjects were led to believe that they were delivering ever more powerful electric shocks to a stranger, on the orders of a white-coated researcher. Most were distressed by the situation, but two-thirds delivered the highest level of shock labeled "danger - severe shock." Like some of Zimbardo's guard subjects, some of Milgram's were anguished afterward by the revelation of their dark potential. When asked about the ethics of such research for a 1976 magazine profile, Zimbardo said that "the ethical point is legitimate insofar as who are you, as an experimenter, to give a person that kind of information about oneself. But my feeling is that that's the most valuable kind of information that you can have and that certainly a society needs it." ...
He told the Toronto symposium audience last summer that the prison experiment was both ethical and unethical.
It was ethical, he said, because "it followed the guidelines of the Stanford human subjects ethics committee that approved it. There was no deception; all subjects were told in advance that if prisoners, many of their usual rights would be suspended and they would have only minimally adequate diet and health care during the study," which was planned to last two weeks.
It was also ethical for him to continue, he said, in that more than 50 people came to look at the study in progress and did not register any objections before Maslach registered hers. Among those who did not intervene were parents and friends of the students who came to see them on the prison's visiting nights, a Catholic priest, a public defender, and "professional psychologists, graduate students and staff of the psychology department who watched on-line videos of part of the study unfold or took part in parole board hearings or spoke to [the study subjects] and looked at them."
But it was unethical, he said, "because people suffered and others were allowed to inflict pain and humiliation on their fellows over an extended period of time."
"And yes, although we ended the study a week earlier than planned, we did not end it soon enough."
http://news.stanford.edu/pr/97/970108prisonexp.html